Joe Biden caused quite a stir when he equated paying higher taxes with patriotism. Biden told ABC’s Kate Snow:
“We want to take money and put it back in the pocket of middle-class people.” Snow asked: “Anybody making over $250,000…” Biden responded: “Is gonna pay more.” Snow: “Is going to pay more.” Biden: “You got it. It’s time to be patriotic, Kate. Time to jump in. Time to be part of the deal. Time to help get America out of the rut.”
Conservatives predictably went ballistic with their calls of “class warfare”; Obama’s fans thought it brilliant economics.
For those of us who are Democrats, or former Democrats, Joe Biden’s statement was offensive on a different level. Although many of us agree with progressive taxation, Biden’s formulation is deeply offensive. According to Biden, greater taxation equals greater patriotism. This concept fits perfectly with the self-congratulatory world of Whole Foods Nation. Anglachel describes Biden’s target audience as the new elites:
The focus of the [Obama] Democrats is on the winners of the economic realignment, those who managed to win a place in the white collar upper-middle class … [Obama] is the exemplar of a mode of life that, while not as unreachable as that of Bush’s base, is still out of reach of those who do not have the education, acculturation and business contacts to climb up that economic ladder.
Some will argue that Biden is simply practicing liberal class warfare; he is targeting the wealthy and not the “bitter” gun owners of greater Appalachia. I disagree. By using the framework of patriotism, Biden is challenging — to use Anglachel’s parlance — the “Bubbas” and the Archie Bunkers — to ownership of American patriotism.
Biden is telegraphing to Whole Foods Nation that it’s equally patriotic to live in Boulder, Colorado and pay on a 33% tax bracket income as it is to serve in Iraq, like Governor Palin’s son. Or, as a friend in this income bracket told me recently, she “sacrifices” by voting Democratic.
The primary campaign showed that Obama fared well with affluent voters and African Americans. Clinton crushed Obama with middle- and low-income voters. The Pennsylvania primary was a perfect example of Obama’s inability to connect with low-income voters:
The Pennsylvania Democratic primary shared many of the same vote characteristics of other primary states this season – with Clinton winning her core base of union members, less educated and lower income voters and rural voters, and Obama winning voters with more education and income, and black voters.
The attack on blue-collar voters by Obama is what precipitated the civil war now raging in the Democratic party, and Obama’s race-baiting of blue-collar whites has been one of the more depressing episodes in our history as a Party.
Low-income white Democrats are the least likely group to vote Republican, and the assault on this vulnerable group has all the markings of racial and class warfare used for electoral gain. African Americans are all too familiar with politicians playing on prejudices for electoral gain and there is nothing different in this case except for the color of the victims’ skin.
The dishwasher, the waitress at Denny’s, the auto mechanic, the grocery clerk, the nursing assistant, the soldier — all low income Americans — are equally patriotic to anyone living in San Francisco or Hyde Park or the East Village, regardless of the amount they pay in taxes.
I’ve been thinking about Biden’s notion of patriotism for several days. Last night I found a video which captures patriotism in a way still held by much of the country. It’s an old fashioned form of patriotism which is now considered uncouth and looked down upon by the liberal elites. But it’s a type of patriotism once honored by Democrats; it’s a part of what made Democrats the governing party for most of the first half of the last century.
The video is from Ken Burns’ brilliant 1990 documentary The Civil War. I think Sullivan Ballou’s love for his wife Sarah is only matched by his love of country.
Listen to Sullivan Ballou’s words carefully and think about everything he is sacrificing. You won’t hear politicians — except perhaps for John McCain — speak of our beloved country with such a degree selflessness and honor.
Sullivan Ballou wrote to his wife that he was “willing—perfectly willing—to lay down all my joys in this life, to help maintain this Government.” Ballou’s patriotism is echoed by Sarah Palin’s willingness to give her child to the service of our country: “Today is the day that I send my first born, my son, my teenage son overseas…to fight for our country, for democracy for our freedoms.”
Whole Foods Nation hates Sarah Palin for the class she represents. She threatens the self-perception of their own moral superiority on race and their economic “sacrifices.” Giving her son to our nation is not enough to silence the voices of hate.
During the primary campaign, on TPM, billysumday suggested that Bill Clinton was a racist because of his bumpkin origins, totally ignoring that the President was educated at Georgetown, Yale, and Oxford:
Bill’s just a good ole boy from the south, and that’s why we love him. But he didn’t handle himself well in the early stage of this campaign and he knew exactly what he was doing when he mentioned Jesse Jackson and tried to marginalize Obama. Is Bill a racist? No. Did he inject race into the campaign? Yes, even if only inadvertently. I mean, we’ve all heard the clips of Bill’s brother using the n-word over and over again, and all the anecdotal evidence of Bill throwing the n bomb out there. Again, I don’t think Bill’s a racist. But I do think he grew up around a lot of racists, in a really racist state, and he’s been colored by that experience
According to the writer, Bill Clinton is a racist because he grew up surrounded by “Bubbas.” President Clinton is not a perfect man, but anybody who knows anything about Clinton knows that he does not have a racist bone in his body. But the writer is really expressing his own prejudices against low-income whites, particularly southern whites, and he is inferring racism because of Clinton’s humble origins.
Likewise, Joe Biden’s contention that greater taxation equals greater patriotism is the same worldview which reduces a person to their environment and their earnings. Biden’s fallacy becomes obvious if you play it in reverse: the less you pay in taxes equals reduced patriotism. It’s class warfare alright, but a war being fought top-down, against low-income whites, those who are perceived to be too “bitter” and too religious to contribute to the nation in a way valued by Whole Foods Nation. Hillary Clinton “and her supporters had to be turned into racists to avoid discussing the economics interests Obama did not deign to address.”
The “Archie Bunkers” have been deemed the enemy. You will find, therefore, that many of the policies advocated by WFN are inimical to the interests of blue-collar workers. It’s no accident, of course, that Obama mocked this group while he attended a gathering in San Francisco by calling them “bitter.” Evan Bayh, at the time, succinctly described the problem with Obama’s class-based attack:
I think you’re on dangerous ground when you morph that into suggesting that people’s cultural values, whether its religion or hunting and fishing or concerns about trade, are premised solely upon those of kind of anxieties and don’t have a legitimate foundation independent of them
WFN is not interested in improving the opportunities available for blue-collar Americans. They see their pickup trucks and snowmobiles as garish obstacles to an imagined utopia. According to Obama and Biden, it’s not about providing health care for the waitress who works at Denny’s or the mom who sends her son off to Iraq, it’s about getting a tax break for driving a Prius, because, as Joe Biden frames it, those who pay more are “sacrificing” more.