Fungible Convictions

Democrat Jim Webb was elected the new senator from Virginia. During his campaign and immediately after, opinionators called attention to how damn conservative Webb is. Just yesterday Bloomberg columnist Andrew Ferguson called Webb “the most deeply conservative national Democrat since Grover Cleveland.”

Which makes the Daily Kos post below (lifted whole-hog but also linked here) about Jim Webb’s “Class Struggle” piece in the Wall Street Journal so very entertaining:

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Boy, that Jim Webb. Such a conservative!

The most important–and unfortunately the least debated–issue in politics today is our society’s steady drift toward a class-based system, the likes of which we have not seen since the 19th century. America’s top tier has grown infinitely richer and more removed over the past 25 years. It is not unfair to say that they are literally living in a different country. Few among them send their children to public schools; fewer still send their loved ones to fight our wars. They own most of our stocks, making the stock market an unreliable indicator of the economic health of working people. The top 1% now takes in an astounding 16% of national income, up from 8% in 1980. The tax codes protect them, just as they protect corporate America, through a vast system of loopholes.

Straight out of Conscience of a Conservative, isn’t it?

Then there’s this bit, channeling the Heritage Foundation to a “t”.

Incestuous corporate boards regularly approve compensation packages for chief executives and others that are out of logic’s range. As this newspaper has reported, the average CEO of a sizeable corporation makes more than $10 million a year, while the minimum wage for workers amounts to about $10,000 a year, and has not been raised in nearly a decade. When I graduated from college in the 1960s, the average CEO made 20 times what the average worker made. Today, that CEO makes 400 times as much.

In the age of globalization and outsourcing, and with a vast underground labor pool from illegal immigration, the average American worker is seeing a different life and a troubling future. Trickle-down economics didn’t happen. Despite the vaunted all-time highs of the stock market, wages and salaries are at all-time lows as a percentage of the national wealth. At the same time, medical costs have risen 73% in the last six years alone. Half of that increase comes from wage-earners’ pockets rather than from insurance, and 47 million Americans have no medical insurance at all.

I thought this part was Grover Norquist speaking. I had to doublecheck to make sure that this was, indeed, an essay by Jim Webb:

This ever-widening divide is too often ignored or downplayed by its beneficiaries. A sense of entitlement has set in among elites, bordering on hubris. When I raised this issue with corporate leaders during the recent political campaign, I was met repeatedly with denials, and, from some, an overt lack of concern for those who are falling behind. A troubling arrogance is in the air among the nation’s most fortunate.

And this part is so conservative, that I almost confused it for a Rush Limbaugh rant:

The politics of the Karl Rove era were designed to distract and divide the very people who would ordinarily be rebelling against the deterioration of their way of life. Working Americans have been repeatedly seduced at the polls by emotional issues such as the predictable mantra of “God, guns, gays, abortion and the flag” while their way of life shifted ineluctably beneath their feet. But this election cycle showed an electorate that intends to hold government leaders accountable for allowing every American a fair opportunity to succeed.

With this new Congress, and heading into an important presidential election in 2008, American workers have a chance to be heard in ways that have eluded them for more than a decade. Nothing is more important for the health of our society than to grant them the validity of their concerns. And our government leaders have no greater duty than to confront the growing unfairness in this age of globalization.

Man, we blew it by supporting Jim Webb. Here we were, thinking we were getting a Democrat. But since the media has told us that Jim Webb is so conservative, because, er, he opposes gun control, we are now stuck with Republican in sheep’s clothing.

Alas…

Next up, Jon Tester and his secret membership in the John Birch Society.

Update: A friend in the labor movement writes me:

This is the bluntest appeal on behalf of working class Americans, combined with a scathing critique of the inequities of American society, I’ve heard from any Senator in years, maybe since the death of Wellstone. Edwards/Webb, Obama/Webb, Richardson/Webb in ’08–this guy is a MAJOR key to bring back white men to the Democratic party. I wish we had a dozen of him!

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[Jim Webb: "Class Struggle" published in the Wall Street Journal]