The Democrats' Preoccupation with Inequality

If you want to understand today's Democratic Party, a word search of the Democrats' debate last week provides a pretty clear picture. Here is how many times key words were spoken: Wall Street: 23, Tax: 20, Inequality: 9, Wealthy: 7.
Now, compare the number of times other national concerns were mentioned: ISIS: 4, Terror/ists/ism: 2, Defense: 2, Military (excluding Jim Webb): 1, Freedom: 1, Debt (national): 0, Liberty: 0, Strength: 0, Armed forces: 0, Islamist/Islamic: 0. Material inequality is the predominant concern of the Democratic Party. Indeed, material inequality has been the predominant concern of the left since Karl Marx.


Read more at Townhall.com Read More......

Obama’s Shallow Inequality Speech And The Presidency That Might Have Been

By Ben Domenech
If income inequality is the defining challenge of our time, why did President Obama spend so much time on policies unrelated to it? Why did he go down a policy path which led in the opposite direction? And why, even today, is he bypassing any possibility of brokering a bipartisan effort to combat “the defining challenge” and instead prioritizing a clumsy, tired, politically dead-end solution – minimum wage hikes – which without question has a negative effect on low-skill job creation while aiding his powerful union allies? Read more at the Federalist... Read More......

WSJ: The New American Divide

WALL STREET JOURNAL, 1/21/2012 - The ideal of an 'American way of life' is fading as the working class falls further away from institutions like marriage and religion and the upper class becomes more isolated. Charles Murray on what's cleaving America, and why.

CHARLES MURRAY: America is coming apart. For most of our nation's history, whatever the inequality in wealth between the richest and poorest citizens, we maintained a cultural equality known nowhere else in the world—for whites, anyway. "The more opulent citizens take great care not to stand aloof from the people," wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, the great chronicler of American democracy, in the 1830s. "On the contrary, they constantly keep on easy terms with the lower classes: They listen to them, they speak to them every day."

Americans love to see themselves this way. But there's a problem: It's not true anymore, and it has been progressively less true since the 1960s.

People are starting to notice the great divide. The tea party sees the aloofness in a political elite that thinks it knows best and orders the rest of America to fall in line. The Occupy movement sees it in an economic elite that lives in mansions and flies on private jets. Each is right about an aspect of the problem, but that problem is more pervasive than either political or economic inequality. What we now face is a problem of cultural inequality. Read more at WSJ...

—Mr. Murray is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. His new book, "Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010" (Crown Forum) will be published on Jan. 31.

RELATED:
Bradley Lecture by Charles Murray, February 6, 2012: Alternative Futures for a Fractured American Culture (Full video will be posted at this link within 24 hours)
AEI: Society and Culture - About the book | Murray on "Coming Apart" | How thick is your bubble? (20 question quiz) | What They're Saying About "Coming Apart" Read More......