Explorations

This from a commenter, Amused Bystander, on Just One Minute:

To the Left Palin and the Plumber are not workers, they are kulaks. No inconsistency at all for the Left here. Seriously. Their only fear is that they tip their hands before they get their mitts on the level of power.

Terribly distasteful, of course, to have to pretend to listen to them while waiting in the wings, but well worth the displeasure.

The middle class is the greatest obstacle to their project; The big corporations are pushovers.

I’m not given to the easy “Marxist” comparisons, and worse, I wasn’t sure what a “kulak” is. A quick pop to Wikipedia yields:

According to Marxism-Leninism, the kulaks were a class enemy of the poorer peasants.[1] From the point of view of this theory, poor peasants and farm laborers had to be liberated by the revolution alongside the proletariat (urban workers). In addition, the planned economy required the collectivization of farms and land to develop industrialization of large-scale agricultural production. The “state of workers and farmers” desired to remove the kulaks as a class, which gave them the chance to integrate in the new classless system with equal rights. However, many resisted these changes, organizing, with the help of former tsarist military, terror against the new collectives. Many farmers and communists were killed, fields were burned, and many machine tractor stations were destroyed. In many cases this caused hunger and large problems in agriculture and to the economy of the Soviet Union. The view of many kulaks was different, as told by Mikhail Gorbachev whose family were “kulaks.” They stated they had suffered from political repressions under the rule of Joseph Stalin in the 1930s.[2]

I’ve got to say, I think he’s[1] on to something here: beyond the sense of entitlement we often see, and the not very well hidden intention to suppress other opinions, there’s an underlying resentment that I’ve always found puzzling. I think AB may have a point: the vicious response to Palin, and now “Joe the Plumber”, may have more to do than anything with the sense that they’re class traitors. They should be properly getting in line behind the True Leaders.

There’s more to that, though: people like Ramesh Ponnuru, Peggy Noonan, and David Brooks have been very very harsh about Sarah Palin. I wonder if it’s not their own reaction to the same thing: after all the Harvard degrees, and think-tank appointments, and so forth, Palin — with her cowtown degree and her second-place in the Miss Alaska project — and Joe the Plumber, are turning out to be the ones moving the political debate.

I mean, how dare they?

1. Nominal; I don’t know I’ve heard AB’s sex mentioned. [↩]