Thoughts triggered by a piece by Richard Fernandez on the dislocation of the Left…triggered…by The Brits voting to leave the EU, Donald Trump’s election as President, Emmanuel Macron’s election as French President, the resounding defeat of Theresa May and her Conservative party’s defeat in Britain’s snap elections, and Macron’s La République En Marche! party’s in-progress accession to strong power in the French National Assembly.

One thought is this.  Van Jones, ex ex-President Barack Obama’s advisor, complained about the selfishness of Democrats’ spending in the last Presidential campaign season while speaking to a crowd at the People’s Summit in Chicago’s McCormack Place.

The Hillary Clinton campaign did not spend their money on white workers, and they did not spend it on people of color. They spent it on themselves.  They spent it on themselves, let’s be honest.

Let’s be honest, indeed.  This is the identity politics of the Left, repeated.  And it’s Jones’ own selfish version of identity politics.  His beef isn’t that the money wasn’t spent to further the campaign or the interests of the American citizenry.  He’s not even decrying the spending in favor of party officials and cronies.  No, his beef is that the money wasn’t spent on his groups of Americans in particular rather than other groups of Americans—or even on Americans in general.

The other thought is illustrated by this graph, which Fernandez got from the Cato Institute, to which he linked in his piece (the Cato Institute article is worth reading in its own right).  It’s a five-year-old graph, but it remains valid.

Notice that while keeping in mind the predominance of union control of teaching in our K-12 schools coupled with the Left’s increasing influence on the slant of the subject matter being taught in required subjects other than science and arithmetic.  Total spending per student has nearly tripled over the last 45 and more years with no effect at all on student performance outcomes beyond a slight degfradation in science performance.

The Left just doesn’t care about performance, even at the foundation of our citizenry.  It only cares about spending and the power that brings them, and here, the Left’s ability to shape successive generations of voters.

Which dovetails nicely with the Left’s dedication to identity politics.  The thoughts aren’t so disparate, maybe.