Faux Populism
July 14, 2004
By Victor Davis Hanson
Private Papers
It is going to be hard to convince the American people that two East Coast, liberal lawyers, one Senator married to a billionaire, the other worth $75 million, are men of the people. No wonder they and their supporters have introduced some very strange arguments.
The first is that John Edwards really has not embraced the privileged life of a multimillionaire who got rich suing obstetricians because he was born poor. But there are two problems with this. First, being the son of a postal employee and a mill worker doesn't necessarily make one impoverished in America. Some of my best friends are postal hourly-wage employees—including my wife and daughter.
Second, this is a strange argument for the Left, one that is the antithesis of its usual creed that we are more or less victims of a rigid, heartless system, and thus fixed at birth as rich or poor, oppressed or oppressor. With such newfound magnanimity, are we now to anticipate that Terry McAuliffe will concede that Dick Cheney really is not a corporate grandee because he was once for a time was a blue-collar worker without money in Wyoming, or that Arnold Schwarzenegger is not at heart a part of the Kennedesque rich and famous because he came to the United States as a penniless weight-lifter?
This admission of fluidity and mobility—that Americans can enter and leave the privileged sects based on circumstances both in and beyond their control—is an anathema to the Left that is determined to use the power of the state to redistribute capital to a monolithic and perennially impoverished underclass.
On television the other night, Mrs. Edwards made an equally embarrassing, but likewise disingenuous admission: the fact that both Kerry and Edwards were multimillionaires and yet were against Mr. Bush's across-the-board tax cuts was proof of their own generosity. Should they be elected, and should they repeal the recent tax reductions, they themselves will be hurt, she pointed out. And it is “un-American” anyway, Teresa Heinz chimed in, to suggest that we should prejudge one on the basis of being rich or poor: if the brag of populism doesn’t stick, then claim a certain victim status by being one of the slandered rich.
But once again, the effort at such dissimulation is revealing. Most two-income families in the top brackets who make $300,000 or so with two or three kids in college, even under recent tax relief still pay over 50% of their income in payroll, state, and federal income taxes. Despite being demonized as the “rich,” they nevertheless feel the sting of tax policy keenly.
But multimillionaires? A Kerry or Edwards has already beaten the game. Much of their income is from lower-taxed investments with loopholes and shelters aplenty, not salaried income with few deductions. And most Americans would not mind to pay an extra million in income taxes when you have twenty coming in anyway—just as they would resent losing say $20,000 when they are working with $150, 000 of net income. Let Mrs. Kerry tell the American people exactly what percentage of her income was paid in federal taxes before she harps about the Bush tax cuts.
Hillary Clinton recently made the same bogus argument and so did Bill—that in their generosity they were willing to pay more income taxes to share with the less fortunate. But their condescending liberality arises only after they reaped a combined $20 million in book advances and speaking fees. Had they really been interested in sacrificing for principle of the commonwealth, then they would have eschewed the dubious financing, freeloading, and other corporate largess lavished on their houses and assorted freebies garnered in the days before their sudden ascendancy to postpresidential millionaire status. These are humanists, after all, who once wrote off gifts of underwear to shave their taxes.
Populism is a hard sell in this country today, when the majority of minimum wage jobs go to teenagers who don't plan to make $7 in perpetuity, when hundreds of billions of dollars go unreported in cash wages from everything for cement work to restaurant tips, and when the uninsured are nevertheless treated freely at tens of thousands of emergency rooms. I wish it were not true, but most successful “family farmers” are in fact sizable agribusiness corporations, many of them with shameful federal subsidies.
It is not that there is not inequality and unfairness in compensation in America; I could never quite figure out why small farmers made less than car salesmen or plastic surgeons. But Americans are sort of wedded to the idea that we all make choices, and there are other things in our lives, both good and bad, that determine what we do and how we are rewarded, rather than just an inflexibly in compensation beyond our control.
Finally, if these two blow-dried, athletic figures in designer suits are going to convince those in Fresno that they are down-home folks, then they are going to have to ask themselves why it is that most who work as secretaries or at the post office would more likely find George Bush, of a corporate, Ivy League pedigree, far friendlier and more accessible than a John Kerry. The heyday of FDR, Harry Truman, and George Meeney passed with enactment of Social Security, the Great Society, Workers Compensation, and Civil Rights legislation.
Now we are left with the much harder questions of an affluent society wrestling with guaranteeing an equality of result rather than ensuring an equality of opportunity. Perhaps that is why where I live bankrupt farmers and failed chemical salesmen are more likely to vote Bush/Cheney than are my tenured colleagues in Volvos and the local legal community who vacation in Europe. Go figure.
In some sense, we are all our own populists, which has become a state of mind. For some such reason, George Bush long ago decided that he did not feel at all easy with the accustomed Eastern bluebloods, the academic establishment, and the cultural elite, but rather with Bible-reading, small-town Texans, and oil wheeler-and-dealers. That he married Laura, not a Teresa Heinz, is proof enough of that.
Mr. Bush may have made a deliberate decision to reinvent himself into a twangy Southwesterner, but it was a decision nonetheless pregnant with meaning. Democrats need to take it to heed. Face it: when George Bush puts straw in his mouth and talks to hardware store owners or plumbers, he sounds more like them than does John Kerry with his sonorous, if not sanctimonious, ponderous, and self-righteous strictures. Country Western singers, junior Marine officers, and NASCAR won't go for Kerry either. Barbra Streisand, Tim Robbins, Arianna Huffington, and George Soros no doubt will. I have the sneaking suspicion that MoveOn.org is more popular in Hollywood, Burlington, Nantucket, Santa Cruz, and the upper West Side than it is in Tulare, Muncie, and Mobile.
There are lots of legitimate issues in his election to fight over—taxes, the war, the economy, the social and cultural agenda, and our so-called allies abroad. The purported populism of John Kerry and John Edwards is not one of them. We have four millionaires running for office; by far the wealthiest two are Democrats. Let's get over—and on with—it.
© 2004 Victor Davis Hanson
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