Let me finish tonight where I started.
What does it mean when a group of people believe they have the “right” to rule? I’m talking about a “ruling class.”
Back at our founding, the conviction that “all men are created equal” had a number of caveats. It meant all white men—not women, not black men and women, but white men of property, and not the indentured, not the poor, not the workers dependent on others for their hiring, not the “47 percent” of that day.
And here we are, now well into the 21st century, with a group of Americans who still rally to the thinking of the Founding Fathers—not the wondrous, liberal words, but the caveats, the exceptions to the shining notion of equality, the very limited notion who is to be included in the ruling of the country: white men of property.
I don’t know many who say it this way or openly think it. But get your head around it! Why did—why do—the Romney people believe these weeks after the election that this is their country to rule, that there must be some unknown aspect of what just happened that renders it meaningless to them?
You must think about this because this is the reason we saw what we saw in the months before the election—the intensive, state-by-state effort to suppress the minority vote, the giant billboards warning minorities they fast felony arrests, all to keep them from the voting booths by hook or crook. And why the equally outward attempt to scare and anger the white working class through an endless onslaught against the person and background of Barack Obama?
Chris Matthews