socio-political commentary.... : The Left's War on the Poor

socio-political commentary.... : The Left's War on the Poor

Why
does the Left so hate the poor? For all its pious intonations of
compassion, its consistent project has been to make their lives
immeasurably harder.

We
could start, of course, with Johnson’s “War on Poverty” that not only
ended in abject defeat -- the same percentage of Americans are in
poverty now as were in 1967, when the “war” was initiated -- but
stripped the poor of their one consistent network of support: the
family. That sad and completely predictable result would be enough to
prove the point.  But the complex ramifications of the many bad
decisions and ill-considered legislative “fixes” are too numerous to
recount in a single column and could not be remedied without a wholesale
repeal that undid damage to the poor that has played out over 40
years.  It would take another 40 years to remedy it.  But we need not go
back that far.  The Left’s war on the poor and working classes
continues and is accelerating.

Liberal
elites have always maintained a sneering disdain for the cultural
preferences of the great middle class, of course.  Take, for example,
Norman Rockwell, perhaps the best loved artist of the American middle
class.  Elite critics dismissed his work for what they referred to as
his “mawkish sentimentalism” and criticized it as an “unending cliché.” 
Rockwell was never, in his lifetime, regarded as a “serious” artist by
the liberal art establishment.  The liberal elite’s critique of popular
novels, television reality shows and the middle class’ embrace of
sporting events from football to Nascar follows the same disdainful
path.