The Democrats’ Dilemma

Joel Kotkin reports:

As liberals, of course, the new class and its elite occasionally complain about the growing gap between the rich and everyone else. Yet contemporary liberalism’s strongest bastions lie in cities and metropolitan regions such as New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco where, according to a recent Brookings Institution survey, inequality is the most pronounced. All these places have been losing middle-class families who no longer can afford to live there.

In this way our greatest liberal cities are becoming centers of the stratified neo-Victorian class structure that economic liberals purportedly despise. One statistic that speaks volumes: the San Francisco, Washington, New York, and Boston regions all boast the highest percentage among major U.S. metros of people who earn money in classic plutocratic fashion: from stocks, bonds, and rents.

These factors may make it difficult for Democrats to govern as the party of what used to be called “economic justice,” even given the presence of a widening gap between the rich and the middle class. It’s revealing that, rather than express outrage at the huge payouts to the Wall Street elite, Democrats generally prefer to demonize oil company executives, whose pay, if more than generous, pales in comparison to that earned by the traders and speculators.

A great one from Joel Kotkin.