David Brooks was upset. You can tell when this conservative and
rather-professorial columnist for the New York Times gets upset, because his words almost sag with disappointment — you can practically hear the heavy sighs in each paragraph. When most
commentators on the right see things that offend them, they get mad; Brooks
gets sad.
What saddened Brother Brooks this time was Barack Obama’s budget. In a recent column, he noted that the $3.6 trillion total is “gargantuan” (we columnists are paid to make keen observations like that), but what really
upset him was that the tax burden to finance universal healthcare, energy
independence and other big initiatives in Obama’s budget “is predicated on a class divide.”
With heavy sighs, Brooks expressed great despair that “no new burdens will fall on 95 percent of the American people,” adding with a tsk-tsk that “all the costs will be borne by the rich and all benefits redistributed downward.”
Leaving aside the fact that such things as healthcare coverage for every
American and a booming green energy economy will benefit the rich as well as
the rest of us, Brooks’ column was echoing a prevalent theme in all of the right’s attacks on Obama’s economic proposals: class war! Indeed, the Times’ columnist even suggested (sadly) that Obama’s budget was fundamentally un-American: “The U.S. has never been a society riven by class resentment,” he sniffed.
Whoa, professor, get a grip! Better yet, get a good history book (Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States would be an eye-opening place to start). While our schools, media and
politicians rarely mention it, America’s history is replete with class rebellions against various moneyed elites who
act as though they’re the top dogs and ordinary folks are just a bunch of fire hydrants.
Check out the Tenant Uprisings of 1766, Shay’s Rebellion in the 1780s, the Workingmen’s Movement of the 1830s … on into the post-Civil War populist movement that
confronted the robber barons, the bloody labor battles at Haymarket and
Homestead in the late 1800s, Coxey’s Army in 1894, the Bonus March of 1932, the Penny Auctions by farmers in the
1920s and ’30s, the rise of the CIO in the Depression years … and right into modern-day
fights involving environmental justice, fair trade, women’s pay, workplace safety, tenant rights, janitors, farmworkers, union-busting,
bank redlining, consumer gouging, clean elections and so forth.
If Brooks & Co. are so isolated as to imagine that our citizenry harbors no class
resentment, they should go to any Chat & Chew Cafe across the land and listen to the locals express their innermost
feelings about today’s greedheaded Wall Streeters who wrecked our economy for their own enrichment.
There is a fury in the countryside toward these plutocratic purse-snatchers who
are being allowed to keep their exalted executive positions, draw fat paychecks
and get trillions of dollars in bailout money from common taxpayers.
In his column, Brooks cried out for a conservative vision of “a nation in which we’re all in it together — in which burdens are shared broadly, rather than simply inflicted on a small
minority.”
Do we look like we have suckerwrappers around our heads? Where were these
tender-hearted champions of sharing throughout the last 30 years, when that
same “small minority” was absolutely giddy with redistributionist fervor — redistributing upward, that is?
With the full support of their political hirelings from both parties, this
minority created tax dodges, trade scams, corporate subsidies, deregulation
fantasies, financial hustles, de-unionization schemes, bankruptcy loopholes and
other mechanisms that turned government into a redistributionist bulldozer,
shoving wealth from the workaday majority into their own pockets.
Brooks might have missed this 30-year class war, but most folks have been right
in the thick of it and are not the least bit squeamish about supporting a
national effort to right those wrongs. After all, even a dog knows the
difference between being stumbled over — and being kicked.
This article appears in Mar 12-18, 2009.
