The authors are devoutly pro-government, but they find that their focus groups \”think government is part of the problem,\” in part because \”political and economic elites are so intertwined\” as to be unaccountable. Devout believers in Keynesian deficits, the purported successes of President Obama’s 2009 stimulus package, and the imminent dangers of global warming—all of which leave their panels cold—they take refuge in what they consider a paradox: \”The only entity in the country that has any power to stand up to these people [i.e., financial elites] is the government.\” But \”if government is corrupted and has actively helped create the problem,\” then liberals are in a box, because \”if you can’t radically reform government, the Democrats are lost. And if the Democrats are lost, the middle class is lost.\” The paradox unfolded, the authors double down on their hopes for class warfare against the rich.

Stanley Kurtz’s somewhat mistitled Spreading the Wealth: How Obama Is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities blames the president, whom he described as the \”Radical-in-Chief\” in an earlier book, for the plight of the middle class. Radical-in-Chief was a painstakingly researched account of Obama’s long association with leftists, including the heirs of Saul Alinsky. Spreading the Wealth pulls Obama’s Alinskysim into the present by describing the president’s ongoing relationship with a group of redistributionists who blame urban poverty on suburban prosperity. Their solution is \”regionalism\”—absorbing the suburbs into the ailing cities, thus affording the urban poor greater fiscal and cultural resources.