Drawing on his military experience in Kosovo, Kurt Schlichter draws a stark lesson for the progressives currently running America’s cultural institutions and the White House:

Today in America, a despised minority that is really no minority is the target of an establishment that considers this minority unworthy of respect, unworthy of rights, and unworthy of having a say in the direction of this country. It’s an establishment that has one law for itself, and another for its enemies. It’s an establishment that inflicts an ever-increasing series of petty humiliations on its opponents and considers this all hilarious.

That’s a recipe for disaster. You cannot expect to change the status quo for yourself and then expect those you victimize not to play by the new rules you have created. You cannot expect to be able to discard the rule of law in favor of the rule of force and have those you target not respond in kind.

Like Schlichter, I find myself wondering, “What is the end game, liberals?”  And (I suspect) like Schlichter, I can only conclude that there’s a great deal that the Left has left unconsidered.  One sees this in their technocratic schemes and in the reams of bad legislation that I’m already (ugh) in the middle of reading, right now.  Progressives seem to have a pervasive character trait that makes them believe they can design perfect systems, or at least self-correcting ones.  Indeed, the realization that this is a grievous conceptual error could be part of a definition of non-progressives.

They think they’ve got the minority groups on chains of identity politics and government benefits.  They think they’ve got the investment class and business moguls caught up in the promise of special access to great mountains of money and protectionist regulations.  They think they’ve got young adults swept up in emotion on purely social incentives.  They think they’ve got those with minority worldviews and behavioral inclinations paralyzed with fear that any other leadership would make them fugitives.  They think they’ve got their (relatively conservative) blue collar workers and emergency personnel on labor-union leashes.  From there, the rest of the process is just continuing to crank the Alinsky lever to reduce the space permitted to those who aren’t locked in.

One of two broad outcomes is possible.  The above construct turns into a doomsday machine and modern technology finally allows those inevitably inclined toward totalitarianism to make resistance impossible, and our planet becomes a moral wasteland beyond the imagination of any dystopian writer.  Or the breaking point is reached, whether with a final “enough” from the targets of the machine (as Schlichter foresees) or with the awakening of key cogs in the machine to the fact that they’d be better off with freedom than in lockstep.