Way back in the dim and distant past Irving Kristol, the father of the one we know, wrote that if you want to help the poor with government programs, you have to deal in the middle class. Unfortunately, that piece of wisdom doesn't appear on Google Search, so everyone has forgotten about it. Except me.
The idea is that if you want to help the poor in old age with a pension program then you'd better make the pension program include the middle class, as Social Security did. Otherwise no-go.
The corollary of this theorem is that it is impossible to reform entitlement programs because doing so will negatively impact the middle class.
Armed with this vital knowledge I remember in 1993-94 thinking that HillaryCare would never fly because the middle class already had health insurance. In other words, there was no way that the Dems could deal in the middle class with their program to beef up health care delivery to the poor, because the middle class had already got what they wanted. I remember the day I heard on NPR the liberal women reporters marveling that ordinary Americans didn't like HillaryCare, because they didn't see how it would benefit them. In fact I remember exactly where my car was at that moment: it was on the I-5 Ship Canal Bridge in North Seattle.
Thus, in 2009-10, President Obama had to lie his head off about Obamacare promising that the average person would benefit and that they could keep their doctor. And Nancy Pelosi had to frog-march the moderate Dems through the lobbies to get them to vote for it. And the Dems had to do some shenanigans in the Senate to get it through. And then the Republicans won back the House in 2010 with the biggest "wave" in decades and nearly all those moderate Dems lost their seats.
Now to the present time. Do you notice that almost all the stuff liberals are pushing is stuff that benefits some liberal identity group but that does not deal in the middle class?
There is illegal immigration and open borders. Almost no average American citizen, white, black, or Hispanic supports this. Really, only lefty activists and their billionaire supporters favor Open Borders.
There is Muslims. Ask any non-Muslim in America, and I bet they'd tell you that Muslims should get with the program. But all the liberals are running around expostulating about Islamophobia.
There is LGBTQ. Really, nobody outside the educated class has a clue what all the fuss is about. As I say, LGBTQ is about getting creative about sex (because we are all creative, right?) and the only people into that are the People of the Creative Self of my reductive Three Peoples theory. And now, according to Ben Shapiro, a transgender has insisting on joining a gym -- would that be Curves? -- that caters for women that prefer not to have men floating around. Of course the trans man-to-woman wants to change in the women's changing room. Of course. Ask any woman in America what she thinks of that!
There is climate change. This is yet another elite plan to kick the middle class out of their cars and force them into buses and trains. Who benefits? All the scientists and regulators in the educated class that get grants and lifetime employment out of the scam, and also crony capitalists that know how to play the subsidy game for electric cars, wind and solar. But ordinary Americans get screwed.
See, I think that our liberal friends think that they got their pensions and health care and education programs enacted because of their glorious virtue, because justice and the arc of history. But really their programs were just bribes paid to the middle class. So our liberal friends don't really get that today's lefty agenda has a fatal flaw: it doesn't benefit the middle class.
Notice the left's response to their quandary: to deplatform anyone that disagrees with them and banish them from the public square as a racist, sexist homophobe. This strategy shows that instinctively, liberals understand that their agenda is unpopular and that the only way to advance it is by totalitarian oppression of the opposition. It may work for a while, but I predict that in the end it will create a huge movement of rejection, boiling with a sense of injustice, that overwhelms the left in a vast realignment of politics.
Yeah. There are two kinds of liberal programs: the ones that deal in the middle class and the ones that don't. And I think that a clever politician ought to be able to figure out how to take that all the way to the White House and a fundamental realignment of the electorate.
The idea is that if you want to help the poor in old age with a pension program then you'd better make the pension program include the middle class, as Social Security did. Otherwise no-go.
The corollary of this theorem is that it is impossible to reform entitlement programs because doing so will negatively impact the middle class.
Armed with this vital knowledge I remember in 1993-94 thinking that HillaryCare would never fly because the middle class already had health insurance. In other words, there was no way that the Dems could deal in the middle class with their program to beef up health care delivery to the poor, because the middle class had already got what they wanted. I remember the day I heard on NPR the liberal women reporters marveling that ordinary Americans didn't like HillaryCare, because they didn't see how it would benefit them. In fact I remember exactly where my car was at that moment: it was on the I-5 Ship Canal Bridge in North Seattle.
Thus, in 2009-10, President Obama had to lie his head off about Obamacare promising that the average person would benefit and that they could keep their doctor. And Nancy Pelosi had to frog-march the moderate Dems through the lobbies to get them to vote for it. And the Dems had to do some shenanigans in the Senate to get it through. And then the Republicans won back the House in 2010 with the biggest "wave" in decades and nearly all those moderate Dems lost their seats.
Now to the present time. Do you notice that almost all the stuff liberals are pushing is stuff that benefits some liberal identity group but that does not deal in the middle class?
There is illegal immigration and open borders. Almost no average American citizen, white, black, or Hispanic supports this. Really, only lefty activists and their billionaire supporters favor Open Borders.
There is Muslims. Ask any non-Muslim in America, and I bet they'd tell you that Muslims should get with the program. But all the liberals are running around expostulating about Islamophobia.
There is LGBTQ. Really, nobody outside the educated class has a clue what all the fuss is about. As I say, LGBTQ is about getting creative about sex (because we are all creative, right?) and the only people into that are the People of the Creative Self of my reductive Three Peoples theory. And now, according to Ben Shapiro, a transgender has insisting on joining a gym -- would that be Curves? -- that caters for women that prefer not to have men floating around. Of course the trans man-to-woman wants to change in the women's changing room. Of course. Ask any woman in America what she thinks of that!
There is climate change. This is yet another elite plan to kick the middle class out of their cars and force them into buses and trains. Who benefits? All the scientists and regulators in the educated class that get grants and lifetime employment out of the scam, and also crony capitalists that know how to play the subsidy game for electric cars, wind and solar. But ordinary Americans get screwed.
See, I think that our liberal friends think that they got their pensions and health care and education programs enacted because of their glorious virtue, because justice and the arc of history. But really their programs were just bribes paid to the middle class. So our liberal friends don't really get that today's lefty agenda has a fatal flaw: it doesn't benefit the middle class.
Notice the left's response to their quandary: to deplatform anyone that disagrees with them and banish them from the public square as a racist, sexist homophobe. This strategy shows that instinctively, liberals understand that their agenda is unpopular and that the only way to advance it is by totalitarian oppression of the opposition. It may work for a while, but I predict that in the end it will create a huge movement of rejection, boiling with a sense of injustice, that overwhelms the left in a vast realignment of politics.
Yeah. There are two kinds of liberal programs: the ones that deal in the middle class and the ones that don't. And I think that a clever politician ought to be able to figure out how to take that all the way to the White House and a fundamental realignment of the electorate.
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