The luxury of liberalism
Posted by Ron Coleman on March 21, 2009
Evan Sayet, per John Hawkins:
[W]hen you’re young and you’re on the college campuses and you don’t have a job, you’re not paying taxes. You’re not starting a business. You don’t have to worry about environmental policies that are ridiculous.
You’re living on these college campuses where no matter how much you binge drink, no matter how much you projectile vomit, no matter how much you go wild for the cameras in Cancun and strip naked, the next day you wake up on a campus with lush manicured lawns. You wake up in an ivory covered two room mansion. You wake up and somebody else has
bought your food, cooked your food, serves you your food, and when you’re finished, cleans your dishes for you. . . .Then you have the other side that you mentioned, the celebrities who have been retarded at the age of the child by their fabulous wealth. These are people who never have to recognize right and wrong, better and worse. They don’t have to make decisions in which those have consequences. You know, of course, Bruce Springsteen doesn’t have to choose between putting money away for his retirement or spending it now. He can spend it now and have hundreds of millions for retirement too.
Susan Sarandon doesn’t have to choose between not getting a new car this year because the rent may go up. She buys lots of houses and lots of new cars. But, []celebrities [are] isolated from the consequences of their beliefs by their money. This goes to professors as well that are on the left at college campuses. They can’t get fired no matter how bad they are at their job. That isolates them from the need to be smart. It isolates from the need to be right. It isolates from the need to be good.
Well, I guess they have to have been good, or smart, at some point. And I don’t know if Bruce is that rich. But by and large I like his point.
James H said
There’s a certain luxury to strains of conservatism, too. You look at somebody who has seven figures or more in the bank and an annual income in the mid six figures, and he doesn’t have to worry that much about policies that benefit the poor. Which is not to minimize the conservative political philosophy. It’s just worth pointing out the converse of Hawkins’ point.
In a couple places (I don’t recall where, unfortunately), I’ve seen an interesting thesis — that American politics consists of class warfare not between the rich and the poor, but between two different groups of elites, each of which has a different set of priorities.
Food for thought.
Ron Coleman said
Yes, and someone raised this elsewhere. In fact, however, we can posit substantial support for both conservative and liberal policies among wealthy, middle class and poor people. The point made in the article is not completely unrelated to money, but it is more about the way the likes of academics and movie stars are divorced in so many ways from the effects of the policies they promote, in ways — see Wall Street — that even wealthy people are not.