"Survival of the Fittest"

Herbert Spencer, who coined the phrase in the title

In a world divided between winners and losers, there can be no middle class.

I think I've figured out the mystery of the new alliance between Ayn Rand followers and Christian fundamentalists, and the answer is supremacism. Both groups see themselves as history's true legitimate winners held back by the masses of losers.

With 40 million people on Foodstamps, and the numbers on government assistance at all time highs, there is a lot of pain and anger out there. Our mandarin classes are blind and deaf to it, and the Oligarchy just doesn't care.

We seem to have abandoned the idea of mass prosperity entirely, an idea once embraced by both political parties. Both parties pursued government policies that created the broad prosperity that lasted for about 4 decades after World War II. Now, most Americans face a future of low wages and declining living standards. The right wing waves the Bible and Atlas Shrugged and triumphantly declares that God's winnowing fork is separating the wheat from the chaff, while Democratic leaders like Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner talk about a "new normal."

The only people, ironically, who seem to genuinely believe in that idea of broadly shared prosperity are the publicly much despised advocates of all things green. They genuinely believe in what our grandparents once believed in, a measure of prosperity and security for all, only now adapted to new circumstances and made environmentally sustainable. We may enjoy punching hippies for sport now, but the hippies turned out to be right all along about the Vietnam War, and with heat waves in Russia, melting polar ice caps, and ever more destructive hurricanes, they may well be right again.