FRED SIEGEL ON THE HOUSE DIVIDED:

Trump is both a reaction to and expression of liberal delusions. [Arthur] Schlesinger’s fears have largely come to pass; we’ve become what he called a “quarrelsome spatter of enclaves.” Schlesinger was too much a part of the elite to imagine that the class he always thought of as representing the best of the future would come to be despised by a broad swath of Americans for its incompetence and ineffectuality. But what Schlesinger saw on the horizon seems to have arrived, with no sign of abating: we are in the midst of a soft civil war.

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What Ayn Rand once dubbed a “Cold Civil War” in the early 1960s has in recent years become increasingly hotter. But if elites had been more competent civil servants and less eager to gin up class and race wars, they might not have caused conditions to go from Defcon-3 to Defcon-Trump.