We get to look past the foreground. At least in my back yard.

The Pareto Principle (also known as the 80–20 rule, the law of the vital few, and the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.

The 80-20 rule is important to us today for two reasons.

First, the current leftist domination and corruption of our nation are the product of just 20 percent of our population. These are the leftists who have subsumed our political class, our mass media, our mass entertainment industry, and our educational and legal institutions. Don’t let their recent vote totals hide their minority status. The leadership of the left stands in relationship to their supposed beneficiaries — minorities, women, illegal immigrants, environmentalists, etc — as a pimp does to his working girls. I’m not being roughly metaphorical. I’m being precise. The pimp cozies up to the lost or naive and sweet talks them into serving his own selfish purposes, which are always money and power. He uses them ruthlessly, then discards them carelessly whenever they become inconvenient. Their personal welfare is never his concern. He prefers them to be ignorant, dependent, helpless except for his largesse, and disposable as toilet paper. His first and absolute commandment is that his working girls prostitute themselves on his behalf and feel a kind of gratitude to him, or failing that, demonstrate unshakeable obedience and loyalty to his interests, regardless of any abuse he may feel required to mete out along the way.

Well, that’s the story of the left that has hijacked our country and our form of government. Another application of the 80-20 rule. 80 percent working girls of all four sexes and 20 percent ruthless totalitarians. Why lefties identify so consistently with murderous dictators around the globe. Why feminists were brought to heel in defending Clinton’s sexual assaults. Why civil rights “leaders” have consented in, no, conspired in, promulgating policies that have systematically destroyed black families, black educational and employment opportunities, and duped their own people into deconstructing cities into a series of urban infernos that ensure the incarceration of close to a majority of black males. Get the men out of the way and the helpless single mothers are yours. Pimps. 20 percent subjugating the 80 percent who trusted and relied on them.

Why there’s a spirit of hopelessness among so many who remember when government was supposed to serve and not rule us. The most viciously ambitious and narcissistic among us have captured all the institutions of power. What can we do? The whole country is imploding. And the working girls keep sashaying up to their pimps with more cash stashed in their panties, gratefully handed over to a contemptuous overlord in a $100,000 limousine.

Worse, the pimp is so delusional, so sociopathic, so deranged that he’s convinced himself his farcical sweet talk is truth, because after all, truth in the post modern street is whatever you pretend it is. There’s no such thing as hypocrisy because just look at those strung out working girls. Where would they be without your protection?

So why would I call this post Life Goes On? Because there’s another 20 percent in play that can’t be dismissed or entirely subjugated. This is the 20 percent that made America work in the first place. The ones who are relentlessly hardworking, creative, focused, and goal-oriented. These are the ones who came here to make a better life for their descendants. They didn’t expect to be rewarded in this life. For them the profit motive of capitalism wasn’t about greed but financing their family’s future. They’re the ones who produced all the great engines of industry and ideas that generated the miracle of American exceptionalism, which is as real as the nose on your face.

And you know what? Regardless of food stamp fraud, ersatz disability claims, and an ever rising tide of government dependency, that 20 percent is still there, in its same old constant relationship to the drones. They work, they aspire, they make huge demands on themselves, they balance family duties against the desire to make a personal, individual mark on the universe, or at least to be the best and bravest they can be, and they are alive in a way successful professional bureaucrats, government or corporate, can never be.

You see, for them it’s not about the money or the power or the prestige. It’s about seeking out the challenges and besting them, come hell or high water. The common bond between “Deadliest Catch” and “Faceoff,” between “Axmen” and “Masterchef,” and even between “Duck Dynasty” and “Heroes of Cosplay.”

No, they don’t all believe in the same things. I’m sure you could collect plenty of lunatic political opinions from participants in most of these shows. What they share that’s more important is a set of values. You work hard. You compete hard. But you also help when help is needed. Seen often, for example, on “Faceoff” and “Masterchef,” ALWAYS on “Deadliest Catch,” and almost never on Gordon Ramsay’s raspberry to American reality show narcissism, “Hell’s Kitchen.”

I’ve lived in both the fatcat bureaucratic corporate world and the entrepreneurial, presumably more dog-eat-dog world of small businesses. Where would you expect to see more toleration of error, more willingness to risk personal loss for the sake of just helping another? I can assure you it’s a slam dunk in favor of the little guy shops. Who they are still matters more than how much they profit personally.

The good news is that that the 20 percent of capitalist idealists (whether they’d accept my label or not) are still out there. They’re the vital ones, the living ones, and their drive is far more powerful than that of the power-besotted, utterly self-satisfied and selfish ones who are sitting astride this beleaguered nation trying to throttle it to death.

The best news is that the lefty 20 percent is, whenever anyone cares to look, an exhausted, idea-less joke. Nothing they’ve done in the last 50 years, excepting the Clean Air Act, has produced anything but hideously negative unintended consequences. They’re the victim of their own conspiracy to dumb the rest of us down. They may have succeeded in creating a horrifying generation of “low information voters,” but they’ve become something worse — “low information intellectuals.” The professors who set about creating a proletariat of parrots did it to their own as well.

When you stop teaching history, facts, writing, and analytical skills to schoolchildren, you have nobbled your own heirs too. Today’s mighty Ivy liberals know nothing of their own history or of western civilization’s. They know how to attack someone else’s argument with monolithic cant and vile abuse, but they can’t construct an argument of their own to save their lives. They have absorbed an impression of history their didact tutors insisted on, but they have no power left to critique any idea, let alone the ideology they embody without appreciating that belief is a thing to be first understood and, second, defended with the power of reason and fact.

They are destitute. Credentialed retards in charge of the body politic. Lawyers who don’t believe in the rule of law, only the destruction of statute via semantic dithering. Political philosophers who don’t believe in any principle beyond their their own entitlement to make the process enforce their own whims about an impossible fantasy of social and planetary justice. Destitute, in short, of all ideas that might justify and legitimize their own lives, let alone their assumed right to tell the rest of us how to live. Resting atop an unbroken record of making things ever and always worse by collecting more power into their own arrogant hands.

Would I bet on this moribund 20 percent against the 20 percent who have some idea why they’re alive and bright-eyed in pursuit of careers and family objectives that have nothing to do with remaking the earth as a satellite around their diseased egos? Not a chance I would.

Did you like the fountains of grass I can see through my bay window, past the busy fingers of the trees that want to hide them from my view?

Life goes on. It will. The American spirit is not something easily stamped out of existence.