Good column - on economic class and political party allegiance

Income inequality is what's really tearing at our social fabric. We need to look at the concept of providing universal basic income. At least examine the idea - just introduced in California  - which does have big negatives - but also some positives as mentioned by Carly Shimkus (who used to work for Imus!) at the end.

This column by Victor Davis Hanson - and here he is in an interview about this column.

During the 1980s cultural war, the left’s mantra was "race, class and gender." Occasionally we still hear of that trifecta, but the class part has increasingly disappeared. The neglect of class is ironic given that a number of recent studies conclude class differences are widening as never before.

Middle-class incomes among all races have stagnated, and family net worth has declined. Far greater percentages of rising incomes go to the already rich. Student debt, mostly a phenomenon of the middle and lower classes, has hit $1.7 trillion.

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So why are we not talking about class?

First, we are watching historic changes in political alignment.

The two parties are switching class constituents. Some 65% of the Americans making more than $500,000 a year are Democrats, and 74% of those who earn less than $100,000 a year are Republicans, according to IRS statistics. Gone are the days of working people automatically voting Democratic, or Republicans being caricatured as a party of stockbrokers on golf courses.

By 2018, Democratic representatives were in control of all 20 of the wealthiest congressional districts. In the recent presidential primaries and general election, 17 of the 20 wealthiest ZIP codes gave more money to Democratic candidates than to Republicans.

Increasingly, the Democrats are a bicoastal party of elites from corporate America, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, the media, universities, entertainment and professional sports. All have made out like bandits from globalization.

The Democratic Party does not wish to admit it has become the party of wealth. All too often its stale revolutionary speechifying sounds more like penance arising from guilt than genuine advocacy for middle-class citizens of all races.

The wealthy leftist elite has mastered the rhetoric of ridicule for the lower-middle classes, especially struggling Whites. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden wrote off their political opponents as supposedly crude, superstitious and racist, smearing them as "clingers," "deplorables," irredeemables" and "chumps."

Class is fluid; race is immutable. So by fixating on race, the left believes that it can divide America into permanent victimizers and victims — at a time when race and class are increasingly disconnecting.

The wealthy of all races are the loudest voices of the woke movement. Their frequent assumptions of "victimhood" are absurd.

Americans who struggle to pay soaring gas, food, energy and housing prices are berated for their "white privilege" by an array of well-paid academics, media elite and CEOs.

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In the pre-civil rights past, race was often fused to class, and the two terms were logically used interchangeably to cite oppression and inequality. But such a canard is fossilized. And so are those who desperately cling to it.

The more the elites scream their woke banalities, the more they seem to fear that they, not most Americans, are really the privileged, coddled and pampered ones — and sometimes the victimizers.