We are accustomed to seeing politics as a clash of political parties or specific ideologies. And there is that. But it goes deeper and scrambles party and ideological labels.

The great divide, the vital separation at the base of many of our political battles, is the tension between free individualists and the collectivist impulse.

It has become so at the center of debate that the agents of collectivism in the major parties and in the media find it necessary to become an internal Thought Police.

Republicans must adhere to the populist mob mentality, lest they be deemed elitist or not sufficiently of the regular volk. Democrats must denigrate the free market, men, free speech, and the United States itself or they may be thought of as counter revolutionaries and hauled up before internal Marxist star chambers. Freedom of thought is not championed by the drivers of the rank and file of either party. The nation is the worse for it, but the mobs love it well.

That’s where confusion reigns. The same dangerous sidewalk Caesars rule MAGA and BLM. There was little difference in basic viewpoint between Antifa thugs and populist rioters. They have different goals, granted. But they want to get there in the exact same way.

That path, strewn with the corpses of reason, history, and freedom, is a road mankind has tried to avoid since Magna Carta, the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and the promulgation of the US Constitution.

It arrays the forces of liberty, merit, and The Enlightenment against the baying throngs of a rapacious and ignorant intellectual peasantry. The meritocracy, to paraphrase WFB, stands athwart the avenues to power of the rabble who, banners held high and cymbals crashing, would condemn a man for having an individual thought not approved by the riff raff.

However, all is not everlasting doom. There are paladins on both sides, though few and far between on the left, who still believe in the power of individual thought. Some also can see the threats to freedom not only here but abroad. They are opposed by the unusual subjects.

In the resistance to aid for Ukraine we see populist isolationists making common cause with hard left ideologues who have classified this “a white man’s war.” Both MAGA and authoritarian socialists dream of a Putin-like regime where anyone who speaks out against the prevailing winds as defined by toothless imbeciles or the effete pseudoelite would be thrown in jail or worse.

This battle for the sanctity of the individual versus the mob is one that free men and women fight today. In the final outcome will be decided the fate of this nation and perhaps of the West. For the sake of our children and their children, we dare not lose this struggle.