Republicans have, on a regular basis, accused President Barack Obama of promoting “class warfare”, because he promotes the concept that the wealthy have been very fortunate, with the biggest tax cuts in history during the Bush and early Obama years, and must start to pay their fair share of taxes to help support the national commitments and responsibilities.
But actually, it is Rick Santorum, above all, who is promoting class warfare, by advocating an anti elitist view about the news media, colleges and universities, and liberals, blaming them for reporting what is going on, and promoting investigation of the mess created by the Bush Administration and the Republican Party during the years they controlled the national government, and advocating open inquiry and analysis and thinking, rather than accepting what we are told is the ultimate truth from a man who advocates religion in government, rather than separation of church and state.
Santorum is trying to organize blue collar whites who are not educated beyond high school and have a much higher unemployment rate against white collar workers and college educated people who have a much lower unemployment rate.
Instead of seeing that education is the road to success and the stable middle class, and despite the fact that Santorum himself has three college and university degrees and will certainly hope his own children will get a college education to advance themselves economically over a lifetime, Santorum calls educated people snobs, and Obama is blamed for promoting a better life for the future generation!
This campaign pitch of Santorum is promotion of resentment, anger, and against the role of education in attainment of life’s goals. It is sick, insane, destructive of social mobility for the future of the nation, and Santorum needs to be repudiated in a massive way by his party, but they seem unwilling to take him on, and they are therefore promoting further degradation of the middle and working classes by NOT advocating what Obama says is necessary for success–as much education as any young person can handle, rather than a drive to the bottom!
If the blue collar whites of the Midwest back Rick Santorum, they are guaranteeing their continued decline into poverty and degradation!
Santorum’s pitch is the closest to that of Pat Buchanan in 1992 and George Wallace in 1968, but he is more of a threat to be the standard bearer of a major political party, and this could, therefore, be a calamity in the making!