Class Warfare

With just over a week to go before the presidential debates begin, the unexpected has happened. The differences between Vice President Al Gore and Texas Gov. George W. Bush haven't narrowed, they've grown wider. At issue is the future of egalitarianism in America. Can Gore convince voters that his defense of "working families"--or, as he now prefers to call them, "hard-working, middle-class families"--constitutes a new egalitarianism?

Columnist Kenneth Khachigian would have us believe that the best thing to do with the surplus generated during the Clinton years is to give the money "back" to the people who earned it (Aug. 29). Khachigian revealed the hidden intent of Republicans in proposing a tax cut when he cited the 300 millionaires at Broadcom as people deserving of a break. That's Republican "logic." Let's not worry about education, health care, the Reagan debt or anything else as long as there is a needy millionaire out there with a tin (gold?

For all its money and modern technological wizardry, "Titanic" is an extremely old-fashioned movie that reinforces conservative ideas about the inevitability of class hierarchies and class injustice in America. Its approach to class relations, in fact, is remarkably similar to the seemingly liberal but ultimately reactionary cross-class fantasy films that accompanied the rise of the Hollywood studio system in the late 1910s and early 1920s.

On a snowy evening in late December 1905, as former Idaho Gov. Frank Steunenberg opened the wooden gate to his comfortable lamp-lit home, an explosion shattered the air, demolishing the gate, splintering yards of boardwalk and tearing the governor's body apart. The blast could be heard for miles around, and the reverberations shook the nation.

Michael Huffington ("Class Warfare Is Off-Target, Hypocritical," Column Right, Feb. 11) unwittingly put his finger on just what is wrong with American politics--the influence of a small moneyed elite both in defining the issues and in choosing candidates who espouse them. Whether it is Huffington or Steve Forbes attempting to buy high office with their fathers' money or high officeholders like Bob Dole spending money supplied by the Gallo family and Archer Daniels Midland, it is money that is talking.

Move over, Lenin. Take a seat, Marx. Make way for the new class warriors: the Republican presidential candidates of 1996. In hopes of derailing Steve Forbes, Republican rivals are resorting to class cliches. Bob Dole, Phil Gramm, Lamar Alexander and Pat Buchanan are using the sort of language that might make even a populist like David Bonior blush, referring to Forbes as "Richie Rich," "the person who goes to work in a helicopter," "one of the boys at the yacht club" or "a zillionaire."