VDH examines denizens of the left, and manages to do so without calling them racist Nazi psychopaths stuck in the anal stage, suffering from both addiction and a fantastical, phantasmagoric cultural nostalgia that causes them to pine away for a lost cultural innocence and purity that never actually existed, but rather is a projected mythos to which they cling like so many hillbilly bronze beetles to a wizened birch. Which, I suppose, means he won’t be appearing with Martin Bashir anytime soon. Hanson:
[…] What are we to make of the self-referential wealthy who demand higher taxes?
About every month or so either a politician — a Barack Obama or John Kerry — or a billionaire — a Bill Gates Jr. & Sr. or Warren Buffett — or a celebrity — a Matt Damon — pontificates about the need for some sort of higher taxes, as if we are supposed to be in awe over such professed magnanimity. Usually the narrative goes one of two ways: “I wouldn’t mind paying more taxes” or “My secretary pays more taxes than do I.”
These apologies insult our intelligence, since the boaster either makes so much money that he would not notice whether he paid 35% or 39% on his income; or he is in government where the state picks up much of the tab for his health care and transportation, and subsidizes his housing and meals. The subtext is Gore-like aristocratic disdain, as in “Why don’t those accountants and dentists pass on their jet skis and Yukons and fork over more to the more noble needy?”
Of course, the very wealthy who rant about higher taxes simply could pay higher taxes. Such an iconic gesture would do far more than a YouTube rant: the media would love Matt Damon if he were paying 70% in taxes on his income. Indeed, he could start a movement to shame other Hollywood celebrities, who then could shame CEOs, who then in turn could shame the rich in general. Or alternatively, the very wealthy who feel under-taxed simply could donate directly to their own favorite government program — a Head Start, solar power subsidy, or food stamp program. Or, again, a Matt Damon could limit his take per picture to $1 million (e.g., curbing those millions he “didn’t need”), and start yet another campaign in Hollywood to reduce movie and DVD prices for the needy.
[…] Is contemporary American aristocracy compatible with, antithetical to, or the logical complement to modern liberalism?
So another mystery is the leftism of those who live in a world of hierarchical privilege. If we examine the elite media (the MSNBC or New York Times megaphones), or Hollywood (the lifestyle of a Sean Penn), or leftist politicians (a Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, or Al Gore), there is almost no tangible difference in the way they live their lives from those of the corporate or private sector elite they deprecate. Ensuring that a child goes to a segregated elite prep school, making a well-placed call to an elite university admission officer, guaranteeing a prestigious internship for a daughter, marrying another anchor person or DC insider politician, living in the right zip code, vacationing in Tuscany — all that is privilege to the core, and in theory at odds with radical egalitarianism.
That begs the question — is the elite left’s infatuation with the good life not so much a paradox, not a hypocrisy at all, but rather a sort of medieval exemption, or perhaps penance? The price for living well is to advocate government subsidies for the less well off that are rarely seen, and disdain for those who grub for money and as tea partiers lack the refinement that is the dividend of the very rich or the so well connected. Does buying a $40,000 ticket to the president’s 50th birthday party mean that one is exempt from the presidential invective against “millionaires and billionaires” and “corporate jet owners”? As a general rule, the more I hear of such carping, the more I assume the whiner covets what he so childishly is obsessed with ending.
The left coveting? The hell you say!
The irony is, we’ve so surrendered ground on language and its framing, and so linguistically degraded any rationalist tether to our discourse, that the mainstream press in our country can openly and without fear of toothy retaliation describe as hostage taking terrorist extremists those who wish to spend within our means, while simultaneously lauding the “serious” and “sober” compromise forged by those whose idea of “cutting spending” is to insignificantly and (perhaps) eventually trim the rate of growth on the trillions and trillion more in debt spending, having first voted to approve such spending, without having done a thing to address the underlying causes of such institutionalized profligacy.
Language matters, as I’ve argued over this moribund blog. Too bad some people couldn’t handle what was such a simple, obvious truth.
Hanson hit my triggers with “the good life” and “living well”. I assume he did that intentionally, but I do wonder, will anyone notice?
OT … but JAYSUS KEEERIST … Obama is LIVE!SPEECH! yet again.
Hubby just chimed in with “What, is this the Hugo Chavez thing where Obama gets his own TV channel by which to harangue us at whim and we are required to watch?”
He got me with “noble needy.”
I say yay! Darleen. He’s listening to me! The get-in-their-faces-EmpLamDukO is the only EmpLamDukO that can win reelection to a lifetime term.
Obama is now offering “Returning Hero tax credit” so companies that hire vets get a break …
Just did a call out to mega companies Microsoft, Lockheed-martin for “doing their part” for vets.
WTF?? And the market is going down WHILE he’s talking!!
Poor vets, the government already has its hooks into ’em, so they’re among the easiest to reach out to use for its own purposes. Its own purposes? Why, reelecting EmpLamDukO to a lifetime term of course!
It’s almost as though the government is leaving the State fair and has decided to partake in a little fiscal wilding, so notionally picks out the easiest targets to hand, isn’t it?
Kaus occasionally puts out “Mickey’s assignment desk”. Reddit has “explain it like I’m five”. Stealing shamelessly, I think we could really use a Congressional Language Primer, an example laden explanation of how the progressives use language to take, keep, and exercise power. We could send it to all the Republican House and Senate members, with a cover personalized for each, pointing out how understanding this will help them personally, will be to their advantage, will advance their ambition. Or maybe to the chief of staff, rather than the Congressman, so that that person can “steal” the ideas and ten take credit with their boss for the great ensuing results.
