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@pakman said in US Politics:
At least some areas have recognised the folly of their knee jerk reactions.
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Class—the Word We Dare Not Speak
The Left does not wish to admit it has become the party of wealth.
By Victor Davis HansonJuly 14, 2021
How often during the last year of woke, have middle- and lower-class Americans listened to multimillionaires of all races and genders lecture them on their various pathologies and oppressions?Million-dollar-a year university presidents virtue signal on the cheap their own sort of “unearned white privilege.”
Multimillionaire Meghan Markle and the Obamas, from their plush estates, indict Americans for their biases.
Former Black Lives Matter founder and cultural Marxist Patrisse Khan-Cullors Brignac decries the oppressive victimization she and others have suffered—from one of her four newly acquired homes.
Do we need another performance-art sermon on America’s innate unfairness from a Hollywood billionaire such as Beyoncé, Jay-Z, or Oprah Winfrey—or a multimillion-dollar-per year Delta Airlines or Coca-Cola CEO?
During the 1980s cultural war, the Left’s mantra was “race, class, and gender.” Occasionally we still hear of that trifecta, but the class part has now increasingly dropped out.
The neglect of class is ironic given that dozens of recent studies conclude class differences are widening as never before.
Middle-class incomes among all races have stagnated and family net worth has declined. Far greater percentages of rising incomes go to the already rich. Student debt, mostly a phenomenon of the middle and lower classes, has hit $1.7 trillion dollars.
States like California have bifurcated into Medieval-style societies. The state’s progressive coastal elite can boast of some of the highest incomes in the nation. But in the more conservative north and central interior nearly a third of the population lives below the poverty line, explaining why one of every three American welfare recipients lives in California.
California’s heating and cooling, gasoline, and housing—the stuff of life—are the highest in the continental United States. Most of these spiraling costs are attributable to polices embraced by an upper-class elite—in Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and marquee universities—whose incomes shield them from the deleterious consequences of their utopian bromides. The poor and middle class have no such insulation.
So why are we not talking about class?
First, we are watching historic changes in political alignment.
The two parties are switching class constituents. Sixty-five percent of Americans making over $500,000 are now Democrats. Seventy-four percent of those who earn under $100,000 are Republicans. Gone are the days of working people voting automatically Democratic or Republicans caricatured as a party of stockbrokers on golf courses.
By 2018, Democrats controlled all 20 of the wealthiest congressional districts. In the recent presidential primaries and general election, 17 out of the 20 wealthiest zip codes gave money overwhelmingly to Democratic candidates.
Increasingly, the Democrats are a bicoastal party of professional elites of corporate America, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, the media, universities, entertainment, and professional sports. All made out like bandits during 21st-century globalization.
Democrats have lost the most support among working-class whites, especially in the interior of the country. But they are also fast forfeiting backing among the Hispanic middle class, and just beginning to lose solidarity among similarly situated African-Americans.
The Left does not wish to admit it has become the party of wealth. All too often its stale revolutionary speechifying sounds more like penance arising from guilt than genuine advocacy for the middle class of all races.
The wealthy leftist elite has mastered the rhetoric of ridicule for the lower middle classes, especially struggling whites. Multimillionaires Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden wrote off their political opponents as supposedly crude, superstitious, and racist, in smearing them as “clingers,” “deplorables,” irredeemables,” “dregs,” and “chumps.”
Class is also fluid; race is immutable. So by fixating on race, the Left believes that it can divide America into permanent victimizers and victims—at a time when race and class are increasingly disconnecting.
The wealthy of all races are the loudest voices of the woke movement. Their frequent assumptions of “victimhood” are absurd.
Americans who struggle to pay soaring gas, food, energy, and housing prices are weekly berated for their “white privilege” that is “unearned,” by an array of rich network and cable television news hosts, well-paid academics, media elite, and corporate CEOs.
Note that the woke military is the brand of four-star admirals and generals, and retired top brass on corporate boards, not of the enlisted. Multimillionaire CEOs bark at the nation for their prejudices, not saleswomen and company truck drivers.
America is a plutocracy, not a genocracy. Wealth, not race, now more likely ensures one power, influence and the good life.
In the pre-Civil Rights past, race was often fused to class, and the two terms were logically used interchangeably to cite oppression and inequality.
