Liberals and Joe the Plumber

My liberal friends like to put it this way: “Why is America anti-intellectual?” It’s true, America has always been a can-do nation, inclined to act first and think second.

But the question can be put the reverse way. Why do liberals sneer at ambitious ordinary people like Joe the Plumber? Why do they brush them off, as Sen. Barack Obama brushed off Joe the Plumber, and tell them to get with the program of sharing the wealth?

It’s not just Joe the Plumber who liberals sneer at. There’s Todd the fisherman, Sarah the small-town mayor, Ronnie the son of the town drunk, Margaret the grocer’s daughter.

What is wrong with people who have worked their way up from modest beginnings? Patronizing Joe the Plumber doesn’t make sense to a conservative or a Republican. But it makes a lot of sense to a liberal Democrat.

Liberals occupy the commanding heights of politics and education and culture. They have also co-opted many of the leading lights of busines. Think Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. When you are up, as liberals are up, there is only one way left, and that is down. When you and yours occupy comfortable sinecures in the academy, in journalism, in the non-profit sector—a sinecure earned usually by academic brilliance—you look upon the simple ambition of Joe the Plumber as a threat. If Joe builds himself a business and acquires a small fortune then he may come, one day, to challenge the comfortable liberals sitting in the warm afternoon sunshine on the commanding heights. The raw energy of the Joes is unsettling.

Much better to keep the Joes down and prevent them from rising and challenging the powers-that-be.

And that goes for the Todds and the Sarahs too.