Former Navy Secretary, Marine veteran, and novelist James Webb (now “Jim” Webb as he embarks on his freshman term in the Senate) was long believed to be a conservative, for his pro-military and anti-preferences stance. But now that he’s a Democratic Senator-elect, he appears to have just completed his indoctrination (or Beltway lobotomy), because he came out with a remarkably demagoguic opinion essay in the Nov. 15 issue of the WSJ.

I have never read any of Webb’s novels, but after enduring his writing style in this insipid essay, I won’t bother. He may have immediately lost credibility with the typical WSJ reader when he employed stump speech language to describe the widening income gap by stating, “America’s top tier has grown infinitely richer and more removed over the past 25 years.” Hyperbole like this is sometimes effective when making a comparison which is difficult to measure, e.g., “Santorum is infinitely more principled than Kennedy.” But if the actual numbers are as stark as he says they are, why exaggerate?

Webb’s points have all been made before, and many sound as if he had just finished reading Lou Dobbs’ book, War on America. So I slogged through them, which is not easy, as populist rhetoric attempts to suppress the intellect with emotion. Populism is a dangerous creed, not because it attracts adherents from both the left and the right, but because it is based upon envy and resentment. Webb’s essay is a loaf baked with DNC talking points flour leavened with populist resentment. To read it, you have to ignore the factual errors and half-truths to get at the author’s proposals, which are — nothing.

That’s right, nothing. Webb contends that our society is drifting toward a “class-based system” and lists all the reasons he feels that the middle class is shrinking and getting screwed at the same time. Most of his populist points have already been made by Lou Dobbs, Pat Buchanan, Ariana Huffington, et al, and refuted by reputable pundits elsewhere, so I won’t address them. What’s missing is the whole point of his essay. Perhaps he’s trying to establish his credentials as a “progressive” Democrat, to allay the suspicions of his new party that he may retain some conservative orthodoxies, by regurgitating a number of their campaign talking points while adding a few more from the populist camp.

Webb doesn’t define a “class-based system” but lists several examples, beginning with CEO pay. He cites that when he graduated from college in the ’60′s, CEOs earned 20 times as much as the average worker, while today they earn 400 times. This is an interesting statistic that illustrates not much more than the elasticity of the income scale where one end is fixed and the other unrestrained, but no one has been able to demonstrate whether it’s good or bad. After all, the Average Worker in the 1960′s lived in a 1000 sq ft house (which he probably didn’t own), owned one car (without air bags, a/c or a CD player), and didn’t go on vacation beyond a lake in the same county. It’s also interesting that Webb would be preoccupied with corporations which are private, must answer to stockholders, and must compete in the global marketplace, and is seemingly unconcerned about the executive pay of government-sponsored enterprises such as Fannie May and Freddie Mac, or the pay of presidents of public universities, which have grown just as fast as that of CEOs. Then there are professional athletes and celebrities. But I guess there’s only so much envy one can harbor.

But the classic measure of socio-economic stratification is not the income scale, but mobility barriers. The U.S. is the most socially-mobile society on the planet, as most people in the upper quintile were not there years ago, and most people in the lowest will not be there years hence. Populists and zero-summers do not recognize this dynamism, and this intellectual and ideological deficiency prevent them from recognizing the real problems that need to be addressed: barriers to mobility, how government erects them, and what government should be doing to tear them down.

Webb does mention the problems of illegal immigration and the failure of public education, two hot-button issues that concern voters. In the first issue he is spot on, as we are outsourcing skilled labor beyond our borders, while insourcing unskilled labor to perform menial tasks within them. But the second issue he dismisses as a scapegoat. If these two issues aren’t related, why not? Or is he really advocating a Fortess America where every worker is unionized, immigration is halted or severly restricted, and globalization sealed out? We’re left only to resent the situation, and condemn current policies without proposing new ones.

Webb’s most noxious assertion is this one:

[An] unspoken insinuation seems to be inundating our national debate: Certain immigrant groups have the “right genetics” and thus are natural entrants to the “overclass,” while others, as well as those who come from stock that has been here for 200 years and have not made it to the top, simply don’t possess the necessary attributes.

It’s obvious which groups Webb is referring to, so why does avoid identifying them, unless he wants to be complicit in the insinuation? Volumes of articles and books have been written about the success of Asian immigrants (and Afro-Caribbeans) relative to native African-Americans, but none have mentioned “genetics” as the key to their success, focusing instead on the strength of the family unit and the cultural value of education. So what does Webb hope to accomplish by tossing the “genetics” slur into the punchbowl?

But repeating unattributed slurs in quotes seems to be a Webb argumentative method — he finishes with a fantasy bumper-sticker phrase probably lifted and embellished from a political pollster:

The politics of the Karl Rove era were designed to distract and divide the very people who would ordinarily be rebelling against the deterioration of their way of life. Working Americans have been repeatedly seduced at the polls by emotional issues such as the predictable mantra of “God, guns, gays, abortion and the flag” while their way of life shifted ineluctably beneath their feet.

He doesn’t attribute this imaginary “mantra” to Karl Rove, but he might as well have. But insulting average Americans of faith, who may own guns, respect the rights of the unborn, resent the judicial redefinition of popularly-established institutions such as marriage, and wince at the desecration of a national symbol that family members have fought for as a form of political expression, is not the way to win the hearts of working-class Americans.

The least fitting adjective one would use to describe an unfortunate individual with a handicap or debilitating disease is “pathetic.” At the very least, respect for the individual’s dignity should evoke terms of respectable compassion rather than contemptible pity.

For example, no one who views any of Jerry’s kids during his telethons would describe any such viewing as a “pathetic” scene.

But the side-showey political commercial of a celebrity with Parkinson’s disease making a pitch for a contemptibly dishonest constitutional amendment is truly pathetic in the most faithful sense of the word, especially after the celebrity later disclosed that he was not fully informed about the ballot measure he was pleading for.

Leave it to the supporters of the Missouri’s Amendement 2, Democrats all and masters of projection, to describe critics who recognize their dishonest tactics for what they are as “pathetic” in return.