There’s an old saying popular among liberals and leftists:
“Anti-Semitism is the socialism of the stupid.” The aphorism
attempts to account for the troubling resemblance of the main
propaganda line for socialism — there is a small, infinitely
powerful, infinitely wealthy cabal at the center of society that
controls the entire economy — with the other propaganda line that
there is a small, infinitely powerful, infinitely wealthy,
Jewish cabal at the center of society
controlling everything. According to this flippant dismissal, only
a stupid person would distort the shining truths of socialism by
muddying them with theories about race or religion.
Somehow it never occurs to liberals that the equation also
runs the other way. Socialism is the anti-Semitism of the
intelligentsia.
The political dialogue of the “1 percent versus the 99
percent” that currently consumes the liberal press is beginning to
take the aura of the 1930s. That was the era, of course, when the
world was divided into the “plutocrats” and “the masses,” when the
Monopoly board’s depiction of “the rich” as a portly,
tuxedo-and-top-hat-wearing breed apart was perceived as social
reality. It was the 1930s, after all, that gave us Daddy Warbucks,
that billionaire-who-could-do-anything, who was, let us not forget,
a friend of President Franklin Roosevelt.
So why anyone would want to revive the politics of a “low,
dishonest decade,” as W.H. Auden described it, that led directly to
the outbreak of World War II? It seems beyond comprehension.
Nevertheless, thanks to the distorted scholarship of liberal
scholars and the New—Dealification of the economy under President
Barack Obama, here we are back in 1935.
The Occupy Wall Street crowd, as anyone who has studied
1930s history can see, is only one or two steps away from becoming
the Brown Shirts of our era. The run-up to World War II was fought
in the precincts of Berlin and other European capitals by political
gangs that had abandoned electoral politics and decided to win
their case “into the streets.” By comparison, the Occupy-Whatever
movement has so far been relatively benign. There is the usual
agitprop of trying to provoke the police into overreaction so that
the aggressors can celebrate themselves as “victims of the
establishment who have unmasked the iron fist of the
establishment,” etc. etc. (Why is it that every movement that
starts out denouncing billionaires ends up fighting $35,000-a-year
cops from Queens?)
In any case, the Occupiers’ form of extra-political
violence isn’t likely to reach true 1930s levels until it abandons
the relative safety of urban parks and college campuses and goes
out to Iowa, where they are promising to “Occupy the Iowa
Republican Caucuses.” At that point things are likely to get nasty.
While the relatively tame urban police forces have learned their
lessons from the 1960s on how to deal with protesters,
inexperienced folks out in the Midwest are not likely to be as
tolerant of political thuggery.
So how did we get to a point most sensible historians had
assumed we left 80 years behind us? There are two answers:
President Obama’s politics and liberal scholarship.
The Occupiers have the germ of a case — just as did the
inhabitants of Hoovervilles and the Bonus Army that descended on
Washington in 1932. (They had written promises of bonuses for their
service during World War I that Congress had failed to honor.) The
economy stinks. There are few jobs to be had. Yet except for James
Taranto in the Wall Street Journal, no news
commentators have yet used the term “Obamaville” to describe the
tent cities that have popped up around the country. Our President
has managed to fashion the worst economy since the 1930s — one
that may soon eclipse the 1930s if Europe follows the present trend
and goes under. Yet his only response has been to cartelize the
economy in the manner of Franklin Roosevelt and then follow by
emulating the worst demagogues of that era. Try this for
example:
According to the tables which we have assembled, it is our
estimate that 4 percent of the American people own 85 percent of
the wealth of America and that over 70 of the American people don’t
own enough to pay the debts they owe. How many men ever went to a
barbecue and would let one man take off the table what’s intended
for 9/10ths of the people to eat. The only way you’ll ever be able
to feed the balance of the people is to make that man come back and
bring back some of the grub he ain’t got no business with.
Is this Obama addressing a group of dewy-eyed freshmen in
Colorado? No, it is Senator Huey Long of Louisiana, “The Kingfish,”
delivering
his “Share the Wealth” address to an assembly of Congressional
staffers in the Capitol Building in 1935. The Hill staffers
applauded rapturously as Long went on to propose stripping John D.
Rockefeller, Bernard Baruch, J.P. Morgan, Andrew Mellon, and the
rest of the millionaires of all their wealth and redistributing it
to the American people:
We say to America 125 million, none shall be too big, none shall
be too poor… but… that America will become a land, sharing the
fruits of the land, not for the favored few, not to satisfy greed
but that all may live in the land in which the Lord has provided an
abundance sufficient for the luxury and convenience of the people
in general.
All that’s missing is Obama’s customary invocation of
“folks.”
