What was the election really about? Class war. That’s not reactionary right-wing paranoia; it’s the claim of progressives themselves, as evidenced by the mainstream liberal group Campaign For America’s Future, who have launched a new website WageClassWar.org, which is, of course, being promoted by labor unions like the AFL-CIO.
On the WageClassWar.org site, Robert Borosage writes a screed that shows a classist, racist, achievement hating worldview.
In 2012, class warfare broke out in American politics. And from the president to key Senate races, the middle class won.
When the 2012 campaign began, the lousy economy made President Obama vulnerable. Republicans were favored to take back the Senate, given retirements in conservative states. Republican billionaires — the Koch brothers, Adelson and others — put up big money in the effort to have it all. Instead the president swept to victory, and Democrats gained seats in the Senate and the House.
Many factors contributed. Republicans learned once more the shortcomings of a stale, male, pale, Southern-based party in a nation of diversity. The GOP “legitimate rape” caucus helped give away two Senate seats. But too little attention has been paid to the new emerging reality. This was the first class warfare election of the new Gilded Age — and the middle class won big.
Of course, the middle class have been the big losers in the Obama economy. So who won, aside from Democrat candidates?
Score a victory for Occupy Wall Street.
People can properly point to the many practical failings of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Occupy was a dismal failure at handling vast sums of money responsibly, providing security for its own participants and for basic civility, hygiene, and sanitation.
None of that was ever the point. Occupy wasn’t about providing a safe urban camping experience for young women. It was about providing the emotional backdrop that would make the reelection of a failed president possible.
There’s a reason that Andrew Breitbart is so on fire in the film Occupy Unmasked. Breitbart saw something vibrantly that many conservatives consistently ignore: the pure overwhelming power of aesthetics and culture. While many intellectual conservatives dismissed the ideas of the Occupy movement as shallow socialist rehashes put forth by muddled, mumbling miscreants, Breitbart saw that the intellectual content was never the actual point.
How could ideas be the main attraction? The hurdle that the left constantly faces is that they cannot point to the success of their policies. Their ideas have been tried in places like the Soviet Union or North Korea and the result is inevitably not just economic ruin but mass slaughter. This is true throughout the history of leftist politics, as it is true on a smaller scale of Obama’s first administration. The concepts simply don’t work.
Occupy wasn’t about ideas, it was about spectacle. It was a show. This was evidenced when I went to Zuccotti Park in 2011 and saw that it had literally become a tourist attraction. Occupy was a socialist petting zoo where out-of-towners wandered through the labyrinth of tents and literature tables snapping iPhone photos of anarchist freaks and hipster camp consolers.
Occupy declared class war on the United States – a vampire’s lunge straight for our financial system’s jugular vein. As such, it was a perfectly designed concept, put forth by the old guard left – Vietnam era senior citizens like Bill Ayers and Noam Chomsky got into the Occupy act, combined with the modern community organizing juggernaut of the Obama administration.
The left is gloating that they have won a class warfare struggle. People who love liberty would do well to pay them heed. They are telling you that class warfare tactics are now their tactics for future elections.
Believe it.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.