by Bruce Walker –
The latest Gallup Poll confirms what most of us had suspected all along: the rich — that top one percent, the folks whom radical leftists like OWS rail against — are not as conservative as the rest of us. The greater conservatism of the 99% rest of us is slight — one percentage point — but it does bring home the fact that many of those with wealth are rather happy with the struggling middle class keeping to its place.
Wealth is not income. The income of the middle class comes from hardworking folks; often husband and wife both hold full-time jobs, trying to reach a level of security, comfort, and leisure which people like leftist Senator Jay Rockefeller or Senator John Kerry have always taken for granted. These leftists do not need to earn money. They simply preserve their acquired wealth.
Leftists’ fear is not that some Americans are miserable and poor or live in dysfunctional families (created by the awful social welfare programs and godless social science of the left). Their real fear is that some hardworking Americans may be able to join their country club or buy a big home in some swanky and exclusive neighborhood.
Leftists do not want “Hope and Change.” They want, instead, glacial immobility. That is why saving every single species on the planet really matters to leftists, even though species quite naturally die out all the time. That is why climate change troubles the left so much; climate change, man-made or not, may actually improve our lives, but any real change terrifies the left.
This is also why the left still spouts Keynesian nonsense fifty years after Keynes died and long after this economic theory was empirically disproved, and it explains why Obama still seems to idolize that misanthropic quack, Karl Marx, more than 150 years after his proposed “science.”
Do we seem, almost sixty years after Dr. King’s “I have a dream” speech and more than forty years after the “feminist revolution,” to still have simmering cauldrons of notional “racism” or “sexism”? Are we still using the same educational theories that drive standardized tests scores lower and lower each decade? Do we still rely on the profoundly dubious “research” of Kinsey, despite the revelations of Dr. Reisman showing that his studies were flawed? When union leaders and the members of public-employee unions have much higher income and benefits than most Americans, what hoary rhetoric still lets them claim the status of “ordinary working people”?
Not only do many of the very rich look down on those who work, sweat, and risk in order to become rich themselves, but one of the easiest ways to make money these days is to flack for some risible leftist patent medicine. How much money has Al Gore made off the global warming racket? What is the average salary of a political science professor at a big university, and how much real work do those drones do?
Leftist ideology constricts radically the number of permissible ways to get rich so that those who sing the party line rake in the dough. Leftists today resemble the nabob of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in its hideous heyday. Solzhenitsyn once said that no one in the leadership of the Communist Party actually believed the claptrap it routinely proclaimed. The party itself was simply a vehicle for the greedy, corrupt, or perverted to live their ugly lives without moral sanction. Power, acquired for the ostensible purpose of social justice, is just a scam, just like leftism is also just a scam.
Where is income highest in America? It is not where oil company executives live or where computer software executives roost, but rather the environs of our nation’s capital: ten of the top-sixteen highest-income places in America are Virginia or Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C.
Forbes Magazine lists the place with the highest income in America as Falls Church City, Va. Consider over the last four elections how well the Democrat running for the highest office did in that county: Obama 70% (2008 presidential), Democrat Creigh Deeds 65% (2009 gubernatorial), anti-Israel Democrat Jim Moran 64% (2010 congressional), and Democrat Dick Saslaw 66% (2011 State Senate.) Radical leftism thrives where the rich dwell, because leftism keeps those who are not rich in their place — no hope and no change.
HT: American Thinker