Joe the Plumber as Kulak

Joe the Plumber, what have you done? Merely scratch the scab off an eight century old sore in western society. Right there on camera – with millions watching and John McCain ready to pounce.
Not that Joe turns out to be a great exemplar for the social class he represents. He isn’t even a licensed plumber, he may not have the money to buy a business, he owes taxes on his home and he may be a bit more talk than do. But he opened up an ancient divide, in plain sight, forcing us all to look at it.
It’s as old as the founding of the first European university; it’s as new as the current presidential campaign. It goes to the core of the liberal/conservative divide. It lies at the root of town and gown, it’s why people call Obama and Hilary elitists. It provides both socialist and capitalist their political ammunition.
Joe brought up the division between the owner class and those who make their living by salary, commission, hourly wage and profession. Those who make their living by drawing a fee as a professional (lawyer, physician, professor) and those who do unskilled labor of the meanest sort stand united in their fear and distrust of those who, merely by money, own the business.
Joe dreams – out loud and in Obama’s face—of stepping into that owner class. He said so – on camera—in the face of a man who epitomizes the non-owning class. Obama is a professional man, educated at one of our finest universities.
Contempt for people like Joe the Plumber is bred into the bones of a man like Barak Obama –or any other well educated political liberal. It’s as if touching the deed to one’s own small business would hopelessly soil the hands.
(Once a business becomes as large as, say, the Kennedy holdings, Averell Harriman’s or Jay Rockefeller’s, it doesn’t matter. Holdings their size become the American equivalent of a dukedom and are more than respectable in liberal circles. It’s the petite bourgeois that are despised. That’s Joe’s crime – he aspires to become a small business owner.)
It’s an attitude we pick up from Medieval Europe –when a student whose only claim to attend a university came from his daddy’s money, not his title or land holdings was disdained. If he was at university merely because he could pay tuition, he was given the official label of “without nobility” or (Sine NOBilis) and held in appropriate low esteem.
If daddy held a title (duke, baron, earl, so forth—in modern times, a profession or high salaried job as opposed to a plumbing shop) you were respectable.
That’s a strange point of view for an American. It was precisely the ambition of men like Joe the Plumber that created the American empire and the American standard of living. People like Joe created the myth that American streets were paved with gold.
In fact the United States represents the first group of people to come out of Europe in over a thousand years who valued themselves in terms of money – not birth or professional status. For good or ill, that’s who we really are –a society driven by those with money and those who want to get it.
We are, like Joe the Plumber – and John McCain’s wife– a money economy.
Our hourly laborers, our professionals, our salarymen (to use the expressive Japanese term) often unite with political liberals to view the “owner class” as an enemy. John McCain understood that in Wednesday’s debate. As Napoleon sneered about England, we truly are a nation of shopkeepers.
Barack Obama isn’t at all comfortable with that. His discomfort shows – when he’s face to face with Joe or when he makes snide remarks about “small town Americans”. That’s why some people think he is an elitist. No more so than anyone else who despises small businessmen.
And, thankfully, he’s closer to a socialist who merely feels that small businessmen should be penalized for their ownership by extra taxation. He’s nowhere near the point of Russian communists who felt small business and land owners (Kulaks) ought to be executed en masse.
Just be aware, at the core of the liberal democratic program Is a real form of socialism. You may approve of it or not, you may feel that socialism of one sort or another is an idea whose time has come--just recognize it for what it is.