Status is a positional good - there really seems to be a zero sum game at work in status hierarchies (if one person gains status, it is as measured against the other members of that hierarchy who lose status). This is the vise in which the Left now finds itself: as more and more of their support comes from urban, white collar workers - many of whom find themselves in jobs that have modest pay, like school teachers or government clerks - then seeing higher pay for "lower status" jobs like the trades, mining, and manufacturing (and the resulting higher financial status) is a psychological blow for their core base of supporters.Queensland won the election for the conservative Liberal party, not because of what they did but rather because of what Labor didn’t do. Labor didn’t stand up for its heartland in the face of the Adani protests. Not only that but labor has failed to understand that its traditional working class voters in outback mining towns are more and more in a high income bracket, a situation that is only a fairly recent development. When tradies are on a cool 250K pay packet then Labor’s class warfare tax brackets suddenly don’t have quite the appeal that they once had.This culminated in the election campaign when a worker at the Gladstone Port in Queensland politely quizzed Shorten on what he was going to do for workers who are now finding themselves in a high tax bracket. Shorten fluffed the question but his real troubles began the next day when the worker had his contract terminated by the company for daring to ask the great Labor leader an awkward question.Labor has been infected by the Green mind virus and assumed that the majority of Australia would vote like inner-city Melbourne. But with the working class now often making more money than inner-city lefties, a threat to their new found livelihoods in the form of stopping a major coal mine was just the tip of the iceberg, as Labor intended to roll out radical Green proposals to go 100% renewable energy in Australia.
I mean, here you are with all this student debt for your Masters in Education and some low-life deplorable coal miner is making twice as much as you?
The Left has a built-in preference for policies that will damage the trades, mining, and manufacturing, so that the Left's core support base will be relatively better off as the people in these "deplorable" jobs lose income and status. Of course, this doesn't do a thing to raise the incomes of the Left's core support base, but nobody ever said that cognitive dissonance ever lead to rational outcomes.
What is a disaster for the Left (in Australia and world wide) is that the Deplorables have caught on to the game, and are now voting as a bloc against the Left. It's self-defense - there's no ideological congruence with "conservative" parties, but that actually makes it worse for the Left: acting in self-interest is a much stronger predictor of outcome than ideology.
And so the Left keeps losing elections that are "unlosable" - BREXIT, Trump, Brazil, Italy ... the list goes on and on. The Green Agenda is toxic at the polls.
Quite frankly, the only places you see success for the Greens is at isolated local levels where there is essentially a single party state - California, New York, a few other places. Unsurprisingly, these are the places facing the biggest fiscal crisis as productive (read: tax paying) members of the Deplorables decamp to friendlier locales. If anything, this accelerates the coming collapse. New York and California Democrats are getting short term psychological benefits for their core supporters at the cost of long term lower incomes for those same supporters.
Hey, nobody ever said that cognitive dissonance lead to rational outcomes.
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Status is a positional good - there really seems to be a zero sum game at work in status hierarchies (if one person gains status, it is as measured against the other members of that hierarchy who lose status).
The Left sees everything as a zero-sum game; it's ingrained into their very basis of thought. If one person is doing well, it's always portrayed as being at the expense of someone else.
You can tell also by the language they use. They never want to go after "people who earn more than $xxx per year", which barring layoffs and retirement are a pretty consistent bunch; the people who made over $250k last year are pretty likely to do the same this year. No, the Left always targets "the [top] 1%".
But who is in the top 1%? It changes daily; whenever someone advances into the top 1%, someone else is booted out. (It's the same with the bottom 1% -- every time someone advances out of that bracket, someone else falls in through no mistake of their own -- but they never talk about that part.) The only way to expand the top 1% is to dramatically increase the population (and it's the Left always saying we have too many people already), but that also increases the bottom 1% (again, they never talk about that part).
We point out that in a capitalist system everyone benefits from a strong economy -- "A rising tide lifts all boats" -- but because the Left thinks in zero-sum terms they literally cannot comprehend it.
Look at this, an Australian Joe The Plumber.
This is a lot more cogent analysis of the Australian election than the conservative triumphalism that I see elsewhere. The Australian "conservatives" wouldn't even make RINO status over here. It was the leftist totalitarians who gave them the victory.
Archer sums it up quite well.
The object lesson: Thou shalt not covet.
Right on. Might have to share that.
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