Is a message of class warfare a good idea for Democrats?
- Strongly agree
- Agree
- Somewhat agree
- Neither agree nor disagree
- Somewhat disagree
- Disagree
- Strongly disagree
0 voters
What class are they supposed to represent? The managerial/administrative class?
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I think in 2021 class warfare is good IF we are talking about billionaires vs. everyone else. Management vs. labor will always be relevant but badly misses the root causes of the world’s problems today.
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The growing class war is owners (and not just landlords) vs renters. Their interests are quite different and it shows up in a lot of conflicts. More generally, anyone with wealth who has an interest in all the things that go along with that (harder to get rid of debt, low inflation, police) and people with very little assets.
The political interests of someone with $5M aren’t that much different than the interests of a billionaire. Low taxes. Low inflation. Keep up property values, ie keep the dirty masses under control.
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I disagree. You will find many more people in the net worth $5 million class that are progressive and want a fair society. Because those people are much more likely to be relatively normal.
A person can get that rich just by being a doctor married to a teacher for example. On the other hand, being a billionaire requires you to either be effectively royalty by inheritance, or an sociopathic capitalist. The billionaire class if a fundamentally different beast than the millionaire class.
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A bunch of billionares are “liberal” too. Just don’t say “defund the police” to billionares or millionaires.
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My experience, admittedly in Australia, is 99% of people of the millions net worth range are from rich families and it is generational wealth. All say they are progressive but its just social issues that don’t personally affect them. They’d lose their minds over any even moderate wealth redistribution.
Once you get that rich, your value is usually tied up in property, whether it be real property, such as land, or financial instruments, such as stocks. They have a shared political interest in government being more a protector of property rights and value than a protector of lives.
If you don’t have that wealth, your value is tied up more in your labor and person, so you have more of a shared political interest in government as a protector of people.
I’m not going to go so far as to echo the anarchic notion that property is theft, but I am going to say that our current system overvalues the right to property vs other rights.
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It’s almost as if net worth alone isn’t a good indicator of moral character. 
It’s more likely to be the inverse.
That’s crazy talk.
I hear you, I’m just saying that priorities need to be set. Millionaires need to pay their fair share, etc., but the big drivers of social problems are at the billionaire level. Starting a fight with millionaires without addressing the insanely out of control influence of billionaires is futile, IMO.
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How do you even do that? Confiscating everything over $1B won’t even get you very far and is largely tied up in non-liquid equities. Heavy taxes need to start in the millionaire range and lower. Who cares about the rhetoric?
As far as influence goes, it’s not really billionares. It’s corporations. And that should definitely be changed dramatically.
Exactly. It’s like people think they guys have a billion in cash sitting in a bank. If you seize the assets what do you do with them. Nobody to buy them cause you have seized the money and assets of anyone who could buy them.
Also the starting salary in Congress is $174k so good luck with getting dems to be all in on class warfare.
Mutual funds, pension funds, all kinds of people would buy up their stocks. There might be a glut of $100m houses, but that’s not a big deal. Stock prices would drop though and some of that “wealth” would evaporate.
What do Dem Congress members have to do with Dem class warfare messaging? None would support it anyway regardless of the salary, they by and large revel in classism.
Put strongly disagree because the Democrats are probably not really keen on pointing out that if the wages of the bottom 90% grew at the same rate as the top 1% over the past 45 years, the median wage would be 85k instead of 50k. It would be a great message if the working class was their constituency but a look at their policies and donors kind of puts a damper on that.
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As I said in the other thread. It’s pure fantasyland stuff.
I’m saying that the class warfare message will get introduced DESPITE democratic politicians. I mean having to rely on the Democratic party as a political vehicle, as opposed to starting a new party, has been discussed on the forum and the biggest barrier to progress of progressive goals is, in my opinion, the current Democratic politicians (and the cronies within the DNC and donor class).