It was only last October that I diagnosed the Democrats as suffering from “prophetic failure.” That’s what happens when the prophecies of a religious cult fail to turn up on cue. And why most politicians are sensible enough to say “we have only ten years to act” before the end of the world. I said back then, “the world was supposed to be all tucked up in progressive heaven by now.” The arc of history was bending towards justice. Then we got Trump.

In When Prophecy Fails, according to Leon Festinger et al., the believers don’t just throw up their hands and go back to ordinary life. Instead they intensify their faith and sharpen up the prophecy. The problem, they decide, is that their faith wasn’t deep enough; they didn’t read the texts right. It is not till later that they lose heart and #WalkAway.

They sure do. They passed AB5 in California to stop the gig economy, which was viewed as an insult to government employee unions. Only it turns out that the artists, writers, and musicians of the wokerati are hardest hit. They passed gun control measures in newly blue Virginia right after 20,000 2A activists had peacefully protested at the State Capitol. They decriminalized petty crime in California and New York City. Like that will help struggling small businesses. And of course, the granddaddy of them all, they impeached a duly elected President of the United States, for reasons.

These are not the actions of a cunning political party carefully plotting how to win 51 percent of the vote at the next election. These are the desperate actions of a religious cult traumatized by the failure of prophecy. And never mind the science! That mucking around with the labor market hurts people at the bottom. That rifles are not a major cause of gun deaths. That “broken windows” policing broke the crime wave in New York City.

And if you worry about our wokerati here in the US, what about the lefty elite in Britain, poleaxed by the “stonking” Boris win in the December General Election? Think how everything they believe has been trashed and thrown in the dumpster -- er, sorry, rubbished and thrown in the bin.

The thing is, it’s not going to get any better here on out. Trump’s not going to be removed from office. All the lefty shenanigans, from monkeying with the labor market to their craziness on crime, are going to rebound on them. Free-stuff-for-all programs aren’t moving the needle. And the idea of non-binary genders as helpless victims on the order of the workers and the African slaves is laughable. Non-binary gender people are not helpless victims; they are educated gentry faking victim status.

You might ask: what is it going to take for these people to accept reality? My answer is: I don’t know, because I’ve never merged my religion with my politics, and I’ve never expected my idea of heaven to be realized on Earth through politics.

For me, it’s pretty obvious that, sooner or later, and hopefully later, the big government entitlement state will run out of other peoples’ money, and women and minorities will be hardest hit. I can dream of a smaller state, of privatized entitlements, of an education system that is, as the Brits say, fit for purpose. But I don’t expect my dreams to be realized here on Earth in my lifetime.

The left’s is another world, for, as the late Sir Roger Scruton wrote:

Leftwing people find it very hard to get on with rightwing people, because they believe that they are evil. Whereas I have no problem getting on with leftwing people, because I simply believe that they are mistaken.

You hate people who are evil; you merely pat fools and knaves on the head.

But our left friends still think that they are going to fundamentally transform society and create a world of justice, but for the evil doings of us racist sexist homophobes. Only things have been going against them for quite a while and they are getting desperate.

Here’s an example of how bad things are: a new fully-qualified high-school English teacher who’s quit teaching, after one quarter of full-time teaching. She “loved teaching English and engaging with students,” but...

From Quillette:

But nationwide, issues like administrative lack of support and incompetence, overwhelming class size, burdensome paperwork, and disciplinary issues overshadow the joys of teaching and make public schools intolerable places to build a career.

So what are our liberal friends doing about this? They are gutting school discipline, because racism. So education is going to get worse, a lot worse, before it gets better.

At least when you are a conservative you do not get to live in a cocoon where nobody is allowed to criticize you.

It’s the old problem. What do you do about a crazy religious cult convinced that the rest of the world is evil?

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on U.S. government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.