The other day I was reading an essay by Victor Davis Hanson wherein he addressed the question: Why do our wealthy, liberal elite love a tax-happy, environmentally-expensive Obama? “The Discreet Charm of the Left-wing Plutocracy”, posted 11/9/09 suggests it’s a number of things, more prominently penance and big money.
In the essay, he cites Al Gore, Michael Moore, John Edwards, Ted Kennedy, Nancy Pelosi and others as the liberal elites, all of whom have a great deal of money and live like it. As Hanson pointed out, the billions Al Gore has made from his the carbon offsets business, designed to give hope to the fearful and to assuage the consciences of the guilty, fear and guilt being the result of his incessant sky is falling, global warming claims, have given him the ability to live a life quite at odds with the lifestyle he urges upon others. While we should be restricted to solar-powered, 1000 square foot homes, ride bicycles and take trains for longer journeys, Gore supports a mansion and a fleet of airplanes to jet him about the country. Michael Moore, John Edwards, Nancy Pelosi, Sean Penn and the Kennedy Dynasty share similar contradictory lifestyles. As I read of their mansions, their limousines, their jets, their jewels and clothing, their nightlife and overall high level of living juxtaposed against a rhetoric that supposedly identifies them with the poor and downtrodden — all the while disdaining “commoners” like Sarah Palin and Joe the Plummer, it occurred to me that these people are America’s version of Old World royalty.
They do whatever they want, and regard it as a given that those who are under their rule should have no say. They only have to pay their taxes, or as in olden times, their tribute and their fealty. The new royalty, who live like kings and lords of old, are justified in doing so because they are so concerned with helping the little people, the unwashed masses they want nothing to do with in the practical. Thus, a king or lord had the right to use his money to build a bunch of expensive gardens, amass an expensive collection fine art produced by the artist his court has sponsored, to go about in gold-gilt carriages with an entourage of similarly outfitted “noblemen” and who of the serfs had any right to criticize. He is the king or the lord. They are serfs. They have no rights; they have only to pay what is due.
This is what our forefathers left England to escape. They came here to be free of confiscatory taxation, taxation without representation, deals cut out of the public eye, in the salons of the wealthy and the so-called noble. Our forefathers came here to build a new nation that was not beholden to royalty, where no man was considered better than another simply because of his birth. Kings were no better, no smarter, no more deserving of respect than commoners. All were equal before the law. So it was no wonder that our first President, George Washington refused to bow to foreign royalty, a tradition continued by all presidents which followed him. Except one.
If you’d like to read Hanson’s essay, it’s here.