No matter where you stand on the reasonable political spectrum, the sights from Minnesota, the sights, from January 6th, the situations all over the nation, must have you ask: Why?

Why do some people riot at what they consider injustice or political misfortune? Why do some see supposed wrongs as an opportunity to loot? Why do some vilify brave law enforcement officers at every opportunity? Why do some follow their emotions, not rational facts, in a cult of personality based around one man? Hasn’t history taught us the danger of that? And finally, given that those rioting and looting are our own people, shouldn’t we rethink our concept of “we the people”? I think we should. For the “people”, for political purposes, have become, perhaps they always were down deep, a mob.

What recent events from both sides have taught us is something the Founders knew and we can see clearly today. The “people” unleashed are nothing but a ravening, ignorant, greedy collection of programmed grievance groups and slobbering hayseeds.

The aristocratic men of the Enlightenment who designed our system of government realized that for freedom to work government had to be limited. That’s why the Constitution is mostly a list of things government can’t do. But they also understood that a pure democracy wouldn’t work, as people would corrupt it into avaricious mob rule. Hence we have representative government and the Founders’ expectation of a virtuous and responsible citizenry, as in the “we the people” preamble.

But we don’t have that kind of citizenry anymore. Goaded on by sensationalist media and told they are noble by demagogues, we have a seething cauldron of ill tempered children on our hands. These are products of a failed education system and a pop culture run by guttersnipes. Are there still responsible reasonable people in America? Of course, many of them. But they don’t drive the agenda. The greasy wheel gets the oil and the mobs get the attention and thus drive the political agenda.

The mobs of January 6th have given the left a casus belli to rationalize suppression of civil liberties in the name of domestic security. Loutish populist demagogues have used their pet mobs to deform and deface civic discourse, substituting bellowing and bravado for reason. Looters, rioters, all supported and encouraged by the left, rage through our cities and are given a free pass by the culture and the media. These mobs and demagogues give lie to a Constitution designed for a reasonable and responsible people. They seek to destroy constitutional rule and replace it with multiculty authoritarian socialism or cretinous knuckle-dragging MAGA populism. Either way, America loses.

As such, the best scenario today would be government by a meritocracy, by an elite who earned the status. But the populists of the right and the Marxists of the left would never allow that, as they would be exposed for the sly sheep herders that they are. So the looting, the riots, and the populist appeals to the worst in our natures will continue. Until, not very far down the road, the mobs will have destroyed the nation they so loudly proclaim they are saving.