What the hope-they’re-white crowd really wishes for is a reason to treat their domestic political adversaries as enemies of the state…

We use the F-word not to inflame emotions but to provoke thought, for we find the behavior of the Obama-era left only disturbing, not alarming. The scapegoating of minorities, the thunderous demands that the Will of the People be done, have an authoritarian feel. But they don’t have much authority.

Why? Because the conception of “the people”–the idea that allows the left to imagine it commands the support of a vast majority–has no organic reality. You’ve heard of the expression “reducing a person to a statistic”? The Obama-era left seeks to inflate a statistic into a people.

Take the “1%.” This refers not to an identifiable group of people but to a statistical artifact: the 99th percentile of income distribution in any given year. Some people, like George Soros (long may he live), can assume they have a permanent place in the 1%. Others fall in briefly because of a sudden windfall or the one-time sale of an asset. Simple probability dictates that most people will be in the 98th percentile or below their whole lives, but that isn’t part of their identity. Not everyone resents great wealth; many admire or aspire to it. And even those who identify as “the 99%” have an ideological kinship with superrich lefties like Soros.