But such a canard is fossilized. And so are those who desperately cling to it.
The more the elites scream their woke banalities, the more they seem to fear that they, not most Americans, are the real privileged, the coddled, the pampered—and sometimes the victimizers.
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@victor-meldrew said in US Politics:
Current lot make you yearn for Slick Willie and Dubya.
Is anyone really pining for Dubya…? The shit he got the world into during his presidency is still having huge repercussions today and will do for some time
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@junior said in US Politics:
@victor-meldrew said in US Politics:
Current lot make you yearn for Slick Willie and Dubya.
Is anyone really pining for Dubya…? The shit he got the world into during his presidency is still having huge repercussions today and will do for some time
I doubt it! Meant more as a reflection on how the current lot are behaving.
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@junior said in US Politics:
@victor-meldrew said in US Politics:
Current lot make you yearn for Slick Willie and Dubya.
Is anyone really pining for Dubya…? The shit he got the world into during his presidency is still having huge repercussions today and will do for some time
Not in Africa. Dubya is an absolute hero in Africa for what he achieved with his AIDS & Malaria programs. Rather than virtue-signal & waffle on about gay & trans rights in Africa like Obama did, he challenged the orthodox western view of Africa and actually made a difference with his PEPFAR initiative. It's estimated to have saved 20 million lives.
Why George W Bush is Africa’s favourite US president The most popular living US president in Africa is not Barack Obama, whose election in 2008 prompted Kenya, the east African country where his father was born, to declare a national holiday. Nor was it Bill Clinton, despite the strong support he enjoyed from the African-American community and his rhetorical clasping of the continent. By some margin, the US president most respected in Africa is one George W Bush. The main reason for Mr Bush’s enduring popularity is a health initiative he personally championed with the unpromising acronym of Pepfar. The President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief, one of the biggest global health initiatives in history, eclipsed anything that either presidents Obama or Clinton achieved in Africa. For Mr Bush, it has polished a legacy tarnished by misjudged adventures in the Middle East. Begun in 2003 and covering some 50 countries, Pepfar has saved the lives of an estimated 13m people living with HIV-Aids, mostly in Africa, by providing them with antiretroviral drugs. The scheme, which has cost $80bn to date, has also prevented some 2.2m children from being infected through mother-to-child transmission. As Mr Bush himself has said, as well as being morally the right thing to do, it has won the US friends across the continent. “The president who stood up and said ‘I am going to do this’ was Bush,” Joyce Banda, a former president of Malawi, told me last week in what is a familiar show of gratitude. “Because of Pepfar, Bush is my best president.” Unlike some development assistance, Pepfar has the virtue of having demonstrably worked. Today, there are some 37m people living with HIV, the virus that causes Aids. That is more than at any time since the epidemic began for the simple reason that 23.3m people, many of them beneficiaries of Pepfar, are on the antiretroviral drugs that can suppress the virus indefinitely. Infection rates, while still high, have dropped sharply. The HIV infection rate in Kenya, the most affected country in east Africa, has fallen from 14 per cent at the time Pepfar began to about 5 per cent today. Life expectancy around the continent, which dipped severely at the start of the Aids epidemic, has bounced back strongly. So have economies once threatened with the devastation of losing large swaths of their working population. Six of the fastest-growing economies in the world last year were African. To understand the impact of Mr Bush’s scheme one has to go back to the early 2000s, when the global Aids epidemic was exploding. In Africa, some 20m people were infected, of whom an estimated 11,000 were receiving the cocktail of antiretroviral drugs whose impact was so dramatic in clawing people back from death it was called the “Lazarus effect”. Unfortunately, the miracle came with a price tag of about $20,000 a year. Even when drug companies came under legal and moral pressure to slash prices, the medicine remained out of reach for the vast majority of Africans. HIV remained a death sentence. This is where Mr Bush, encouraged by his wife Laura, came in. The president had heard that a single dose of a drug called Nevirapine could prevent mother-to-child transmission through breast-feeding. According to an account in the Dallas Morning News, he asked Dr Anthony Fauci, an Aids specialist at the National Institutes of Health, to come up with a funding plan. Dr Fauci laid out an initiative that would have cost $500m. Mr Bush asked him what it would take to do something truly transformative. In his 2003 State of the Union address, the president asked Congress to commit $15bn over five years to fight the epidemic. Pepfar was born. Today, two things threaten the progress that has been made. One is complacency. After 30 years of the epidemic, it is tempting to declare victory prematurely. But untreated, HIV will bounce back, not only in Africa but in the rest of the world. Second is funding for Pepfar itself. President Obama was the first to propose cutting the budget. Donald Trump has urged cuts of around 20 per cent. So far, Congress has said no. The idea of aid is under attack, even in Africa itself. In the US, many support a cut in foreign aid which, at 0.18 per cent of gross domestic product, is already near the bottom of the league table of contributions by developed countries. In a 2016 speech, perhaps the nearest Mr Bush came to a “we choose to go to the moon” moment, he addressed the question head on. “I believe,” he said, “that spending less than two-tenths of 1 per cent of our federal budget to save millions of lives is [in] the moral, the practical and the national security interests of the United States.” Millions of people with HIV who are living full and productive lives would agree.
