Chris, yes and no…
Ever wonder why far more American billionaires and so many politicians are progressives. A recent analysis show 30% more Progressive billionaires than Republican billionaires.
How many politicians become rich selling the poor on the ability of government to lift them out of poverty. The last four Democratic Presidents/Vice Presidents (Obama, Clinton, Biden, and Gore) promised to fix society and help the poor. But did they? They did get rich… Obama being the most recent…
So my point is simple. Umair tends to say America is headed down the tubes because of one reason or another. This demands change. This fits perfectly with the agenda of the wealthy and their politicians. Politicians offer change for a price… your vote and eventually your money. The rich offer to solve your problems with new solutions that you can buy. No one has learned better how to harness the anger created by writers like Umair than politicians and the wealthy. But change is destabilizing for the middle class.
These people learned how to navigate our economic system to escape poverty and earn a good life. They took risks, pursued education, or developed skills. They achieved success as skilled workers, small business owners, and farmers. They are happy with the “system”. The system is not perfect and it needs to continue to evolve, but it is working for them and they don’t want progressives to screw it up by declaring it broken and in need of radical change. Umair focuses on the poor, he virtually ignores those for whom the system is working.
These feelings are not restricted to “white people”, women and minorities make up a disproportionate number of new business owners. Many trades with good incomes are dominated by conservative minorities, an example is the construction trade in southern California. Today’s farmers come in all races and both genders. Umair wants to make it about race or gender or religion, or gender orientation… but in the end, it is the battle between those for whom the system works and those for whom it doesn’t and that breakdown just does not fit the narrative Umair “sells”.
So the real conflict emerging in America is between a subset of the wealthy and their politicians versus the middle class. The middle class knows how to succeed, but they don’t want government taxes dragging them down or making them dependent on government (in effect, they don’t want government giving them back some of their money and giving the rest away to others). They are willing to pay “their fair share”, they just have a different idea of how much that is.
But many of the wealthy make money providing goods and services to the masses… They want to help the poor so they can spend more (not a bad goal), but they want to do it with entitlement programs which redistribute the money of the middle class and not their own (no matter how much lip service is played to taxing the wealthy more, entitlements in this country are paid through property taxes, wage taxes, and sales taxes… not wealth taxes). The middle class has been fooled enough to know how these stories always end.
The system is neither broken, racist, or heading towards extinction. It is an evolving system of compromises between competing interests. Perhaps the more that is understood, the more compromises can occur and the less polarization our nation will experience.
