We Just Had a Class War --And one side won.

[Starry Messenger]

http://nymag.com/news/features/obama-class-war-2012-11/

<snip>

It began last December, when Obama delivered a trademark Big Speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, where Teddy Roose­velt once spoke, on government’s place in mitigating income inequality. It was, in a sense, an extension of his failed budget negotiations with House Republicans. Obama had decided that his reelection effort would be an attempt to go over Speaker of the House John Boehner’s head and bring to the voters the proposition he couldn’t get the opposing party to accept: that both moral decency and plausible budgeting required an end to George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the rich.

<snip>

Conservatives, of course, were dying to join the great debate over class—dying to listen to their standard-bearer assail Obama as a redistributionist and lay out a ringing defense of economic freedom. Romney constructed much of his summer campaign around Obama’s wrenched-out-of-context line “You didn’t build that,” conveying the party’s belief in the centrality of business owners, a notion for which Romney himself served as the main avatar. And when he selected Paul Ryan, the chief party ideologist, as his running mate, it seemed as though the battle of ideas was about to be joined in full.

<snip>

Obama’s goal was to prove to the GOP that their rigid defense of the richest one percent was political poison and to force them to bend. For now, at least, their same monomaniacal refusal to increase any taxes on the rich is leading Republicans to deny any connection between the tax issue and Obama’s victory. Numerous Republicans pointed last week to the party’s restrictionist immigration agenda as the source of its dismal performance with the growing (and increasingly Democratic) Latino bloc. But the party’s Latino problem does not rest with immigration law. Polls show that Hispanics are just plain liberal on the main role-of-­government questions dividing the parties. More than three fifths want to leave Obamacare in place rather than repeal it; a mere 12 percent agree with the Republican position of closing the deficit entirely through spending cuts. The harsh truth that fend-for-yourself economic libertarianism is a worldview mainly confined to the shrinking, aging white electorate is a reality Republicans prefer not to acknowledge.

<snip>

Of course, what the people want is all fairly beside the point now. What matters in Washington is power and leverage—two things that accrued dramatically in Obama’s favor last week. But it’s not irrelevant that American voters had a chance to lay down their marker on the major social divide of our time: whether government can mitigate the skyrocketing inequality generated by the marketplace. For so many years, conservatives have endeavored to fend off such a debate by screaming “class war” at the faintest wisp of populist rhetoric. Somehow the endless repetition of the scare line inured us to the real thing. Here it was, right before our eyes: a class war, or the closest thing one might find to one in modern American history, as a presidential election. The outcome was plain. The 47 percent turned out to be the 51 percent.

[reformist2]

1. This is what democracy looks like.

[msongs]

2. it remains to be seen which side "won" if the alleged winners cave in to alleged losers nt

[Starry Messenger]

3. We can't just stop at elections.

If we don't put pressure behind our votes, the whole thing is useless anyway. But thanks for weighing in Eeyore.