George Clooney and the Willful Delusion of Rich Activist Liberals

By Tom Rogan

Tuesday, April 19, 2016

George Clooney has raised tens of millions of dollars for charity, and has brought attention to great suffering in post-earthquake Haiti and the warfare-stained Sudan. This good work has helped improve and save lives. But at home, Clooney’s advocacy is less than positive. Clooney is now America’s proudest archetype of the rich activist liberal (RAL). And by funding faux-enlightened liberal populism, RALs harm low- and middle-income Americans.

RALs have it easy. Consider, for a start, the differential goods and services the wealthy consume in contrast to other Americans. While most of us — induced by reasonable quality and reliable pricing — shop at generic grocery stores, wealthier Americans are pre-disposed to boutique markets. This dynamic renders in affluent communities where wine and cheese shops, delis and businesses with higher profit margins abound.

But the dichotomy becomes relevant when you consider RAL policies. As I explained last week, higher minimum wage laws, increased regulation and greater government intrusion in the economy are negative. Reducing the economy’s growth potential and limiting positive capital investment flows, they restrain improved employment rates. Two especially strong examples stand out. First, Bernie-esque opposition to free trade, which robs low-income wallets. Second, the war on America’s energy industry, which raises energy costs and destroys thousands of new jobs.

Yet there’s also an immense arrogance to the RAL’s agenda. Consider Clooney’s comments Sunday on “Meet the Press.” Confronted about his $300,000 (per head!) fundraiser for Hillary Clinton, Clooney reacted with extraordinary hypocrisy. His fundraising, he claimed, is only a defense mechanism against conservative fundraising. Most RALs make the same absurd claim. Consider George Soros, or hedgefund billionaire and Democratic green-energy subsidy baron Tom Steyer. Having bought Democratic support for his preferred energy policies that hurt low-income Americans, Steyer retains the gall to describe his fundraising efforts as those of a “small shepherd boy.”

Of course, this arrogance is only a symptom of something else: successful liberal appropriation of wealthy civil society. Where wealth was once celebrated as a characteristic of business success, media-enabled liberals have made wealth a bogeyman trait. As in the European Union, wealthy Americans are now supposed to be subtly ashamed. But here’s the brilliant liberal catch. Having fostered this self-guilt, activists at MoveOn.org, ThinkProgress and Occupy Wall Street then offer penitence to the wealthy. “Donate to us,” they say to rich liberals, “and you can RALly in service of the people.” In return for a few hundred thousand dollars, RALs receive the laying on of hands and temporary (until the next check is due) moral salvation. And in that pleasant purgatory, liberals are then freed to sip Sancerre and admire its charismatic honesty.

But RALs should reconsider their moral self-assessment. Their policies would lead to economies drained of productive potential and buried in the metastasis of punitive regulations that smash the poor. RALs are simply modern day Marie Antoinettes. Sitting happily insulated by their wealth, they abandon the poor to eat cake. Just look at California.