But it isn’t just the President’s channeling of the
demagogues of the 1930s that has created the poisonous mood.
Liberal scholars have labored long and hard to bring about this
moment. Two of the most noteworthy are Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel
Saez, a pair of French Marxists who parachuted into Berkeley in the
1990s and without ever bothering to check out the neighborhood
started dissecting income tax records trying to prove that America
has as much inequality as France in the days of Louis XVI. All this
has since been fought out in the academic journals, with Alan
Reynolds standing toe-to-toe with Piketty and Saez, critiquing
their work every step of the way. Suffice to say that P&S are
the main source of the “1 percent” argument that has become the
touchstone of Democratic politics.
Here’s how P&S arrived at their
conclusions:
1. First, they looked at
individual tax returns, rather than
households or families. Individual returns reflect every teenager
who earned $3,000 at a summer job. Not taking account that people
share income and support each other naturally skews things toward
the lower end.
2. P&S took no account of government
transfers, which now make up a huge portion of the
income of poorer households. Welfare payments, SSI, food stamps,
housing vouchers and Medicaid — all are non-taxable and constitute
a major source of income to most poor families.
3. A vast number of “the rich” who show up at the top end
of the income scale are Subchapter S corporations, not individuals.
The 1986 tax reform raised corporate taxes to 36 percent while
lowering personal rates to 28 to 35 percent. This set off a
stampede out of Schedule C corporate filings and into Subchapter S,
where a corporation’s earning can be shared by up to 100
individuals. Almost half the corporations in America
now file “personal” income taxes. Banks making $10
million in revenues now file under Subchapter S. This makes it
appear as if there are fabulously rich individuals roaming the land
when in fact they are small and mid-sized corporations. By failing
to take this into account, P&S decided there has been a huge
and growing “inequality gap” since 1986.
All this is lost in the shuffle, however, as the campaign
to scapegoat the “1 percent” becomes an obsession of the liberal
obsession. The New York Times now runs a
front-page story almost every day highlighting the comparison
between “the 1 percent and the other 99.” The one before
Thanksgiving
featured a lament of how the 99 percent must camp out in front
of Targets and Wal-Mart “racing for bargains at ever-earlier hours
while the rich mostly will not be bothering to leave home.” Three
days before that
it was how “the gap between first class and coach”
on international flights “has never been so wide.”
Carriers… are offering private suites for first-class
passengers, three-star meals and personal service once found only
on corporate jets. They provide massages before takeoff, whisk
passengers through special customs lanes and drive them in a
private limousine right to the plane. Some have bars. One airline
has installed showers onboard.
The amenities in the back of the cabin? Sparse.
That these luxury passengers are paying $15,000 a seat and
provide more than half the revenues from each flight did not seem
to make much difference.
Finally last Sunday the Times
found an éminence grise in former Republican mayoral
candidate Ron Lauder, who spearheaded the campaign to impose term
limits on New York City politicians. Pictured in front if a $135
million painting in light that made him look like a German baron
who supported the Nazis in 1933, Lauder was stigmatized as a
manipulator “now worth $3.1 billion” who is making “shrewd use of
the tax code [to achieve] deductions worth tens of millions of
dollars in federal income taxes.” Lauder’s sin is that he has
donated paintings from his personal collection to establish the
Neue Galerie of Austrian and German art in Manhattan. When the
New York Times starts pillorying art galleries, you know
you’re in a new era.
Still, all this hasn’t been enough for Paul Krugman, the
only certifiable lunatic ever to win a Nobel Prize. Last Friday
Krugman
informed readers that aiming at the 1 percent is all wrong.
They should be raising their sites:
If anything… the 99 percent slogan aims too low. A large
fraction of the top 1 percent’s gains have actually gone to an even
smaller group, the top 0.1 percent — the richest one-thousandth of
the population.
Dismissing the objection that the .01 percent might
include some “job creators” (Times style is now to put
ironic quotation marks around “job creators”), Krugman goads his
followers to action:
So should the 99.9 percent hate the 0.1 percent? No, not at all.
But they should ignore all the propaganda about “job creators” and
demand that the super-elite pay substantially more in taxes.
Seriously, what’s the point of singling out the “0.1
percent” if not to hate them? But let’s go Krugman one better. I’ll
bet it’s not just the 0.1 percent or the 0.01 percent or the 0.0001
percent that’s responsible for this country’s ailing economy. I’ll
be there’s one individual behind it all,
one sinister billionaire who is manipulating the system, thwarting
poor old President Obama efforts to bring prosperity to the people.
I’ll bet we even know his name. It’s Goldstein, Emmanuel
Goldstein.
