CLASS WARFARE? TELL ME ABOUT IT

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Political strategists talk about "wedge issues," meaning issues that pry voters away from their traditional allegiances. Welfare is the classic wedge issue. Conservative welfare reformers may say their primary concern is to liberate the poor from the shackles of their underclass culture, and some of them may even believe it. But only the most naive or cynical among them would deny that the political potency of the welfare issue derives mostly from resentment of the poor as leeches on society, not from sympathy for their plight. This resentment may be justified or it may not, but encouraging and exploiting it have been wildly successful Republican strategies.

Why is it illegitimate class warfare for the Democrats to try to portray the Republican Party as the handmaiden of the financial elite, but not class warfare for the Republicans to tar the Democrats as creatures of a cultural elite? If the Republicans feel free to exploit resentment of the poor, why shouldn't the Democrats feel free to exploit resentment of the rich?

Class warfare does seem like a fusty foreign concept. But in a slightly different guise it dominates not only American politics but much of American society as well. That guise is the cult of victimization, about which much has been written (such as Time critic Robert Hughes' wonderful book Culture of Complaint). By now the game is to accuse others of playing the victim card, and then to trump them. Blacks and women having had their turn, it is apparently the moment for white males to enjoy semiofficial permission to feel sorry for themselves-and to demand redress. This is a class war everyone is fighting, and no one is suing for peace. Maybe it's a job for Jimmy Carter.