Historically, as countries have struggled to escape general poverty and political instability – as they have developed their own economic powers and values, as they have progressed from being simple geographical areas filled with many poor people and a very small and closed group of bosses – as they have developed into full-fledged nations with opportunities and empowerment for their people – one socioeconomic factor has stood out as being both an indicator of the success of that effort to develop, and as an important factor in continuing and expanding that development. That factor is the presence of a significant and stable middle class – “middle class” usually being defined, at the low end, as those people with an income high enough such that housing and a life-supporting diet are affordable and available for them.
Adding a middle class to a developing country provides, first of all, a set of stakeholders in that country – people of means who do well enough in their lives such that they have an interest in keeping their country’s systems in place. Having a substantial proportion of society within that middle class serves to empower that desire to maintain those systems – not only in democracies (in which the large middle-class vote brings decisive advantages in elections), but in non-democratic countries (where non-elected leadership is still more comfortable when the likely rebellious portion of the population is smaller than the supportive portion.)
A middle class also provides a buffer for a country. Poor people generally live on a day-to-day basis, trying to earn enough money so that they can all eat, and have a place to sleep, and have some security from physical danger. This is precarious; a loss of a few days’ wages for a poor person can be a matter of life and death. The loss of a few days wages for a country full of poor people can disrupt entire sectors of a country, cause starvation and a loss of housing, and topple governments.
A middle class of citizens will, by definition, have some surplus wealth left over from each day once it has purchased its food and shelter, and some portion of that surplus is usually kept as a savings buffer. In a country with a large middle class, an event that causes a general loss of wages for a short term will not necessarily cause hunger or displacement or revolution – instead, the people will reach into their savings to keep them going until the wage loss ends.
So, in the path of a typical country that is progressing in its development, we see that the growth of a true middle class of citizens is of critical importance to the ultimate success of that progress. A substantial middle class helps to buffer the day-to-day, short term effects of those bad events that periodically hit every nation, and it ensures that there will be substantial popular support for whatever economic and/or social systems are in place.
A substantial middle class thus makes for a more stable society. But, what if you specifically do not want your society to be stable? What if you would like your society to rise up in revolution against its leaders and its rules and its traditions? If the poor segment of society considers the current rules and values of that society to be unfair and unfixable, but there is a substantial middle class of people doing relatively well and feeling comfortable with its social rules and values, any revolutionary struggle on behalf of the poor will be opposed by that middle class.
Enter Obama. He considers our society – capitalist, republican, stratified by race – to be unfair and unjust in its treatment of the lower classes of people. To him, those in our very large middle class are agents of the upper classes, out of self-interest in maintaining their comfortable existence. The middle class, because it has its buffers and resources as well as its own traditions and values which encourage self-sufficiency and which foster the ideal of the possibility of upward mobilty – i.e., hope for the future – this middle class becomes the predominant barrier to successful revolution on behalf of the poor.
If Obama wants to reshape this country for the benefit of the poor and the unempowered, he needs to reduce the stability and inertia that the middle class both desires and provides. He needs those comfortable middle classers to lose their buffers and their safety nets and their feelings of empowerment and their appreciation for a system that has allowed them to “make it” in life, and he needs them to view the upper classes as their enemy.
So, no, he’s not acting stupidly, at least in a tactical sense. He’s reducing the middle class, which he needs to do in order to get his revolution going.
And, yes, he’s acting stupidly, in a strategic sense, because he wants a revolution that will take us into a social and economic order that has never worked for more than a small portion of any society that has attained it.
That he is willing to cause, for millions, the pain, disruption, and violent death that has always accompanied such radical revolutionary change says much about him. Add to that his unconcern for the vast damage that he is doing to the lives of millions through his economic, environmental, and social “executive-order” changes, and you begin to get a picture of who Obama really is.
“The sociopath is that truly self-absorbed individual with no conscience or feeling for others and for whom social rules have no meaning.” The sociopath pursues his own interests and goals with little or no concern for others – indeed, showing little understanding that “others” even actually exist.
I believe that B Obama is a true sociopath.
