The Art of Class War

While many stunned Republicans still wallow in handwringing and second-guessing after President Obama’s stolen re-election, the progressive offensive is gaining momentum. The Democrats are stepping up the class warfare that is the heart and soul of their us-versus-them strategy to pit the oppressed 99% against the heartless capitalists of the 1%.

Check out, for example, the unabashedly named Wage Class War website, launched only a month ago and administered by longtime progressive activists Robert Borosage and Roger Hickey. A former New Left radical and Director of the Institute for Policy Studies, Borosage founded and currently chairs the Progressive Majority political action committee. He is also an editor at The Nation and a regular contributor to The American Prospect, both progressive publications.

If you click on Wage Class War’s “About” link, you are taken to the website for the Campaign for America's Future (CAF). Borosage and Hickey co-founded CAF in 1996 as “the strategy center for the progressive movement. Our goal is to forge the enduring progressive majority needed to realize the America of shared prosperity and equal opportunity that our country was meant to be.” Each year, CAF holds a “Take Back America” conference which the organization describes as “a catalyst for building the infrastructure to ensure that the voice of the progressive majority is heard.” “We are the 99%,” the conference page proclaims.

Borosage and Hickey’s WageClassWar.org boldly states at the top of its home page that “in the future it won’t be values voters, angry white men or soccer moms that win elections. It will be class war.” The site celebrates what they deem to be the class war successes of the 2012 election, which it describes as “the first of the class warfare elections of our new Gilded Age of extreme inequality.” Those victories include Senate wins by Elizabeth “No one gets rich on their own” Warren and the socialist-leaning Sherrod Brown, and of course, Obama’s re-election.

Warren’s page on the site asserts that her campaign “established her populist credentials and defined the theme for the campaign – the people over the powerful.” Her page prominently features the YouTube video in which she rants illogically that factory owners “moved your goods to market on roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police and fire forces that the rest of us paid for,” and so on. As if factory owners didn’t also pay taxes for those services – but acknowledging that would undermine her demagoguery. Her page conveniently omits mention of how she exploited Harvard’s diversity program and Native Americans as well by claiming minority status as a law professor, the comically thin evidence for which was her 1/32 Cherokee heritage and her grandfather’s high cheekbones.

Speaking of diversity, the Wage Class War site ridicules Republicans as a “stale, male, pale, Southern-based party in a nation of diversity,” and demonized Mitt Romney as “inescapably the candidate of, by and for the 1 percent. He came from the world of finance and carried their agenda.” Curiously, the website describes Obama as “neither by temperament nor predilection a populist class warrior,” but acknowledged that when “faced with potential defeat, he turned to what works.” And what worked for him in 2012, according to the site, was “his calls for raising the taxes of the wealthy” and “repeatedly portraying Mitt Romney as a walking example of the out-of-touch elite.”

Borosage states that “more and more of our elections going forward will feature class warfare – only this time with the middle class fighting back.” But as FrontPage’s Daniel Greenfield points out, “the only middle class he wants fighting back is the one that holds down government jobs and feeds off the working middle class… It’s the Russian economy with an American flag and a framed photo of Obama in the background.”

That’s what progressives want (minus the American flag, I suppose). They don’t want prosperity – they want “fairness.” They don’t want freedom – they want dependence. And even in victory – in fact, especially in victory – they don’t want coexistence, regardless of what their Prius bumper stickers say. They want total domination over the right, and our eventual extinction. Because the beating heart of the radical left is totalitarianism.

How do we combat that? As Sun Tzu advised in his renowned The Art of War,

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.

Unless the right wants to keep succumbing in every battle, we must not only understand the ruthless nature of the enemy, but re-examine ourselves and commit to our fighting spirit. Power-lusting, Alinsky-trained, class war radicals like Borosage, Hickey, Warren, and Obama control the Democratic party today. They are “in it to win it” by any means necessary, and maddeningly, the Republican party seems woefully ill-prepared to defeat them. We’re still playing by Marquess of Queensbury rules, trying to take the high road, like the British troops of Revolutionary times, marching in bright red uniforms and tight formation down the center of the trail, forming one big fat target for the American guerrillas to pick them off from behind rocks and trees.

We are in a civil war for the soul and future of the nation. Progressives have been waging this war for a long time, and Obama’s re-election confirms that we are now officially no longer a country of two parties who are united in the goal of a greater and more prosperous America, just divided about how to achieve it; instead, America is divided between those who proudly want the American Experiment to succeed, and those who are hell-bent on perverting it and transforming our homeland into a Euro-socialist wasteland. Until the right acknowledges this and responds with the ferocity and vision of winners, the class warfare legions of the left will march toward total victory.

(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 12/24/12)