The Democratic Party has two reliable groups of adherents: the rich and the poor. Posted on 03/02/2013 5:09:15 AM PST by Kaslin
The Democratic Party has two reliable groups of adherents: the rich and the poor.
Not all of the rich, of course. Not all of the poor, either.
But a large swath of wealthy people, especially those whose wealth was inherited rather than earned, wouldn’t dream of voting for a Republican. Ditto for a large number of poor people who have discovered how to sign up for various welfare programs and intend to remain on the dole for the rest of their lives.
What do these groups have in common? Nothing. They rarely meet. And if they did they wouldn't like each other.
You might be inclined to think that the political union of these two groups is an accident of modern electoral politics. But there may be something else involved. Both groups have little use for the middle class ? the poor envy them and the wealthy distain them.
To test the idea the there might be some sort of weird sociology involved, I decided to look in on some communities where limousine liberals are firmly in control and have no fear of being ousted in the next election by middle class voters with middle class values.
Welcome to the People's Republic of Boulder, Colorado.
When you ask the residents what they like about Boulder, they are quick to respond. "You won't find any large billboards telling you where the nearest Target is," I was told. And, "Where you might find a McDonald's or a Taco Bell in some other city, in Boulder you are more likely to find Starbucks or Whole Foods."
To make sure that things stay that way, Boulder has virtually destroyed any possibility of new housing that people who shop at Target and eat at McDonald's would find affordable. Through tight zoning restrictions, the city has virtually legislated new, middle class housing out of existence. The city has even purchased large tracts of land to make sure development doesn't occur.
As a result, the average price of a home in Boulder is $375,000, in contrast to an average price of $220,000 in Colorado Springs.
Boulder has its own global warming policy. In fact, it is one of the few cities in the country that is about to jettison a private electric utility company for a publicly owned one. The reason: the private electric company isn't "green" enough. This would be comical until you stop to realize that Boulder has a lot to atone for on the climate change front. Two thirds of all the people who work in Boulder must drive to work from outside the city because they cannot afford to live there.
That's 60,000 automobiles spewing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every morning and every evening of every congested business day, thanks to Boulder's land use planning.
While Boulder forces its middle class workforce to live in neighboring communities, it is surprisingly generous to the poor. A multimillion dollar homeless shelter is so luxurious, it actually attracts vagabonds from other Colorado cities. As one local writer explains:
Boulder Shelter for the Homeless is a multimillion dollar facility of recent construction. It has a spacious day room, a TV room, washing machines ($1 per load) and dryers (free) available, showers, a few dozen small storage lockers, and a large kitchen/dining room…It has a 160 person occupancy limit, and the nightly "overflow" is accommodated by a network of local churches and a synagogue managed by Boulder Outreach for Homeless Overflow.
There is also an active program to provide subsidized housing to low-income families. One development on prime real estate with a mountain view is estimated to have a market value of $500,000 per unit. In other words, low-income families are living in housing units that are worth considerably more than the average home in Boulder! Unfortunately, poor families cannot sell their homes to the highest bidders, however. Were they able to, they would immediately become non-poor and the property would go to its highest valued use.
Maximizing the value of property, however, is not the goal of the citizens of Boulder. If you have a house built, say, before 1950, there's a good chance the Landmark's Board will designate it a historic preservation site and not allow you to modify it. For new houses and renovations, the city virtually dictates how big the house can be. It also tells you what kind of fireplace you can have and what you can or can't burn in it. If you want to tear down an existing structure, you can't just bulldoze it. You have to disassemble it and recycle all the pieces.
When the owners of a trailer park decided to use the property to build condominiums instead, the trailer owners appealed to the city leaders, who rezoned the property so that it could only be used as a trailer park.
Then, of course, there is the nanny state desire to tell everyone what to do with their personal lives. Smoking in Boulder is banned in almost all indoor facilities and also outside on the sidewalk.
What's my own view on all this? If Ted Turner buys a ranch at the foot of the Tetons and he buys up so much property that no one else lives within miles of him, more power to him. But if he buys a small ranch and then tries to get the government to keep everyone else out, that is the crass and illegitimate pursuit of self-interest.
If he does the latter, he should feel guilty. Very guilty.
It's this way in much of Colorado. Largely because of the influx of Californians. They come in cash rich, selling their overpriced Cali homes. They drive up property values and then immediately begin the process of voting to halt development.
I have a house outside of Durango. Same situation. Now they have started building eye sore "condominiums" along the rivers and mountains for more affordable housing. Meanwhile, they live in beautiful houses in the tony areas north of Durango.
Californians are like locusts.
It is a disability with me. I look at a page and before I read anything my eye goes straight to whatever errors are on the page. I can’t read it until I mentally correct them.
