Why Class Warfare Doesn't Work in America

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.  
     
  

Chop Shop Yatkeman's Sister

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Haikou, Hainan Province, China

Haikou, Hainan Province, China

Jesus and the Woman at Jacob's Well

 

      Jesus' encounter with the Samaritan woman, recorded at John 4, is interesting for a number of reasons and is one among several instances in which He shows His disapproval of racial, religious and gender discrimination. The Samaritan woman is the first person to whom Jesus expressly reveals who He is. He comes close to revealing his status as the Son of God to Nicodemus in John 3, but he refers to Himself in the third person.  He does not expressly say to Nicodemus, as He does to the Samaritan woman, "I am he, the one who is speaking with you."  This is also the longest conversation that Jesus is recorded to have had with any individual in the New Testament. Jesus and his disciples did not have to go through Samaria, Jews normally bypassed that region because the Samaritans had their own religious outlook and did not practice Judeaeism.  In other words He intended to go there. He was not just passing through.  And we encounter Him talking to a woman, for one thing, and a Samaritan, for another. A Jewish man would never drink water proffered to him by a Samaritan because they were considered by the Jews of that time to be unclean. The woman was at the well at noon time. Most people gathered water in the morning or evening, when it is not as hot. This woman went at noon in order to avoid people, perhaps from shame. The fact that she had had five husbands and was living with a man who was not her husband, indicates a shameful personal history.  So Jesus is revealing His divine sonship to a woman, a foreigner, a half-Jew, a sinner, and to her people who are outside the pale of Judaism. It shows the breadth and scope of His kindness and tolerance as distinguished from the narrowness and intolerance of the times.
     There are a number of instances in which the same principle is shown --- the story of the Good Samaritan, His willingness to go to the home of a Roman Centurion to heal the man's servant, His encounter with the gentile woman, a Scyrophonecian gentile, whose daughter was desperately ill and whom Jesus healed --- these among others.  And all of this when tolerance was not generally the order of the day.

FREDDIE PLATO