During the heady days of the 2009 protests against the
“Porkulus” bill, Obamacare, and big government in general, many
people spoke of the rise of the Tea Party movement as the result of
Presidents Obama and Bush having “woken the sleeping giant” of
pro-liberty America.
But that giant may turn out to be a pygmy when compared to
what Barack Obama, Harry Reid, and Occupy Wall Street have awoken
with their incessant and intensifying class warfare.
Americans who consider themselves Tea Partiers are a
minority of the country, even if a significant and motivated one.
The real majority, one which Democrats are foolishly antagonizing,
are those of us who refuse to accept the left’s claims that
Americans of one economic class are the enemy of those in another
economic class.
A
recent poll by Gallup shows that the efforts of Obama and the
Occupiers may be backfiring against the beggar-thy-neighbor
Alinskyite left.
To be clear, while the poll shows that “Americans’ views
of their own position as ‘haves’ or ‘have nots’ have been
remarkably stable,” the percentage of Americans who believe that
the nation is divided along those lines has plunged since
the last similar poll, done just prior to President Obama’s
election in 2008.
During the Bush years, people were beginning to think that
lower-income Americans were in a form of conflict with the elite,
now called “the 1 percent,” or were perhaps even their victims.
Those views became particularly intense during the depth of the
2008 financial crisis when politicians of both parties, parroted by
media everywhere, blamed the real estate crash and ensuing stock
market plunge on Wall Street bankers who fooled unsuspecting
borrowers into buying houses they couldn’t afford and then
securitized “toxic” derivatives and sold them to unsuspecting
investors.
The mess was far more a failure of government than of
markets, something which one might think would be difficult for the
American people to learn, especially since politicians of both
parties have a lot to answer for when it comes to pushing
“affordable housing” aka “vote buying” on the nation.
But Barack Obama has given the nation a tremendous object
lesson by posing the federal government as the solution to all
problems — and then proving that it isn’t. When the president said
that spending a trillion dollars of our children’s future earnings
would keep unemployment below 8 percent only to see us spend the
last two and a half years with only three months below 9 percent
unemployment — and none below 8.5 percent — the public begins to
see the economic emperor as wearing no clothes.
Even if the voters don’t think about it explicitly, if the
Obama administration’s claims about government fixing the economy
are so obviously false, then just perhaps the other charges made
about evil capitalists being the source of all evil may also be
false. At least, they’re worth skepticism.
And thus the public has become skeptical.
The Occupy Wall Street movement has likewise had the
opposite effect of what its anarcho-socialist hygiene-challenged
spoiled middle-class kids intended. When you see “protesters”
defecating on a police car or an American flag, instigating
violence, and generally being incoherent, the ordinary American is
likely to see those people as a greater threat than a bunch of
villainized bankers could ever be. Again, when the messenger is so
utterly without credibility, the internalized message among the
public is likely to be the opposite of what the preachers of
radicalism offer.
Among those 19 groups for which Gallup broke out the
“haves” versus “have nots” responses, only one, those earning less
than $30,000 per year, had a majority who put themselves in the
latter category. Even the unemployed, non-whites, those without a
college degree, and Democrats all have a majority who self-identify
as “haves.”
While a majority of Americans believe that the nation is
not divided along these lines, a majority of
Democrats do buy into the class warfare rhetoric, with 58
percent saying we are split between “haves” and “have-nots.”
However, even that is down three percent from 2008. Independent
voters reject the class warfare concept with only 37 percent
believing we’re divided, a stunning drop of 11 points from three
years ago. Similarly, self-identified moderates are at 38 percent,
down 13 percent. Not surprisingly, barely one quarter of
Republicans (26 percent) and conservatives (27 percent) see class
warfare as real.
Interestingly, while the numbers for Independents and
moderates were nearly identical, as were Republicans and
conservatives, there is a significant gap between Democrats and
liberals, with the latter group showing a 66 percent majority
believing in the “haves” versus “have-nots” divide, eight percent
more than Democrats. While this might mean that there are liberal
Independents adding to the number, a bigger take-away is likely
that there is a fair number of slightly conservative Democrats,
those we used to call Reagan Democrats, who might drift away from
their party’s presidential nominee.
As if to reemphasize the point,
another Gallup poll released Friday shows that
“More Americans say it is important that the federal government
enact policies that grow the economy and increase equality of
opportunity than say the same about reducing the income and wealth
gap between the rich and the poor.” Only 46 percent of poll
respondents thought that government efforts to reduce income or
wealth gaps between rich and poor were “extremely important” or
“very important.” However, when it comes to increasing equality of
opportunity, the number is 70 percent, and for “grow and expand the
economy” the number jumps to 82 percent. Somewhere Thomas Jefferson
is smiling; Karl Marx and Saul Alinsky not so much.
We are all Americans, all endowed with an unalienable
right to the pursuit of happiness, and most of us with aspirations
to the American Dream of upward economic mobility. When you hate
your neighbor because of his success, you shred our national
fabric. Barack Obama may want to go down that road, but most of the
rest of the nation properly finds his intentional attempts to
divide us somewhere between dubious and abhorrent.
As Gallup notes, “Americans as a whole are no more likely
to see the country as divided into haves and have nots than at any
time in the past two decades.” This is bad news for Barack Obama
and other Democrats running for reelection in 2012. Their siren
song of divide-and-conquer is falling flat on the ears of the
majority of Americans. But the annoying political tinnitus is
awakening the real sleeping giant — those Americans who recognize
that our nation did not become great by thinking like V.I. Lenin,
Che Guevara, or Chairman Mao.
