It’s long been a dividing line in American politics. Money and power flow into the city from the country. Small towns and farms lose workers to big-city jobs. Kids move away to the big city and don’t return. Big cities breed degeneracy and crime. Liberal media in the big city swamps the countryside with Marxist propaganda. Law-abiding citizens feel uneasy in the city, while criminals take maximum advantage of the city’s anti-Second Amendment, anti-white, anti-Christian laws to pimp, push, and pulverize.

For decades, big cities have taken while small towns and countrysides have given. For centuries, merchants and bankers in the city have profited while mom-and-pop businesses and family farms have gone belly-up. It’s a story at least as old as Thomas Jefferson vs. Alexander Hamilton.

Now the day of reckoning may finally be upon us.

Years of marginalizing and exploiting the country on behalf of the city could come back to haunt the Left now that many big cities, such as New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles are openly defying the Trump Administration over the issue of illegal immigration. These so-called “sanctuary cities” offer no sanctuary for ordinary Americans. They tax them, over-regulate them, oppress them, subvert them, harass them, drive them to the point of despair, or at least force them to move to the suburbs and exurbs. Mayors and councilmen in these cities are unwilling to do anything for ordinary citizens unless it’s an election year, or unless it’s to float another bond for bread and circuses, a.k.a. the local pro sports franchise. However, the leaders of these big cities are presently willing to put everything on the line for the sake of people that don’t even belong there, and who have all broken at least one federal law.

To punish the innocent and protect the wrongdoer is the definition of injustice.

Thank God we country folk (a term that includes all sane people, even those who happen to live in these cities) have a fighting chance in our Fightin’ Scots-German President Donald Trump and his Rebel Attorney General, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III.

For years we’ve lived at the mercy of these big city pimps like Rahm Emanuel and Bill DeBlasio. For years they have besieged the countryside through their mass media propaganda outlets, their stranglehold on factories and jobs, and their breeding grounds for depravity, corruption, crime, and anti-American hatred.

Now the tables are about to get turned on them.

Instead of them besieging us, we are going to besiege them — through the instrumentality of the federal government.

It’s the 21st-century version of farmers and housewives surrounding skyscraper-laden boroughs with pitchforks and rolling pins. The pitchforks will be arrest warrants and handcuffs wielded by federal agents with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The rolling pins will be computer keyboards used by Executive Branch bureaucrats to cut off federal funds from these cities.

Can you imagine how the political landscape would change if the Trump Administration really put its foot down? If ICE did systematically arrest illegals in these cities? If the White House made sure that these cities would no longer receive federal funds for things like roads, water and sewer, Medicaid, education, and so on? The cities would be forced to either (a) capitulate, (b) sue (they’d eventually lose), or (c) try to outlast the siege by further sucking dry their shrinking tax base (which would accelerate the fateful day of their capitulation). All three scenarios result in a W for the nationalist-populist win-loss column.

And if the cities tried to pull a “schoolhouse door” moment by blocking federal agents with local cops or sheriff’s deputies, it would be sweet, poetic justice to see the shoe on the other foot when the 101st Airborne would get deployed to put down the armed liberal hissyfit.

There is plenty of precedent for that sort of seemingly extreme action. The Obama Administration paved the way for a Trumpian overthrow of these cities’ pseudo-elite status by telling them that if they didn’t comply with federal law, they’d forfeit access to federal funds. Sessions can already arrest and prosecute the cities’ leaders for violating federal law. As for force, in 1954 Eisenhower was willing to use force to carry out federal policy in an unwilling state. Why not do the same in the cities — and this time for a cause actually worth fighting for?

It would be hard for the Leftist media to argue that this supremacy clause-style policy espoused by Barack Obama was wrong. All Trump and Sessions would have to do is point to ol’ Barry and say “If it’s so wrong, why did the first black president do it?”

I like the idea of government interposition. I like the idea that cities, counties, and states can stand up to the federal government and be perfectly within their constitutional rights in so doing. However, even for a small government, local-is-better, states’ rights guy like me, the plain fact is that since 1789, immigration policy has not been under the jurisdiction of any government besides the federal government. Immigration policy was cited in the Declaration of Independence as one of the reasons our Founding Fathers broke off from Great Britain, it was one of the subject areas that the states reserved for the federal government when the Framers drew up the Constitution, and it was one of the first issues the U.S. government dealt with in 1790 and 1795.

Maybe this is wishful thinking. But I don’t think it is. It’s simply a matter of imagining something other than the status quo. One of Trump’s strengths is precisely that. Even more so, creative, outside-of-the-box thinking is Stephen Bannon’s strong suit. I am very glad he is there to advise the new administration. This is no time to waffle and conduct business-as-usual. This is our time. We must make the most of it, and be willing to pay any earthly cost for doing what is self-evidently a heavenly cause.