Economic Resentments

One of the Left’s perennial disappointments in America’s downtrodden masses is that the latter don’t think of themselves, and hence don’t act or vote, as though they were downtrodden masses. That’s why campaigns based on supposed economic resentments of the oppressed usually fail. (Except, you could argue, campaigns to lower taxes, but that’s another story.)

With that history in mind, George Will writes today that

[p]erhaps the selection of Edwards expresses Kerry’s desire to outsource, as it were, the nonsense part of his campaign. Edwards can talk economic foolishness for the constituency hungry for that — the Democratic base — while Kerry talks sense, as he understands it, about other matters.

Will is referring here to Edwards’ “two America’s” rhetoric, suggesting that Edwards believes “that even with the nation at war, and after 10 quarters of economic expansion, many millions of voters in this affluent society will vote on the basis of economic resentments.”

Note, however, that implicit in Will’s criticism is the recognition that Edwards may well be correct. Many millions of voters may indeed vote on the basis of economic resentments — not the downtrodden masses, of course; they have been hegemonized by our crass materialistic culture into a political torpor of false consciousness, but the compassionate vanguard of the “Democratic base,” who from the comfort of their suburban and academic villages are expressing by proxy the resentment the masses should feel, but don’t.

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  1. David Nieporent July 12, 2004 at 4:32 am | | Reply

    The point I always make in this discussion is that the logical extension of the left’s whine that the poor should vote their economic self-interest is that the rich should also. But they don’t _really_ believe that; they think that the rich voting out of their economic self-interest is evil and greedy. The poor are fools if they don’t vote for socialism, but the rich are mean if they don’t.

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