printPBS’s Christina Bellantoni cites a poll (which I can’t locate on PBS News Hour’s usually well-organized site), according to which individuals earning less than $50,000 trended Barack Obama; those earning more than $50,000, and certainly individuals in the upper-income tax bracket, preferred Mitt Romney.
Single women and racial minorities are with Obama too. (Understandably, categories overlap.)
People with higher incomes are in the minority. They are an economically dominant minority (to paraphrase Amy Chua). The rich dominate the economy, the poor dominate the polity.
When elections roll around, the voting mass exacts its revenge against the economically dominant minority.
The economically dominant minority funds government. The rich pay most of the taxes. Obama is the candidate who, on paper at least, has promised his special constituencies more of what richer people rightfully own. Mitt Romney is the candidate who, on paper at least, promised to confiscate less private property.
That is, at least, how the voter perceived the candidates.
Answer me this, then: What kind of a right is the vote? What kind of a right gives one man control over another man’s life?
In this democracy (for we are no longer a republic), you vote not for a representative who will defend your inalienable, individual rights. Rather, if you are The Rich, whom The Left treats as a reified, rigid state-of-being, you vote defensively. And if you are The Poor, you vote, indirectly, to extract what your guy has promised you from The Other Guy.
In a word, pillage politics.