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For the hundreds of millions living in Third World tyranny and misery are growing, as is their willingness to risk their lives to reach Europe. And national resistance is not going to dissipate as the illegal immigrants and refugees come in growing numbers.

What the resisters see as imperiled is what they treasure most, their countries, cultures, way of life and the future they wish to leave their children. These are things for which men have always fought.

And, in America, is diversity leading to greater unity, or to greater rancor, separatism and disintegration? Did anyone imagine that, 50 years after the civil rights laws, we would still be having long hot summers in Ferguson, Baltimore and Milwaukee?

The crisis that South Carolina statesman John C. Calhoun had posthumously predicted in his “Disquisition on Government” has also come to pass.

The country would divide into two parties, Calhoun said. One would be the party of those who pay the taxes to government, the other the party of those who consume the benefits of government.

The taxpayers’ party would engage in constant clashes with the party of the tax-consumers.

In 2013, the top 1 percent of Americans in income paid 38 percent of all income taxes. The bottom 50 percent of income-earners, half the nation, paid only 3 percent of all income taxes.

A question logically follows: If one belongs to that third of the nation that pays no income taxes but receives copious benefits, why would you vote for a party that will cut taxes you don’t pay, but take away benefits you do receive?

Traditional Republican platforms ask half the country to vote against its economic interests. As a long-term political strategy, that is not too promising.

During the New Deal, FDR’s aide Harold Ickes, declared in what became party dogma, “We shall tax and tax, spend and spend, and elect and elect.”

And so they did, and so they do. But this is a game that cannot go on forever.

For, as John Adams reminded us, “There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”