The latest poll from Monmouth University, released on Tuesday, reveals the extent to which the Biden administration’s economic attack on the middle class is succeeding.
When nearly 1,000 Americans were asked this question in late June, “How much have each of the following groups benefited from President Biden’s policies so far — have they benefited a lot, a little, or not at all?” only seven percent said that “middle class families” benefited “a lot,” while 54 percent said they benefited “not at all.”
More than four out of ten respondents told the pollster they are “struggling to remain where [they] are financially,” while only nine percent said their financial situation was “stable.”
A majority — 57 percent — said that the actions of the federal government over the past six months have hurt their families, while just eight percent said they have helped them.
When asked, “Would you say things in the country are going in the right direction, or have they gotten off on the wrong track?” just 10 percent said the country is heading in the right direction, while 88 percent said Biden had put the country “on the wrong track.”
Columnist Liz Peek opined at Fox News that “Americans are furious, despondent, and fed up with … Joe Biden. They agree: the country has gone off the rails and the president seems utterly incapable of fixing what’s wrong.”
Peek is looking at the Biden administration through a sympathetic lens: he’s doing the best he can, but he “seems utterly incapable.” In other words, he really means well, but he’s getting bad advice.
However, the proper lens is the one provided by Marx and Engels in their Communist Manifesto:
The [dictatorship of] the proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from [the middle class], to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state.
Lenin wrote that “whoever conceives of the transition to Socialism without the suppression of [the middle class], is not a Socialist.… It is essential to suppress the [middle class].”
The reason is simple: the middle class, when thriving, presents a nearly insurmountable obstacle to those working to establish a dictatorship. In her article “The Middle Class Must Not Fail,” Taylor Caldwell said:
The middle class made the dream of liberty a possibility, set limits on the government, fought for its constitutions, removed much of governmental privilege and tyranny, demanded that rulers obey the just laws as closely as the people, and enforced a general civic morality.
The middle class in America is known for its self-reliance, its independence, its belief in God, and its strong family ties. It also provides the bulk of the capital that the private capitalist system needs to operate.
The Biden attack on the middle class is showing up in slowing economic activity as the middle class pulls back from its spending, and that class’s sentiment in June reached the lowest level ever recorded. The economy is now in recession, with two straight quarters of negative economic growth. Jobless claims are rising, and companies who were hiring are now laying off workers. Stocks have had their worst first six months since 1970.
The attack is showing up at the gas pump, too, aided and abetted by Biden’s regime restricting oil and gas production and now imposing new ozone rules that will cut oil production in the Permian Basin.
And the Institute for Supply Management (ISM) just reported its manufacturing index dropped in May, along with a major decline in new orders and a decrease in supplier deliveries.
The middle class is increasingly unhappy about Biden’s attack. The Monmouth University study is hardly an outlier — the Trafalgar Group and Quinnipiac University polling show Biden’s approval rating in the middle 30s, while its disapproval rating is approaching six out of ten of those polled.
Let’s have no more talk of Biden’s “failures.” A different lens — one that proposes that he and his handlers are doing everything they can to slow, ruin, and destroy the middle class — reveals remarkable success.
