The oldest fraud

[R.A. Hettinga]

<http://www.townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/printts20041105.shtml>

Townhall.com

The oldest fraud
Thomas Sowell (back to web version) | Send

November 5, 2004

 Election frauds are nothing new and neither are political frauds in
general. The oldest fraud is the belief that the political left is the
party of the poor and the downtrodden.

 The election results in California are only the latest evidence to give
the lie to that belief. While the state as a whole went for Kerry, 55
percent versus 44 percent for Bush, the various counties ranged from 71
percent Bush to 83 percent Kerry. The most affluent counties were where
Kerry had his strongest support.

 In Marin County, where the average home price is $750,000, 73 percent of
the votes went for Kerry. In Alameda County, where Berkeley is located, it
was 74 percent Kerry. San Francisco, with the highest rents of any major
city in the country, gave 83 percent of its votes to Kerry.

  Out where ordinary people live, it was a different story. Thirty-six
counties went for Bush versus 22 counties for Kerry, and usually by more
balanced vote totals, though Bush went over 70 percent in less fashionable
places like Lassen County and Modoc County. If you have never heard of
them, there's a reason.

 It was much the same story on the votes for Proposition 66, which would
have limited the "three strikes" law that puts career criminals away for
life. Affluent voters living insulated lives in places well removed from
high-crime neighborhoods have the luxury of worrying about whether we are
not being nice enough to hoodlums, criminals and terrorists.

 They don't like the "three strikes" law and want it weakened. While most
California voters opposed any weakening of that law, a majority of the
voters in the affluent and heavily pro-Kerry counties mentioned wanted us
to stop being so mean to criminals.

  This pattern is not confined to California and it is not new. There were
limousine liberals before there were limousines. The same pattern applies
when you go even further left on the political spectrum, to socialists and
communists.

 The British Labor Party's leader in the heyday of its socialist zealotry
was Clement Attlee, who grew up in a large home with servants -- and this
was not the only home his family owned. Meanwhile, Margaret Thatcher's
family ran a grocery store and lived upstairs over it.

 While the British Labor Party was affiliated with labor unions, it was the
affluent and the intellectuals in the party who had the most left-wing
ideologies and the most unrealistic policies. In the years leading up to
World War II, the Labor Party was for disarmament while Hitler was arming
Germany to the teeth across the Channel.

 Eventually, it was the labor union component of the party that insisted on
some sanity, so that Britain could begin preparing to defend itself
militarily -- not a moment too soon.

 When Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto, they
were a couple of spoiled young men from rich families. All their talk about
the working class was just talk, but it appealed to other such young men
who liked heady talk.

 As Engels himself put it, when the Communist group for whom the Manifesto
was written was choosing delegates, "a working man was proposed for
appearances sake, but those who proposed him voted for me." This may have
been the first rigged election of the Communist movement but it was
certainly not the last.

 All sorts of modern extremist movements, such as the Weathermen in the
United States or the Bader-Meinhof gang in Germany, have attracted a
disproportionate number of the affluent in general and the intellectuals in
particular.

  Such people may speak in the name of the downtrodden but they themselves
are often people who have time on their hands to nurse their pet notions
about the world and their fancies about themselves as leaders of the poor,
saviors of the environment or whatever happens to be the Big Deal du jour.

 Osama bin Laden is not someone embittered by poverty. He is from a very
rich family and has had both the time to nurse his resentments of the West
and the money to organize terrorists to lash out in the only way that can
give them any significance.

 The belief that liberal, left-wing or extremist movements are for the poor
may or may not be the biggest fraud but it is certainly the oldest.

-- 
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R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an
intellectual could ignore or evade it." -- Thomas Sowell