Hellbent on relieving the democratic guilt imposed by the economic inequality that his own policies harden into a political system, only at his expense and ours can Obama break Plato’s curse: that the city ruled by the love of wealth will be “not one, but two, a city of the rich and a city of the poor, dwelling together, and always plotting against one another.”
My column this week at The Daily Caller throws a lance at the inequality myth the president is peddling to Americans of every class:
the president thinks he can claw back some of the middle and working classes by promising to lift up the wretched at the expense of the wealthy. Tightening that gap, he imagines, will get Americans outside his core constituency to feel like they’re part of something bigger than themselves. And sure enough, they will be. It’s called big government.
What Obama won’t say is that his transparent desire to redistribute wealth for its own sake is carefully calibrated never to bring real change. It will never dislodge our rather un-American overclass and underclass, because both a microscopic elite and a huge mass of wards of the state serve the interests of big government in general and the Democratic Party in particular.