The Right-Wing Prescription for Economic Recovery: Lionize the Rich and Demonize the Poor

By Dylan Headley, AlterNet. Posted July 11, 2009.

Besides, the rich will corrupt the process anyway, so why bother trying to check them at all? Or so shrugs Ramesh Ponnuru, whose usual schtick of shrill moral certitude (his book about Democrats is thoughtfully titled The Party of Death) is here belied by his casual acceptance of the Wealthy Criminal Class's amorality:

Regulatory Capture [Ramesh Ponnuru] Thomas Frank understands that regulators can easily become the servant of the companies they are supposed to be regulating. Why this phenomenon does not dim his enthusiasm for regulation even a little is a bit mysterious.

A nice try by Ponnuru to argue, albeit implicitly, why try? But of course decent people must try; as for corruption, well … it could be managed if regulatory agencies had more transparency, if regulators with conflicts-of-interest were sacked or never hired in the first place, if both politician bribe-taker and businessman bribe-giver were subject to harsh criminal penalties, and if, above all, the regulatory system were to adopt an adversarial (to business, I mean) mentality worthy of its checks-and-balances nature.

On the other hand, it is nice to see a libertarian fellow traveler tacitly admit that the whole campaign-contribution = protected speech thing is a total sham.

With their reflexive coddling of the malefactors of great wealth, it's no surprise that wingnuts are perplexed by and outraged at the traitors of this class, those whom we might call benefactors of great wealth but Frum describes as:

[R]ich whites(!)[.]

As [Andrew] Gelman demonstrates ... the great mystery of our time is not that working-class Kansans vote Republican. The great mystery of our time is that upper-class residents of Beverly Hills and Greenwich, Conn., vote Democratic.

Getting back to Douthat (though I sympathize with the reader who says, "please don't do that!"), one reason explaining the existence of the Rich Who Vote Democratic is social liberalism: like Thomas Frank's Kansans whose social and cultural beliefs trump their own economic interest, rich liberals take their place in the culture war seriously enough to, literally, pay for it.

If this seems like a coldly calculated trade-off for Wealthy Democrats, it no doubt is in some cases. In other cases, the Wealthy Traitor to his class might simply be such a "single-issue" fanatic that his other voting interests don't even register. But the real answer is in the nature of social liberalism itself: unlike social conservatism, which is proscriptive, idealist and frequently hypocritical, social liberalism is tolerant and "realist" -- attributes that inevitably flow from the ability to empathize with the Other. In Bill Clinton's shorthand, the liberal rich can feel the poor's pain. Sociopathy is, at root, inability to empathize.

Frum simply cannot empathize with the few rich whites who can empathize with the poor.

See more stories tagged with: regulation, economic meltdown, right-wing pundits, class warfare

Dylan Headley is a flag-incinerating moonbat who lives in a corrugated tin shack in the South; he blogs as HTML Mencken at Sadly, No!

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