As soon as pigmentation trumps argumentation, we're all in trouble.

From Four Thoughts on Trump's "Mexican" Judge Remarks by Charles Lipson. Lipson's first three points are the obvious ones such as ethnicity has no place in the discourse of ideas and pursuit of truth.

He finishes with the fourth point which I think is part of the circumstances which has brought Trump so far. Our corrupt political class has too long been firmly in the thrall of our bankrupt public intellectuals out of the Frankfurt school with their postmodernism, critical theory, critical race theory, gender theory etc.

It is rich -- truly rich -- to see the same people who have turned the country into a festival of divisive identity politics shocked, shocked to see their arguments used against them. For years, they have mocked our country’s ideal of a "melting pot," sneered at our country's motto, "E Pluribus Unum."

Fashionable academics have been drum majors in this dismal parade. It began with a critique of Western scholars who study the Middle East. Only Muslims from the region, the critics asserted, can truly understand its politics and how hateful the West truly is. They likened serious, thoughtful scholars to colonial oppressors, saying Westerners didn’t have the right identity or credibility to comment on “their issues.”

One hears the same about whites discussing social and political issues affecting the problems of our urban cores, as if the social pathologies are too obscure to understand or somehow impolite for outsiders to notice. The same arguments have been used to exclude men from discussing issues of sex discrimination and assaults against women. Of course, personal experience can enrich and deepen one's understanding of complex issues. Sharing those experiences can help others understand them, too. But the conversation should be open to everyone, subject to the usual rules of evidence and argumentation. Nobody owns exclusive rights to discuss these questions. Nobody.

As soon as pigmentation trumps argumentation, we're all in trouble. That’s exactly where we are now, sinking in the quicksand of divisive identity politics. Donald Trump's noxious comments illustrate the problem. They should teach us the pernicious effects of judging people -- and presuming their views -- based on who they are, not on what they say and do.

The vested interests, ideological mutants and crony elite wish to shut up the citizenry to keep them from pointing out the nonsense being mooted about by the academy and the advocacy groups. It is all incompatible with both the culture, the tradition and the ethos of the United States. The coercive elite is being pushed back by the governed who no longer consent to put up with the tendentious nonsense.

Four years ago the system provided us with the choice of a decent man with notable and exceptional accomplishments in personal and public life, exceptionally generous and civic minded, family life above fault, intelligent, experienced. We would have to go back to the founding of the Republic to find someone of such capability and qualification. But the worst political class ever, the vested interests, crony capitalists, corrupt advocates and authoritarian ideologists in the press and in Washington managed to shield the child of the inner beltway and turned away the possible Cincinnatus.

The electorate has turned, Gozer-like, on the political class and their enablers in the media and academy and said, as in the original Ghostbusters, "Choose! Choose the form of the Destructor!" The electorate has presented the insiders with the Destructor from their own id, Trump. The destructor who cares not a whit about the niceties of convention, civility, and ideological protocols. Who is unbound by the forms and customs of the coercive postmodernists. Who speaks the unspeakable. What a Destructor.

The last cycle we had the opportunity to choose an accomplished, honest paragon whose mere rectitude threatened the comfort of the political class, media, and academy. Provoked, the electorate in its best Gozer impersonation has now unleashed the Voluble Destructor on the system of privileges and immunities shielding the insiders. We can only hope the benefit of disrupting and sidelining the authoritarian ideologues, postmodernists, critical race theorists, crony capitalists, vested interests, etc. will outweigh the chaos of Trump.

And this too shall pass.