Liberals Hate Conservatives for Being Poor, and for Being Rich

I find it fascinating that our left-leaning friends claim both that conservatives* are poor (at least compared to liberals) and that they’re rich.  People of the left then use both claims as justifications for their self-righteous contempt for those who disagree with them.

Hillary Clinton last month:

But what the map doesn’t show you is that I won the places that represent two-thirds of America’s gross domestic product.

(Click for sources: video, transcripts of selected excerpts plus commentary at the liberal Washington Post.)

So the problem is that poor people didn’t support her bid for the presidency, causing her to lose—Clinton had the support of the rich, but she didn’t draw enough support from non-rich constituencies.  OK, got it.

Contrariwise, the article from earlier this year that everyone was briefly talking about earlier this month (after the CEO of Twitter tweeted about it), “The Great Lesson of California in America’s New Civil War” (“Why there’s no bipartisan way forward at this juncture in our history — one side must win”):

Another driver on the road to civil war is when two classes become fundamentally at odds. This usually takes some form of rich versus poor, the wealthy and the people, the 1 percent and the 99 percent. The system gets so skewed toward those at the top that the majority at the bottom rises up and power shifts.

. . .

The Republican Party is all about rule by and for billionaires at the expense of working people.

(See also response from David French, who quickly poked several holes in the authors’ argument.)

Or, as a (very intelligent, very educated) liberal friend of mine told me recently, we need campaign-finance reform because “Republican billionaires” donate to political campaigns (you’ve no doubt heard similar arguments many times)—as though there are no liberal billionaires.  On the contrary:

Soros ended up spending more than $23 million in 2004. All of the money went to liberal groups. His friend, the now-deceased insurance magnate Peter Lewis, contributed another $23 million. Clinton bro Steve Bing gave $14 million. Herb and Marion Sandler, the subprime monarchs, donated $13 million — all to liberals.

Indeed, of the top 20 donors to 527 groups in 2004, only seven gave to conservative-leaning organizations. Liberals dominated the outside spending contest that year. Liberals dominated the outside spending contest in 1996, in 1998, in 2000, in 2002. Liberals dominated the contest in 2006. They dominated it in 2008. And the Center for Responsive Politics totals do not capture the full range of union spending for liberal causes and Democratic candidates, which the Wall Street Journal calculates is as much as “four times as much . . . as generally thought.”

Looking at the bigger picture, David French concludes that as to “political donations . . . the two sides tend to be [relatively] evenly matched” (internal hyperlink omitted).

Nothing says that Mrs. Clinton and those “Civil War” guys have to have the same opinions.  But since our left-leaning friends seem to be all over the place about the theory behind their contempt, it would be nice if they tried having a little less contempt for us in the first place.

 

* Conservatives—i.e., the half of the country who vote for the (relatively, matter-of-degree) more nearly small-government party, the party that more nearly still embodies the values of the Declaration of Independence, such as equality before the law, the idea that the purpose of having a government in the first place is to protect our rights and freedoms, and the idea that we get to change the government if it instead starts infringing on our rights and freedoms.