Class Politics Quotes

In the political language of today, people who want to keep what they have earned are said to be greedy, while those who wish to take their earnings from them and give it to others (who will vote for them in return) show compassion.

When the only people in mainstream discourse who care about the working class are Wall Street investors, it really is time to ask where our politics went wrong.

We're seeing quite a lot of people who really would like a return to class-based politics.

The Clinton administration cared a lot about the middle class and the poor. But it also cared a lot - too much, in retrospect - about the rich.

When you have powerful unions, you have a working class that is politicized.

I was brought up a working-class Tory. I believe, to be a true socialist, you have to be a capitalist first. In my heart, I'm a socialist; in my mind, I'm a capitalist.

If people continue to feel like Democrats are looking after poor folks and Republicans are looking after rich folks and nobody is looking after me, then we don't get a lot of stuff done. And the trend lines evidence the fact that folks have gotten squeezed. And obviously, 2007, 2008 really ripped open for people how vulnerable they were.

My family got all over me because they said Bush is only for the rich people. Then I reminded them, 'Hey, I'm rich'.

Intersectionality draws attention to invisibilities that exist in feminism, in anti-racism, in class politics, so, obviously, it takes a lot of work to consistently challenge ourselves to be attentive to aspects of power that we don't ourselves experience.

It used to be that the working class, broadly speaking - Americans who worked with their hands, who worked in factories, who were not in management - were an interest group, a political interest group. And their main spokespersons were the Democrats. Their platform was the Democratic Party. And that began to change after the 1960s. Not for black or other working class Americans, but for white working class.

No class of Americans ... has ever objected ... to any amount of government meddling if it appeared to benefit that particular class.

Middle class voters are the mega-prize in American politics.

The policies of the Democratic Party have always been in cultural consonance with the culture of the working class. And, somehow, they missed that.

Nothing is more calculated to make a demagogue popular than a constantly reiterated demand for heavy taxes on the rich. Capital levies and high income taxes on the larger incomes are extraordinarily popular with the masses, who do not have to pay them.

The slaving Poor are incapable of any Principles: Gentlemen may be converted to true Principles, by Time and Experience. The middling Rank of Men have Curiosity and Knowledge enough to form Principles, but not enough to form true ones, or correct any Prejudices that they may have imbib'd: And 'tis among the middling Rank, that Tory Principles do at present prevail most in England.

Real Democrats don't abandon the middle class.

Liberals think their campaign against Wal-Mart is a way of introducing the subject of class into America's political argument, and they are more correct than they understand. Their campaign is liberalism as condescension. It is a philosophic repugnance toward markets, because consumer sovereignty results in the masses making messes. Liberals, aghast, see the choices Americans make with their dollars and their ballots and announce - yes, announce - that Americans are sorely in need of more supervision by... liberals.

Democracy is not the ideally best form of government … unless it can be so organized that no class, not even the most numerous, shall be able to reduce all but itself to political insignificance, and direct the course of legislation and administration by its exclusive class interest.

We have seen a central government promote the power of labor-union bosses, and in turn be supported by that power, until it has become entirely too much a government of and for one class, which is exactly what our Founding Fathers wanted most to prevent.

We have to expose Republicans for the frauds that they are when it comes to what they want to do for working men and women.

Democrats may want working-class white Rust Belters to have good jobs at high wages with pensions and health benefits, but they can't make them vote that way.

What I see is that the Democratic Party takes working class communities for granted, they take people of color for granted, and they just assume that we're going to turn out no matter how bland or half-stepping these proposals are.

Matter as matter rather than matter as symbol is a conscious political position, essentially Marxist.

The Democrats have failed to have a real robust message for working-class people in places like Ohio - these states that Donald Trump came in and won.

The white working class likes being pandered to even less than it likes being insulted.