A woman named Sally Kohn has written an op-ed (here) in the Washington Post demanding that Obama get into a class war with the Republicans. In fact, she says that we already are in such a war and that it was started by corporations and the rich. She cites the usual statistics about the rich getting richer and the poor poorer, huge profits for corporations, and how corporations and the rich are fighting against unions and higher taxes. She complains that “Republicans have made clear that they would rather cut Social Security and Medicare benefits than raise taxes on the rich or increase spending to help our economy.” Finally, she complains that “almost one in 10 Americans is unemployed, and 15 percent live at or below the poverty level.”
Aside from that last point, the rest of what she says is worthless rhetoric. Let me fill in Ms. Kohn (and others who think similarly) on those points that they somehow aren’t seeing, but which are often seen by the middle classes who now vote Republican rather than Democrat:
• You Democrats had two years in which to push for jobs, and you did very little. A lot of money was spent to stimulate the economy, and GM was taken over by the government, but otherwise nothing much changed. If anything, things got worse. Instead, you Democrats pushed for reform of health care. You showed which was more important to you, but now you think you deserve another chance to blow it.
• You Democrats constantly whine about more taxes for the rich. What is with this obsession you have? Most of us figure that the rich will easily evade these higher taxes via loopholes, or if worse comes to worst, simply by working less.
• You complain that Republicans have made it clear that they have certain priorities, namely cutting Social Security and Medicare rather than raising taxes on the rich. But you Democrats have your own priorities, for example, preferring to help the environment over helping the poor. One way to help the poor is to get the price of gas down, but the environmentalists are always dead set against anything that would do this. A recent proposal to build a pipeline from Canada to refineries in Texas – a proposal that would help the poor by lowering the price of gas as well as giving them jobs – is of course being protested against by environmentalists, who insist it might hurt the environment if there’s a spill. So long as you leftists choose to help the environment over helping the poor, enough people from the lower and middle classes will figure this out and vote against you.
• You, like all liberals and leftists, complain about the large profits of corporations, but never about the large endowments of universities like Harvard. Nor do you complain about the high tuition rates for college these days. Why not? These are costs for the poor that need to be addressed. Unfortunately, you have little interest in addressing these costs, mainly because the reason for them, relatively high salaries for faculty together with a huge increase in administrators for positions leftists want (like multicultural affairs officers), would mean hurting your own. This is another instance of you liberals and leftists having priorities that hurt the poor.
• Instead of thinking of strategies to fight the rich and powerful (like having homeless people squat in foreclosed homes), you should be talking about creating jobs. Nowhere in your article do you talk about how to do this.
• What you need to do is to figure out how to help corporations and small businesses hire lots of people, but you leftists are too used to thinking of these people as the enemy to do this. But one must do it, and what I frequently hear from such people is how regulations stifle companies and how the new healthcare bill has made it too uncertain to hire anyone new because the costs at this point are unknown.
Any genuine class warfare would find the Democrats the object of anger just as much as the Republicans.