We have the same phenomenon over here. Polly Toynbee, one of our more prominent leftists, is a textbook example. When she isn’t telling us that “inequality and disrespect makes people fat,” Toynbee rails against “the unjust rewards of the rich,” which she defines as, “the 1.5% who earn over £100,000.” These, she says, are the “extravagant earners” who “feel profoundly entitled to take what they like in salaries” and “monster bonuses,” all while being “unashamed” and “untouched by public disgust or a sense of propriety in the face of so many losing their livelihoods.”
Toynbee’s own Guardian salary, for years a subject of speculation, was eventually revealed as £106,000 – excluding royalties, advances, media fees, etc. This, despite the paper’s precarious financial state and staff redundancies. Curiously, Polly’s own financial rewards are not deemed “extravagant,” “unjust” or in any way improper. But then Toynbee’s property portfolio – including a £2.4 million London townhouse, another home in Lewes and a Tuscan holiday villa – is maintained with the proceeds of writing about the poor. Which presumably counts as some sort of ideological talisman.
Though I see no reason to suppose that Toynbee is as gushing with compassion as she would have us believe. If she were, she might give half of her six-figure salary to those she deems in need, and do it again the next year, and the year after that. I suspect she could do this fairly easily and each time it would change someone’s life. Likewise, she might give one of her three houses to a deserving family. That too would be a life-changing gesture.
But I think we all know that isn’t likely to happen. And I think we know why.
Being screwed by leftards is not that rare.
I don’t notice them sticking massive amounts of money into charities. In fact, I seem to remember two leftard icons claiming used underwear as a tax write-off. It seems that “handing it over” to the government will assure your place in Heaven (Which happens to exist NOW, not “after”).
“Plugs” Biden (the stupidest human being EVER to sit in the Senate) gave about $2.50 to charity before he was revealed)
My father was a serious business man (he built the Socony-Mobile building, 666 5th Ave, and the MOMA addition – no, not with his own hands), and you know what?
He spent tons of money helping charities, and spent his weekends using his own time and his own hands helping people who NEEDED help, and couldn’t help themselves.
What a big business prick, eh?
Now? We have assholes who think that giving money to the government has ANYTHING to do with charity, because they are too elite and busy to bother with their own fellow men. And these fascist shitheads have the balls to call my Dad “selfish”?
I have just about nothing, but if you are in a bind, I WILL do my best to help you. I truly would give the shirt off my back for someone in real trouble.
Eat me, you greedy little leftard fascist worms. You don’t have to do shit, because the “government” will cover it for you – by FUCKING EVERYBODY IN SIGHT!(Youtube – Jonathan Coulton – “The First Of May”. too lazy to deal with the link)
All these people on government pensions, food stamps, welfare, etc (and I must add that I don’t have a problem with Gov workers who entered the devil’s pact in good faith) don’t seem to understand that, when the USA collapses, NOBODY is going to get ANYTHING but a flash mob at their door, pointing guns at them, and looking for “goodies”!
DOH!
“Too bad some people couldn’t handle what was such a simple, obvious truth.”
I’ll have to say, Jeff, I have learned a lot from your writing. Enough to make me spitting mad at the perverters of language, that is for sure.
Mr. Thompson, ah yes…Toynbee – The UK’s own answer to Krugman and Dowd. God love ya for putting up with her, Monbiot and Fisk.
Yes, she’s a wonder of the age. Though I’m still not sure how self-aware she is. She has no discernible sense of humour, certainly not about herself, and her capacity for unrealism is a thing to behold. She manages to sound earnest and impassioned even – especially – when distorting facts and deforming logic. The more dishonest and evasive she is, the greater her tone of moral indignation. Which is quite a skill. It takes continual practice.
Toynbee even has the gall to call herself middle-class. This, she tells us, is why she gets mocked by those nasty “rightwing” bloggers. But Polly isn’t middle class – she’s a millionaire, in the top 1% of earners, part of the metropolitan media elite, born into three generations of the same (which may explain how she got into Oxford with only one A-level). She’s invited to Chequers by Prime Ministers – who, it’s rumoured, find her intimidating – and regularly holds forth, and holds court, on the nation’s state broadcaster. And she describes those who earn a lot less than her, and who have none of her connections and influence, as “the elite” and the “hugely privileged class.” You could scarcely get more elite than Mary Louisa “Polly” Toynbee.
But they, unlike her, are the wrong kind of rich.
Maybe, like many of her peers, Toynbee expects to be part of the nomenklatura – a consultant and advisor, being compassionate from on high and ensuring the unobstructed operation of our egalitarian utopia – and therefore, naturally, exempt from its pious “redistribution.” She is, after all, a millionaire descendent of the Earl of Carlisle and accustomed to a certain deference from those in her orbit. Or maybe she’s just managed to construct a personality that’s impervious to its own vindictiveness and colossal hypocrisy. Which might explain why she’s so comically unprepared to have her own affairs considered in any way relevant.
A trait, incidentally, that Toynbee shares with her employer, the Guardian’s editor Alan Rusbridger, who also denounces “fat cats” but sounds flummoxed when asked about his own elevated lifestyle and £520,000 salary: “Er… er… I didn’t ask for the money.”