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@victor-meldrew thanks fella, interesting. Not my favorite president at all, but shows again that people are nuanced and shades of grey, not just hero/villain
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@nzzp said in US Politics:
@victor-meldrew thanks fella, interesting. Not my favorite president at all, but shows again that people are nuanced and shades of grey, not just hero/villain
Putting who was behind it to one side, it was a stunning endeavour way up there with the US Space program with it's out-of-the-box thinking and challenging accepted thinking.
Can't recall the exact figures, but they spent something like $300m in Ghana and it increased life expectancy by 10 years or so.
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@victor-meldrew said in US Politics:
@nzzp said in US Politics:
@victor-meldrew thanks fella, interesting. Not my favorite president at all, but shows again that people are nuanced and shades of grey, not just hero/villain
Putting who was behind it to one side, it was a stunning endeavour way up there with the US Space program with it's out-of-the-box thinking and challenging accepted thinking.
Can't recall the exact figures, but they spent something like $300m in Ghana and it increased life expectancy by 10 years or so.
Being a fluffybunny, was quality improved?
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@mikethesnow said in US Politics:
@victor-meldrew said in US Politics:
@nzzp said in US Politics:
@victor-meldrew thanks fella, interesting. Not my favorite president at all, but shows again that people are nuanced and shades of grey, not just hero/villain
Putting who was behind it to one side, it was a stunning endeavour way up there with the US Space program with it's out-of-the-box thinking and challenging accepted thinking.
Can't recall the exact figures, but they spent something like $300m in Ghana and it increased life expectancy by 10 years or so.
Being a fluffybunny, was quality improved?
Yes, as increasing life expectancy can drive growth. There's loads of good stuff going on in Africa and Ghana is a good example - reasonably stable democracy, relatively low corruption and a good education system.
I think Bush's program worked as it wasn't about giving money but the resources/tools to fight disease.
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@victor-meldrew if only we saw more of that! It might be his vibe in more recent years but I reckon George W is the humblest president they've had for years. Very much in a aw shucks kind of way. But he can take a joke and make a few too.
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@victor-meldrew said in US Politics:
@mikethesnow said in US Politics:
@victor-meldrew said in US Politics:
@nzzp said in US Politics:
@victor-meldrew thanks fella, interesting. Not my favorite president at all, but shows again that people are nuanced and shades of grey, not just hero/villain
Putting who was behind it to one side, it was a stunning endeavour way up there with the US Space program with it's out-of-the-box thinking and challenging accepted thinking.
Can't recall the exact figures, but they spent something like $300m in Ghana and it increased life expectancy by 10 years or so.
Being a fluffybunny, was quality improved?
Yes, as increasing life expectancy can drive growth. There's loads of good stuff going on in Africa and Ghana is a good example - reasonably stable democracy, relatively low corruption and a good education system.
I think Bush's program worked as it wasn't about giving money but the resources/tools to fight disease.
Fair play then
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@paekakboyz said in US Politics:
@victor-meldrew if only we saw more of that! It might be his vibe in more recent years but I reckon George W is the humblest president they've had for years. Very much in a aw shucks kind of way. But he can take a joke and make a few too.
And who would you say is at the other end of that spectrum?
Rhetorical question obviously 😀
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