You’ve no doubt heard Obama speak of the middle class, and wondered to yourself, “Who’s he talking about?’ Joe Biden in his announcement deciding not to run for president last week said he would continue to work for “the middle class”. Hillary has her pat lines about “the middle class” as well. In fact every Democrat does, at every level of politics. They all speak of protecting, saving, or expanding the middle class, yet no responsible journalist, in nearly twenty years, has ever asked any Democrat to explain just what or who “the middle class” is.
There’s a reason for this, for it’s typical leftwing doublespeak, using a word the majority of American believes means one thing, while its code-meaning is totally different. In short, to Democrats “the middle class” are the workers who work for the state management class (the civil service) including state workers, school teachers in particular, who deliver state services at the front lines, and select union members working for private sector companies recognized by the government as “partners”, or as we call them, “cronies”.
Only Democrats could get away with this, but as we’ve learned the past 4-5 years, only the GOP would let them get away with it, learning only recently that it’s because the GOP had always been in on this statist program. Partners in crime, if you will.
When seen from the Left’s point of view, the objective of the economic programs launched by Obama, (but on the drafting table at least since LBJ) has been to destroy the American private sector small business-middle class and replace it by a managerial state middle class….which had governed the world since the Bronze Age.
What most Americans do not understand:
… is that a world run by a managerial state class had always been the ruling power structure since the time of the pharaohs, the only real changes being the titles of the ruling class. Today we are in the third incarnation, where central committees have replaced kings and pharaohs, adding a cozy relationship with big industrial powers in the 1930s, where the state picked winners and losers in the private sector, deemed a far more workable, and profitable, relationship than the disastrous communist model tried out in Russia for 75 years, where the best Soviet leadership could get was hotel suites that couldn’t match up to a Motel 6 in the West, and limousines that rode like ’51 IH tractors. Today this new partnership is called “crony capitalism”, but was once upon a time referred to as “fascist economics”, made popular by Benito Mussolini and made near-perfect by, yep, you guessed it, Adolf Hitler…only on the days he dressed in tails for high tea. (European socialists don’t like to be reminded of these photos of Hitler.)
Finally, after the state ruling committees, and the state bureaucracies (the civil service) and the professional classes, doctors and lawyers, there remains, as always, since the time of pharaohs, the producer class, the 95% who actually grow the food, and produce the goods and services, the better cuts always reserved for the management class. For thousands of years these workers were referred to as the “drone class” or names to that effect.
What most Americans also do not understand:
… is that America is the only country in the history of the world in which the revered middle class was also it’s private sector. Every failed seminar I’d ever given in east Europe, SE Asia and west Africa was based on the simple notion that free markets mean creating a middle class in the private sector…detached from the state class.
Until only recently, the past twenty years, American private sector workers out-earned government sector workers by 25%. Now the reverse is true. Since Obama came to town, government has grown considerably, while the private sector small business class has been decimated by at least 20%.
Consequently millions of whites and Hispanics have joined the dependency class (welfare). The Appalachification of America, if you will, for the intent is to make this condition permanent. Having once belonged to a thriving, vibrant small business middle class community, as hourly workers, with wages enough to start a family, a bright light of upward mobility, and enough to plan a future, workers had a lot to be proud about and to look forward to. Especially thanks to the Reagan tax cuts in the 1980s. Just fifty years ago, their numbers were small, filling the job sector in downtown retail businesses. Factory work paid better but was undesirable for many Americans for purely American reasons. Many young people took lower paying jobs in small business because of the more friendly work environment, often outside, where the boss knew your name, and with some promise, with spunk and hard work there were promotions to be had. One thing about factory work, no one ever bragged about being a second-or-third generation factory worker. Factory workers slaved to send their children off to a better life, so there were less and less people to fill empty factory slots. This is why factories move, or, instead, some crony businesses, want a steady flow of new workers.
Most of all, statist Democrats hated the idea that low-level receptionists could own stocks, have an IRA, or have enough disposable income to buy mail order from Finger Hut, and things had been simmering since Reagan left town in ’88. It wouldn’t take more than a couple of years to realize that statism was back with a bang, and that the government of Barack Obama and the Democrats had no intention of repairing this “recession”. All they have done is lie about the numbers to give the appearance of recovery when one has not occurred.
The Reagan years produced young entrepreneurs with keen instincts, but not necessarily any college credit. My county, Chesterfield, in Virginia, had hundreds of small businesses started and run by just such young men, none of them ever knowing just how much certain classes of their professional “betters” seethed at their success. Lawyers were one. College teachers, like Jonathan Gruber, another.
Do you have any idea how much it galls a law partner in downtown Cincinnati to watch a kid from his high school class become a millionaire by age 45 selling scrap metal, and never once making a donation to PBS during their annual telethon? I do. Or how about that business professor at the Business College who watches the guy who does his termite inspections blow by him on the interstate in his S65 AMG Mercedes coupe (with Oogah horn) while he’s cruising down the road in a suddenly-bourgeois 2011 Volvo?
“Tain’t fair”, they mutter. (Trust me, I know this to be so.) The entire Obama class of wannabes are eaten up with envy of people who do better then them, but who they perceive to be beneath them.
“The middle class” of Democrat-speak is not the private sector. The Obama Administration has waged relentless warfare on small business, reducing the entire sector by at least 20% diminishing the remainder, with more to come. The lower-end of the small business sector has all but disappeared while the upper end has seen revenues fall by 40%-50%. The jobs that were lost are to remain lost. Michelle Obama even warned young college students in 2008, :”Maybe you should reconsider degrees in business and accounting” and go into “public service”. Now those who did not heed her threat have no careers, mountains of debt and the available jobs reduced by 6 million. One way or the other they will become wards of the state.
This pathology of envy goes back to Karl Marx, so is not new, but the type of government that empowers then goes back to the dawn of recorded history. Envy is but one vice of men statism serves.
What most Americans also do not understand:
…is that America was no accident. By design, we had no real government class, which is the essence of our miracle. The Founders believed that only commonsensical Americans, at the bottom, could keep government, at the top, small, simply by denying it money. But slowly, being a Christian nation, we were guilted, and on any given day, with millions of immigrants who largely poor and easy marks for a handout, we were also willing to let government rob from Peter to give Paul free stuff….while keeping a reasonable (up to 40% now) middle man’s commission. The rest is history. In 1932 we invited government to come into our house, just to sit a spell and explain some programs they had in mind for the poor, and 80 years later, they’ve taken over the dining room and we’re now sitting at the kiddie table out on the porch.
What most Americans still do not understand:
… is the bigger struggle between Good and Evil and where America fits into that picture. Think Tolkein and his depiction of Sauron, or just think Satan as Mark Twain once described him:
“The spiritual head of half the world, and political head of the whole of it, must have executive ability.”
As a Wall Street executive, who would sit on the Devil’s right hand? Why, Government, of course, as would the bureaucracy sit on Government’s right hand. Just connect the dots.
Obama & Company are little more than Orcs, soulless, mindless minions pursuing a return of their king, and the world back to its proper order. All that stands in their way is America and its damned class of free men and women who only want to be able to buy the biggest bass-boat in Chesterfield County, and to be their own boss doing it..
The Desire to be one’s own boss, to build and own his own business, is instinctive in man, and I mean this in the most Darwinian of senses.
And finally, in terms of presidential politics, understanding this instinctively is why so many Americans from the first-second generation immigrant class, the working class, and the entrepreneur class, are cozying up to Donald Trump and Ben Carson, neither of whom have any pretense of being of the state class.
