The superrich: Facing a Holocaust?

“An outbreak of whiny victimhood is ravaging some of America’s most exclusive ZIP codes,” said Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post. “In a now-infamous letter to The Wall Street Journal,” Silicon Valley billionaire Tom Perkins recently claimed there are “parallels” between Nazi Germany’s persecution of the Jews and the “progressive war on the American 1 percent.” Citing the Occupy movement and the “demonization” of millionaires in the media, Perkins warned of a potential “Kristallnacht” against the fabulously wealthy. This paranoia is not limited to one eccentric billionaire, said Philip Bump in TheWire.com. The 1 percent, it seems, is growing increasingly fearful that rhetorical class warfare will soon give way to “serious class warfare,” with the rabble erecting “French Revolution–style barricades on Park Avenue,” and perhaps chopping off some well-groomed heads.

The Kristallnacht comparison was “unfortunate,” said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. But the Left’s vitriolic responses to Perkins’s column only proved his point about “liberal intolerance.” His letter “barely scratched the surface of the War on Wealth that has spread under the Obama regime,” said Michelle Malkin in NationalReview.com. Since the financial crash of 2008, Washington liberals have “stoked bottomless hatred against ‘millionaires and billionaires’” and claimed solidarity with Molotov-cocktail-throwing Occupy protesters—while ignoring the benefits that businessmen bring to the rest of us. Perkins started at the bottom, and poured his “heart and soul” into his tech business, helping to generate more than $90 billion in revenue and 275,000 jobs. When people like him do well, the “world is a better place for it.”

Ah, pity the poor plutocrats, said Alex Pareene in Salon.com. The superrich have had their feelings hurt, and their huge sense of entitlement has been threatened by small tax increases and mild financial reform. What makes the 1 percent’s persecution complex so “risible,” of course, is that the “frothing revolutionary leftists” of their nightmares control nothing, least of all Washington. It is now “impossible to get elected” president or senator without “the backing of a cadre of multimillionaires”; a political system utterly dependent on money will never allow any true “redistribution,” or policies that address economic inequality. Sleep well, Mr. Perkins: There is no bearded bogeyman under your bed.

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