Our liberal friends are nothing if not stiff-necked. As stiff-necked as “Downton Abbey’s” Earl of Grantham sitting down to dinner in white ties and tails. And they have a similar problem. How do you keep the glorious family tradition going when you are running out of money?
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It’s perfectly simple, at least for Lord Grantham. You marry a rich American. But what happens when, a generation later, you lose your entire fortune to a foolish speculation? Perfectly simple: you get your middle-class heir to cough up an inheritance from the father of the girl he dumped for the lovely Lady Mary.
Isn’t this exactly the position our liberal friends find themselves in? Here they are, nobly providing sustenance for millions of welfare state tenants, but experts are warning them that the good old liberal plantation can’t go on spewing out benefits forever.
So Lord Liberal is starting to run out of other peoples’ money. Where is the rich American heiress with the wherewithal to keep the glorious Welfare State Abbey running at full strength, with the full complement of devoted flunkeys and footmen and adoring devotees of welfare state benefits and privileges?
Not to long ago, the middle-class Matthew and the former chauffeur Tom had an idea. “Hey Bob,” they said to Robert, Lord Grantham, “let’s make the Downton Abbey estates pay their way!” Of course for Lord Grantham, this was unthinkable, for it would mean turning out loyal tenants that had been living on the Crawley lands for generations. And it would also mean admitting that he had been mismanaging the estates for decades.
“Unfortunately, Bob old chap,” the young Turks said, “if we don’t do something now, then the family will lose Downton Abbey and all its money, its power and its beautiful women.”
Or, in the memorable words of President Bush at the time of the Crash of 2008: “This sucker could go down.” He meant the good old US of A.
If you want to understand President Obama and his divisive politics and his inequality agenda, and his crony capitalism, and his harassment of conservative groups and his frequent budget crises, think of Lord Grantham and Downton Abbey.
When you’ve been sitting in the cat-bird seat of the old landed ruling class for a century or two, you start to believe that God meant you to enjoy money, power and the love of rich American women forever. And you are completely clueless when it comes to doing something to stop the whole thing going down.
Liberals have a similar problem. Attended by an obsequious media and cheered by all its loyal beneficiaries, liberals think of themselves as the intelligent and evolved ones, favored by the gods of equality, and cannot imagine the need to reform their welfare state before it runs out of money and the all the attendees and the beneficiaries turn on them as the Paris mob once turned on Robespierre.
Let’s suppose that there exist rising liberals that know they have a problem, the Matthews and the Toms biting their tongues. How are they going to get Lord Obama to save the liberal project, when he is completely oblivious of the prospect that, sooner than he thinks, “this sucker could go down?”