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You look at the Democratic debaters and you despair. It’s a hackneyed collection of motley mediocrities that includes, among other things, an unrepentant crusty commie, an ersatz squaw, a golddigging narc, a handsy grandpa, a furry, and a New Age weirdo who unironically channels Oddball from Kelly’s Heroes.

To quote the gender fluidity pioneers of Twisted Sister, America, if that’s your best, your best won’t do.

Now, we’re supposed to ignore their undeniable lousiness because we’re in a crisis. The crisis appears to be that our elite has been denied total power via the defeat of Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit, but that’s not how they sell it. It’s a crisis of rampant bigotry. It’s a crisis of foreigners not being subsidized by Americans. It’s a crisis of the weather maybe being different in a century. But these crises share one thing in common: only the liberal elite can save us.

Well, there is a crisis, but not the one they are pushing. The looming existential challenge we face is not the failure to appease some angry climate goddess but, rather, the frivolous priorities of these bored beneficiaries of the bounty of Western civilization. They got handed a world of peace and prosperity unparalleled in human history and instead of appreciating and protecting it they want to toss it all away. Why? Precisely because they got handed it. The dummies who make up our elite don’t value the society they inherited because think this is the natural state of man - that all this just sort of happened and that it will go on just sort of happening forever no matter how much they undermine its foundations.

But it won’t.

Let’s start with the most basic problem, which is that the undistinguished members of our ruling caste hate the people they presume to rule over. It’s not a matter of simply regarding the proles as uncouth and vulgar and not our sort of people. It’s hate. Bitter, clingy hate. And our elite feels no obligation to the people who make their cushy lives possible. A functioning ruling class at least tries to rule; ours finds that too much work and instead focuses on Chardonnay and condescension.

You look back in history and the upper class at least showed up for the hard stuff. The Roman elite was out there on the battlefield with the peasants (that was after they allowed the mob into the army - for a long time only the patricians were allowed to fight). The British upper class was out there on the battlefield too. The elite used to acknowledge obligations to their lessers, and when they stopped doing that, things went sideways. When Flavius and the gang decided to let the barbarians handle the strenuous work of defending the Empire and chilled in the local vomitorium instead of hoofing it to battle the Parthians, Rome started falling. The British upper class doesn’t do anything harder today than ring up the local bobbies to demand the arrest of Twitter yobs who say mean things.

The American ruling class is garbage too. Did any of those 671 Democrats up on that stage ever seem to side with their own society? Nope. Donald Trump utters the phrase “America First” and that whooshing noise you hear is the sound of millions of our betters collectively wetting themselves.

They don’t value what they didn’t earn, and they didn’t earn their exalted position within the society. It was here already, a Ferrari parked in the driveway. Mom and Dad retiree, tossed them the keys, and surprise, they wrapped it around a tree.

Our elite is made up of Kennedy kids, in-breed mediocrities of more accomplished sires, easing their pain with the dope of politically correct ideology and often overdosing.

That’s what all this PC nonsense is, an analgesic to dull the throbbing ache of their own manifest unworthiness. When they detect and call out alleged racism or sexism or transphobia or fatphobia or whatever, they become the heroes of their own story. They aren’t fighting off the Germanic hordes on the Rhine, or contending with Zulus at Roarke’s Drift. But, darn it, they are still brave warriors slaying those dragons. Except instead of swords, they wield whining.

We should give them a parade. They vanquished manspreading! They defeated all those people telling little girls they can’t do math. They are heroes! They may not be doing sweaty, dangerous stuff like exploring the origins of the Nile, but if they were, it would be “Dr. Livingstone, I presume, but I want to be clear that what I am presuming is not your gender. What are your pronouns?

They can’t be real victors because they’re not fighting a real battle. They can’t achieve anything because all they do is try to tear our society down. So they manufacture crises so they can pretend to conquer something and feel the giddy thrill of pretend heroism.

But, of course the strenuous avoidance of strenuous challenges in favor of imaginary struggles does not dispel those actual challenges. It just compounds them, letting them grow and grow. Someday, when our society is forced to abandon its fixation upon embarrassing mock conflicts because the real ones have shown up on our doorstep, we may find we can’t resist, that our muscles have atrophied from decades of boxing shadows.

China is on the rise, and its kids are learning calculus and building carriers while ours are being read to by drag queens. The Islamic militants are still out there, despite the heroic efforts of our non-elite citizens to winnow down their numbers over the last two decades of wars our bumbling betters refuse to win. Our enemies have two things our elite lacks - seriousness of purpose and confidence in their own dogma. And, of course, someday the bill is going to come due for all the free stuff that we only recently discovered was a human right. Little did we know that some dudette from Oaxaca is owed a tummy tuck paid for by a West Virginia auto mechanic.

The Democrat candidates are an unserious bunch, avatars of an unserious elite spewing unserious nonsense. The problem is that the world is a deadly serious place.

I used to write speculative thrillers but now they seem like nonfiction. Check out my action-packed yet highly amusing novels about the United States’ split into red and blue countries, People's Republic, Indian Country and Wildfire. These liberal-infuriating thrillers have been called “Appalling” by the hapless geebos who sank the Weekly Standard, which is awesome.