You probably learned to read during the same era I did. You know, back when the schools actually taught the language as it's fundamentally constructed.
I have the same affliction as you do. Simple errors in spelling and punctuation have stuck out like a sore thumb to me since I was a kid in elementary school.
The liberalism here is a bit different from California's. I think it is more utilitarian. Liberals here mostly voted for Obama for affirmative action and the myth that he wants to help women and the middle class. Liberal Californians that I have the misfortune of working are more utopian They believe in the dictatorship by the scientific / technological elite. I think that's why they are so obsessed with central planning.
I suspect so. My grammar school years(the 50s) were passed in a Calvert System private school for Americans in Istanbul. I was an average student. After I got home I was so far ahead of everyone else that when I hit Algebra in high school it almost got me because I had not had to study for my straight As for three years and the tools were rusty. I got more history and everything else in what was known in the States as "social Studies" than I got in the rest of my public school career. As I look back on the schools in Florida and Virginia that I attended to 1964 I know that they were much better than anything now.
My wife is a primary teacher here in NW Florida where the schools have always been 10 years behind those in the northern part of the country. That used to be a liability. Now it is a relative blessing.
C'mon. That is the (upper middle class) American way. If these people voted for conservative Republicans tomorrow they'd still behave the same way.
There it is. My experience is similar. I started kindergarten in 1958 in the US Army school system, and continued until late 1966 when my parents divorced.
Like you, I found myself far ahead of my peers when I first attended the public schools. Their curriculum was so far behind the comparable grade levels in the military schools, that I coasted in neutral for a couple of years before having to seriously apply myself again.
I never did lose the lead I had on my public school peers. When I left high school, I was testing at a second year college level.
Limousine liberals who live off daddy's trust fund absolutely hate and loathe anybody who has worked their way up from the lower classes. Yes, there are quite a few limousine liberals who went to a nice college and never really had to work a day in their lives. They will spend the rest of their lives lounging at Starbucks sipping a caramel macchiato in their stylish loafers while pecking around the internet on their MacBook Pros, with no particular place to go.
People in the lower classes who have failed to move up do indeed resent those who have escaped the life of housing projects and watching mindless sitcoms in darkened rooms with bowls of cheese doodles while waiting for their EBT cards to get refreshed.
We are doomed. But some of us are beautiful.
I hear ya in not wanting all the poor in your neighborhood, but the ‘burbs are really very poor places for the poor and the handicapped. Far better to have public transportation and walkable access to jobs, stores, schools, doctors appointments, parole officers, and so forth.
The author seems to avoid the elephant of commonality between the two groups.
Both disdain the work necessary to build wealth.
IE, they’re both LAZY.
“...I’ll just say that I’ll be more sympathetic to your argument if you are willing to let me put Section 8 housing next door to you.”
I lived next to section 8 housing in Stockton CA for 8 years and I guarantee you there were no rich liberals living anywhere near - just working people. They did come by for the drugs, however. I also don’t think I ever saw you come by, but I may be mistaken.
I think the point is that Boulder is a city of hypoctites hiding behind the veneer of “preservation”. Of course, every county or city has the right to preserve its heritage as it sees fit. It is rich liberals using their money and influence to engineer us to shield themselves from the effects of their assinine policies that is the outrage.
Here's video of this in action inside OWS at Zucotti Park. Scroll down a bit. Sorry, you'll have to see a few moments of Jon Stewart before the good stuff.
Same here.
“Rich liberals’ other coup is convincing the poor that living in squalor and deliberately eschewing modern conveniences like the flush toilet is a sign of virtue.”
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I’m a 1944 war baby and I grew up in “squalor” and I’ll be damned if I wouldn’t rather live that way again than have all these flippin’ modern conveniences and live in the asylum this nation has become.
I take your point but the point is that the upper class have convinced the middle class that the only moral path is to impoverish oneself. The OWS idiots believed this . They believed they were protesting rich capitalists when they were simply doing the bidding of rich leftists.
“Californians are like locusts”
No. Those are the same locusts that came to California years ago and destroyed it. They are just doing what locusts do. They came from all over the country.
Judging from some of the videos I wonder if most of those OWS idiots even knew WHAT they believed. Most seemed to lack the ability to form even one meaningful sentence, let alone express a belief system, give them a chance to say a hundred words and they contradicted themselves multiple times.
I used to see a newspaper comic a long time back that featured a little boy who would go outside to fetch the paper for his mother or something equally as simple and he would walk all over the neighborhood and get into all kinds of little adventures before making his way back to home. The ramblings of the OWS bunch were the verbal equivalent of that.
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