Page 35 - American Conservative September/October 2015

infrastructure, Vice President Joseph R. Biden said: ... ‘The middle class has been slammed. They are in worse shape than they have been at any time since the 20s ... What’s the way to grow the middle class? Jobs. What’s the way to get jobs?’”
Biden’s answer: “generate” jobs via the magic of Keynesian government spending, a repeat of the New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps and Works Progress Administration.
A Google search on “Biden speech middle class” returns 702,000 hits; “Obama speech middle class” returns 19.3 million. According to the vice presi- dent, the middle class is “the fabric that stitches to- gether this country.” But it’s “cur-
independence, self-sufficiency, ownership, entre- preneurship, and real social power. To echo Cole and Postgate, the essence of the once-great middle class was that they possessed “their own type of property to support them.”
In any event, the 24/7 spin cycle may finally have gagged on the term “middle class.” All at once it is only too obvious that there is no substantial middle left to rhapsodize over or pander to. As Amy Chozick wrote in the New York Times this spring: “The once ubiquitous term ‘middle class’ has gone conspicu- ously missing from the 2016 campaign trail, as can- didates and their strategists grasp for new terms for
rently being killed.” Meanwhile, in his 2015 State of the Union address, the president preached the gospel of “middle-class eco- nomics.” According to his ghost- writers, that means “Everyone gets their fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and plays by the same set of rules.”
The 24/7 spin cycle may finally have gagged on the term “middle class.” It is only too obvious that there is no substantial middle left to rhapsodize over or pander to.
The actual meaning is another tax increase on those who still have enough wealth left to be worth swiping. Just after the 2012 election, Howard Dean revealed the left’s program to save the middle class when he said, “This is, initially, gonna sound like heresy from a progressive. The truth is, everybody needs to pay more taxes, not just the rich.”
Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell insists that the billions of dollars in subsi- dies disbursed to low-income people who sign up for Obamacare are “further proof that the Afford- able Care Act is working for the middle class.” And Robert Reich has said over and over that “inequal- ity is bad for everyone, not just for the middle class and poor,” and that income redistribution must be engineered to raise the income of the middle class to “middle-class levels,” whatever those are.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren talks the new class war bet- ter than most. She’d love to be able just to come out and yell about “the working class!” But she knows better than to do so. André Thirion’s book about impotent red intellectuals in Paris between the wars was called Revolutionaries Without Revolution. What Elizabeth Warren keeps jabbing her forefinger at is a workers’ movement without workers.
Like other cynical champions of the mythic mid- dle, Warren deliberately mischaracterizes it. Middle class is not an income level but a material relation- ship to society. What has vanished from all these leftist analyses are the key middle-class elements of
an unsettled economic era. The phrase, long syn- onymous with the American dream, now evokes anxiety, an uncertain future and a lifestyle that is increasingly out of reach.”
A family living paycheck to paycheck, heavily in- debted and sometimes even “food-insecure”—that’s not a middle-class family. And nearly half of Amer- icans don’t even bother to pretend that’s what they are any more. So instead let’s call them “ordinary Americans” (Bernie Sanders). “Everyday Ameri- cans” (Hillary Clinton). “Hard-working men and women across America” (Ted Cruz). “Hard-work- ing taxpayers” (Scott Walker). “People who work for the people who own businesses” (Rand Paul). Or simply “people who aren’t rich” (Marco Rubio).
Everyone wanted to be middle class, but the word that best describes what our country is undergoing now is “proletarianization.” In ancient Rome, the class known as the proletarii were too poor to pay taxes or serve in the army; all they could give the state were their proles (“offspring”—as in “prolific”). Today the welfare-state plan is to force what’s left of “the backbone of America” to pay for its own dispossession and disempowerment. Then our un- derstandable class anxiety will be tranquilized by government transfers that give us an illusory “leg up,” class-wise.
The middle class could only be destroyed in the name of the middle class. Everyone loves the mid- dle class, and everyone kills the thing he loves.
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2015
THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 35