h/t Instapundit
[NYP] - In America, class warfare is often disguised as culture war, and culture war is often cloaked by talk of race. But underneath it all, the class warfare is still there. Whether accidentally or intentionally, America’s upper classes seem to wind up harming the working class and small businesses, always in the name of some high-minded cause.
On immigration, for example, the go-to move is to call people who object to open borders racists and nativists. But what’s behind it? As Biden economic adviser Jared Bernstein commented: "A tight job market pressures employers to boost wage offers . . . One equally surefire way to short-circuit this useful dynamic is to turn on the immigrant spigot every time some group’s wages go up." Immigration as a way of keeping working-class wages down.
Likewise, efforts to defund police or de-police neighborhoods are treated as anti-racism, but their actual, predictable effect is to make poor and working-class neighborhoods much less safe, in order to make wealthy woke activists feel good about themselves. Similarly, Anthony Lukas’ classic book, "Common Ground," told the story of how wealthy white activists placed most of the burden of desegregating Boston’s public schools on poor black and white families, while those behind the policies retreated to leafy suburbs, far from the problems they had created, or made worse. |