Class action

By Mark Alexander · Friday, September 1, 2000

It's that time of year again, when the Sociocrats (or "New Democrats," as they like to call themselves) park their luxury imports, exchange their starched white collars for open blue ones, forgo Chardonnay for Budweiser, and commune with their most loyal voters to dispense a lifetime supply of "class warfare" rhetoric.

Albert Arnold Gore and his cadre will use this Labor Day weekend to laud the "working class" [read: those who are beneficiaries of special interest protection rackets like organized labor, or income redistribution schemes like recipients of some form of "welfare"] and villainize the "rich and powerful" [read: those who pay taxes to support the "working class"]. The rich and powerful, as defined by the Gore ilk, are those families with combined annual incomes of more than $30,000 ("working families," as defined by George Bush).

Class warfare, now a staple of Democrat campaigns, is the ultimate un-American exercise of political hypocrisy. The practice -- in America -- has its origins with the campaign of that wealthy aristocrat, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who demonstrated that making an ever-larger number constituents dependent on income redistribution enforced by the central government is a winning political strategy. FDR understood this admonition from his elder cousin, Teddy Roosevelt: "Arrogance and envy, the bitter scorn of the rich man for the poor man and the bitter hate of the poor man for the rich man, are merely the opposite sides of the same dark shield...."

At a time when millions of Americans were suffering under the Great Depression, FDR said, "Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle." Of course, that was not quite an "American principle," but a paraphrase of Karl Marx's Communist maxim, "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs."

FDR set the stage for the entrapment of future generations by the welfare state and the incremental shift from individual freedom and free enterprise to dependence on the state and socialism. Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev said of the political trend launched by Roosevelt's "New Deal," "We can't expect the American People to jump from Capitalism to Communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving them small doses of Socialism, until they awaken one day to find that they have Communism."

Despite all his class warfare rhetoric, FDR did not hail from the ranks of the "working class" but from wealth and privilege, as did his present-day students Al Gore and Teddy Kennedy. These modern-day "inheritance welfare liberals," though from different socioeconomic strata, identify strongly with government welfare dependents because the former were dependent on their inheritance throughout their formative years, and never developed the character and spirit of those who have -- of their own accord and initiative -- sustained their families and communities.

Inheritance welfare liberals have managed to lock the lips of generations of government welfare "voter blocks" to their Democrat posteriors. Al Gore is currently leading the pack with his campaign mantra: "They're for the powerful; we're for the people."

This weekend, we will hear much ballyhooing about George W. Bush's "risky plan" to leave $1.3 trillion of the projected $4.5 trillion ten-year budget surplus in taxpayers' pockets -- though Gore will phrase it: "Risky investing in a tax break for the wealthy." Of course, all Mr. Bush has proposed to do is reduce tax rates proportionally -- meaning those who were paying more would keep more.

Gore will warn that the Bush plan will wreck the "Clinton/Gore" economy and that his alternative proposal for $2.3 trillion in new government tax-and-spend programs will do more for the "working class." Accordingly, Gore's new campaign mantra should be: "Ask not what you can do for your country, ask what your country can do for you!"

Of course, the only thing the Bush plan will wreck is Gore's effort to shackle more citizens to central government welfare spending programs, and thus, expand his dependent constituency.