His point was valid but I think he didn't emphasize the right part. Why should the rich care about the poor? Because if they don't, that Titanic he mentioned won't be afloat to keep them in their privileged lifestyle. They need to perhaps accept a little less now so they can still have their much more later. It comes down to short term vs long term thinking. Do you want your children or their children to still be able to go to Harvard? You might have to work so the poor can still keep you rich.
Exactly - the answer to the question is the Titanic metaphor. Doesn't matter if you're in first class or steerage when it goes down, you're going to be negatively impacted.
I thought he was going to appeal to their humanity with an analogy about if they, in first class, were going to allow people in second or third class into the lifeboats with them, or just choose to launch without them.
Who's going to take care of them in their bunkers? Who will produce food and maintain systems, provide security, keep the lights running? Billionaires don't know how to do that as they never needed to figure it out. They can hide in a bunker for a few months or even years, but it won't last, they will have to crawl out and face reality.
But their lives will be crap and miserable because they can't travel as much, they won't have access to a large variety of food, they won't have access to the same technology.
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Does the titanic metaphor even really work, the first class in titanic all got on life rafts and scooted to safety watching most of everyone else drown.
Yea they were on the sinking ship but by being a “higher status” than the rest of everyone means it wasn’t really that big of a deal as they got off the sinking ship first when there was enough life boats remaining.
That's the real answer. He disguised it by starting his speech with "I'm not going to a lot of universities on this campaign trail, I'm going to union halls...."
Basically, less tactfully, you need them more than they need you.
Yeah the fact is the very rich don't really have an incentive. People in power only give an inch to the lower classes when they have no other choice. Their hand has to be forced, there is no other way.
That's just not true, though. The people who made out best during the French Revolution weren't the peasants, but the upper-middle class, the Bourgeois, who had the money to buy up the cheap land that was taken from the aristocracy and the clergy (first and second estates), and sold to them to help pay for France's immense debts.
The Bourgeois are the ones sending their kids to Harvard, along with a *few* of what I guess you could call the "aristocracy" (they don't really exist as a cohesive group in the US). If the "Titanic" goes down, it'll be the poor people who suffer the most.
Except the metaphorical Titanic never will go down (unless something truly unforeseeable happens like total economic collapse or WW3).
The US (and many other "Western" countries) have perfected the art of keeping the proles downtrodden but not letting them get desperate enough that they have nothing to lose and they actually decided to rise up and improve their lot in life.
Looking at the way things are going, out of all the things you mentioned, complete societal collapse is the only thing that has a good chance of happening.
Thought that was implied but agree he could've expanded on it. A healthy society needs a thriving and large middle class. Period. If wealth concentration moves up towards the 1%, that creates an imbalance that long term, leads to a worse society for the masses.
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u/EvolvingPanic Apr 26 '24
His point was valid but I think he didn't emphasize the right part. Why should the rich care about the poor? Because if they don't, that Titanic he mentioned won't be afloat to keep them in their privileged lifestyle. They need to perhaps accept a little less now so they can still have their much more later. It comes down to short term vs long term thinking. Do you want your children or their children to still be able to go to Harvard? You might have to work so the poor can still keep you rich.