Why Class Warfare Doesn't Work in America
In his re-election campaign Obama shifted from a broad general appeal to class warfare, hoping to gain traction by proposing to cure the nation's woes by taxing 'millionaires and billionaires', apparently without sensing any obligation to show how that course would accelerate economic growth, improve the unenmployment situation or enhance the general prosperity. In fact it would not, and beyond the radical left, including the mainstream media, Hollywoood, Academia, the generality of jealous malcontents and the permanent leftist political class the class appeal is a lost cause in anything like the long run even though Obama won the election largely because Romney was simply not an effective candidate and Obama had the media solidly behind him. But this shift leftward is almost certainly a temporary, if very unwelcome abberation. There are two primary reasons for this.
First, Americans actually understand that you cannot tax the rich out of our troubles and into solutions because there simply are not enough rich people with enough money to do that. The voters are not as naive as the left thinks they are If American history and culture were different from what it is, there might be some possibility that a rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul strategy could actually work as it only apppears to be working now temporarily, by postponing the day of reckoning. Most Americans know that business, and therefore growth, are discouraged by excesses of taxation and regulation and they are generally convinced that such excesses exist now.
Second and more fundamental is the fact that class envy is foreign to the thinking of most Americans due to the significant degree of class mobility in this country. There are fixed class distinctions in most of the rest of the world, more in some regions than others, but just about everywhere except for Canada, Australia and a few other countries most of which have English-speaking populations. Many Americans, if not most, have relatives on the low end of the socio-economic scale and others on the high end. That's America, Abe Lincoln growing up in poor backwoods circumstances with one year of formal education only to become a brilliantly self-educated lawyer and president of the United States. Whatever your circumstances you may realistically hope to improve them if that is your ambition. And --- America is so bountiful and free that many folks are satisfied where they are. Money isn't everything. Regardless of that, with conditions like we have in America people are not so anxious to destroy a class to which they themselves may aspire to become members, and various friends and relatives are now, even though they themselves are not members now. They see how it happens, as people in most of the world do not, which makes them susceptible to class-warfare arguments. Ask Oprah Winfrey, who came from as far down on the social register as you can get --- poor, abused, unhappy childhood --- and became the famous billionaire we all know. It is just a fact; Americans are not class-identified to anything like the degree that most populations are.
First, Americans actually understand that you cannot tax the rich out of our troubles and into solutions because there simply are not enough rich people with enough money to do that. The voters are not as naive as the left thinks they are If American history and culture were different from what it is, there might be some possibility that a rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul strategy could actually work as it only apppears to be working now temporarily, by postponing the day of reckoning. Most Americans know that business, and therefore growth, are discouraged by excesses of taxation and regulation and they are generally convinced that such excesses exist now.
Second and more fundamental is the fact that class envy is foreign to the thinking of most Americans due to the significant degree of class mobility in this country. There are fixed class distinctions in most of the rest of the world, more in some regions than others, but just about everywhere except for Canada, Australia and a few other countries most of which have English-speaking populations. Many Americans, if not most, have relatives on the low end of the socio-economic scale and others on the high end. That's America, Abe Lincoln growing up in poor backwoods circumstances with one year of formal education only to become a brilliantly self-educated lawyer and president of the United States. Whatever your circumstances you may realistically hope to improve them if that is your ambition. And --- America is so bountiful and free that many folks are satisfied where they are. Money isn't everything. Regardless of that, with conditions like we have in America people are not so anxious to destroy a class to which they themselves may aspire to become members, and various friends and relatives are now, even though they themselves are not members now. They see how it happens, as people in most of the world do not, which makes them susceptible to class-warfare arguments. Ask Oprah Winfrey, who came from as far down on the social register as you can get --- poor, abused, unhappy childhood --- and became the famous billionaire we all know. It is just a fact; Americans are not class-identified to anything like the degree that most populations are.
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