Democrats are the Party of the Rich. Now What?

It's official, according to The Hill. Democrats are the party of the richest kind. And the poorest kind.

Of the 10 percent of congressional districts with the highest poverty rates, the Democrats hold 38 of 43.
Of the 10-percent richest districts, the Democrats control 37 of 43, and of the six districts held by the GOP, all are marginal— only one held with more than 55 percent of the vote.

There is an OMG feeling about this, as though Republicans are losing the country by losing the rich. Because we all know that the Republican Party is the party of the rich and big business, and if they can't retain the support of the rich and the corporation, why, they cannot be long for this world.

But I thought it had been obvious for years that the Democratic Party is an over-under party, a coalition of the educated class and the underclass, with the educated class buying the support of the underclass with benefits. As I say:

Government is an armed minority, occupying territory and taxing the inhabitants thereof to reward its supporters.

If you are an educated ruling class the same rules apply as if you were the ruling class of aristocratic warriors in olden times. You retain the support of your supporters by rewarding them -- with taxpayers' money. Of course, the educated ruling class does not just reward its underclass supporters; it also rewards its educated class supporters, with grants and sinecures and save-the-climate policies.

Of course, in part the Democratic voting of the educated class is explained by its dutiful acceptance of whatever it has been carefully taught in schools and universities. The whole point of schools is to teach ruling-class ideology to the plebs, and the whole point of universities is to teach ruling-class ideology to future operatives of the ruling class.

But there is a practical aspect to the educated support of Democrats as well, and this was first suggested to me by the best-seller The Millionaire Next Door by Stanley and Danko. They argued that the millionaire next door was a successful businessman who maybe had built a chain of dry-cleaners or other small business that nobody had ever heard of. But what about his children? The fact is that any successful businessman got there partly or mostly on luck. Chances are that Lady Luck won't help the next generation. So what do rich parents do? Perfectly simple. They use their money to give their children an elite education with lots of credentials. There is a whole world out there where you need credentials, and where credentials are an entry pass to a good, reliable professional-class income.

You can imagine that anyone that has got where they are today with an elite education and professional credentials is going to be a supporter of the status quo. Imagine if the regulatory state collapsed and credentials were no longer a factor living prosperous and secure upper-middle-class life: not to be endured.

So why am I not a fully paid-up member of the educated ruling class? The answer is that I have never liked school, and never got beyond a bachelor's degree in engineering. So I am really not invested in the credentials game. I revere the startup businessman although I have never attempted to work in a startup. And I don't appreciate the musical chairs of the established corporate institution, public or private or non-profit.

Obviously, the job of the Republican Party is to become the party of the middle class, nudging its way upward to attract the seat-of-the-pants businessman and nudging downward to attract aspirational blacks and Latinos that are moving from dependency to responsibility. If you watch carefully you can see that President Trump is working on that, touting record low unemployment for blacks and a criminal reform bill.

Of course another prize would be millennials, that think right now that Medicare-for-all would be just the ticket. I had a friend whose millennial son was all obsessed with getting health insurance. He must have been carefully taught, because when you are a young person and don't have children and don't have assets you you really don't need health insurance. That's why Obamacare was all about forcing young people to pay big insurance premiums for health care.

And single women. At some point the women of the west are going to realize just what a crock the whole sexual revolution has been for women, and how abortion victimizes them rather than protects them. And then they will turn against the Democrats. But that time is not yet, and the average young woman has been carefully taught to believe that progressive politics is her lifeline to safety in a cruel, white patriarchal world.

Meanwhile the educated ruling class is busy trying to make it difficult for any unapproved voice to thrive in the public square. Because hate.

The thing to remember is that ruling classes tend to be pretty stupid. They do things to shore up their power, and convince themselves that it is the right thing to do. Of course, very often the people on the receiving end of their power plays experience the wise and evolved actions of the ruling class as simple injustice.

This is why I say that there is no such thing as justice, only injustice. The closest I would come to defining justice is the absence of injustice. But as soon as a ruling class starts using its ruling class power to make life for convenient for itself you can be pretty sure that it will be practicing injustice on the little people.

Why is the ruling class so tone-deaf to its unjust actions? It is explained by my Law of the Incoming Rounds. People are really sensitive to injustice landing on their heads, but really insensitive to injustice they are landing on other peoples' heads.

My point is that the educated class in its rich-bitch neighborhoods and congressional districts has absolutely no idea how its ruling-class ideology plays to ordinary middle-class Americans. It is like any religion or cult that lives in its own world and knows that everyone else is a bigot.

The question is when and if the people on the receiving end of the educated class's rule decide that they are not going to take it anymore.

And whether political entrepreneurs can raise a standard and rally the victims of ruling-class injustice to their banner.

I suppose you can look back on the rule of the Bushes as trying to square the circle between the middle-middle Republican voters and the educated class voters. Think of the Bush "compassionate conservative" thing in 2000 was an effort to do that. But maybe it won't work any longer because the interests of educated-class voters and deplorable class voters just can't be compromised any more.

Today's question really is whether in 2020 President Trump can rally more blacks and Latinos to vote for him than he loses in the rich and woke districts that are trending Democrat.