Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
Thanks to Laurence Lewis at Daily Kos for a proper perspective on "class warfare" in this excerpt from his excellent post. Who is waging class warfare?:
It's standard operating procedure for Republicans to respond to calls for fair taxes by whining about supposed class warfare. It's standard operating procedure for Republicans to do all they can to concentrate more and more wealth and power in the hands of fewer and fewer without anyone calling it what it is. But for a little perspective on the supposed class warfare from the left, we can refer to future Sen. Al Franken's 2003 best-seller Lies And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them:
In her book A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, Barbara Tuchman writes about a peasant revolt in 1358 that began in the village of St. Leu and spread throughout the Oise Valley. At one estate, the serfs sacked the manor house, killed the knight, and roasted him on a spit in front of his wife and kids. Then, after ten or twelve peasants violated the lady, with the children still watching, they forced her to eat the roasted flesh of he husband and then killed her.
That is class warfare.
Arguing over the optimum marginal tax rate for the top one percent is not.
Of course, it's not only an outrageous smear for Republicans to accuse those seeking some measure of economic justice as waging class warfare; it's also the very definition of hypocritical. Because in the Post-Industrial Era, it's the Republicans who have been attempting a systematic dismantling of all government protections and services that help the less economically advantaged, while at the same time opposing any similar cuts that might affect the wealthiest, while at the same time continuing to promote government spending that further enriches the wealthiest. But that's not class warfare. Calling for a return to the tax rates of 1950s and 1960s—which saw the blossoming of the middle class, the construction of the national highway system, the expansion of Social Security and the creation of Medicare and Medicaid—is class warfare.
Read the entire post.