Our daughter was recently married and a family we have known for decades attended. They are very, very nice people and I think the world of them. In the time we have known them they have become wealthy. Not "wealthy" in terms or earning over $250,000 per year (the Obama definition), but in being worth over well over ten million dollars.
So I was sort of surprised to hear my friend tell me that he voted for Obama. The tipping point for him was McCain's decision to choose Sarah Palin as his running mate. What made him decide that supporting an totally inexperienced man whose close confidants included a racist preacher and the man who bombed the Pentagon for President versus the successful governor of our largest state for Vice President is not a subject I wanted to explore during our wedding festivities. It reinforced an idea that I have long held that lots of money does not lead to wisdom. It takes a lot of hard work and dedication (unless you win the lottery) but at the end you have lots of experiences that make you smart about lots of things, but not necessarily wise about ultimate things.
Jonah Goldberg makes a similar point about wealth and Republicans, and it's this: if Republicans really represented their financial base, they would call for the confiscation of the assets of the "wealthy" while paying homage to the upper middle class.
That Democrats are the party of the oligarchy gets more, not less, obvious when you move beyond Wall Street. The cliché that Republicans are the rich people’s party makes a certain amount of common sense if you are just looking around your Middle American suburb. You will notice that the man making $200,000 a year is marginally more likely to vote Republican than his neighbor making $50,000. But in suburbia, the word “rich” is really a kind of slang, meaning “slightly better off.” Johnson isn’t talking about those people. He is talking about people who are rich-with-a-capital-R, the ones who can convert wealth into political power, the ones whose annual income is measured in millions, or tens of millions. Again, how do they vote, and who is their party?
We can formulate a guess by looking at the 20 ZIP codes that pour the most money into the political system. (See the chart on page 23.) This list coincides fairly well with any list of the 20 richest neighborhoods in the United States. All but one of those 20 neighborhoods give the majority of their money to Democrats. (The exception is McLean, Virginia, which gives 48 percent to Democrats.) Most of them give the overwhelming majority of their money to Democrats. For example, none of the 7 Manhattan neighborhoods listed—where we can assume Johnson’s oligarchs live—gives less than 71 percent of its money to Democrats.
That presents a challenge to the usual way of looking at things, doesn’t it? Republicans have been paying a high price in both public opinion and political coherence to defend the prerogatives of a class that despises them. It was to cosset just these people with tax cuts that George W. Bush destroyed the balanced budget. It would seem that Republicans are either an exceptionally idealistic political party (pursuing their ideology to the point of self-destruction) or an exceptionally foolish one (convinced that anyone with a great big pile of money is their friend). There may be another explanation. To paraphrase something Clinton aide David Dreyer said many years ago, Republicans have done Lord Acton one better—they’ve been corrupted by power they don’t even have.
If Republicans wanted to defund the Left, they would demand the confiscation of all wealth over $5 million and a 100% tax on all incomes over $1 million. In addition, they would tax all charitable foundations and endowments with assets over $1 billion at a rate of 45% of income and capital gains.
At which point the uber-wealthy funding the Left would decide that the progressive income tax was not such a good idea after all.
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