From Politico.com
Can Obama beat 'class warfare' rap?
By Molly Ball & Ben Smith
When President Barack Obama laid out his deficit plan Monday, he wasn’t just trying to sell a policy. When he pressed for tax hikes on the rich and announced, “This is not class warfare,” he was trying to exorcise a demon that has bedeviled the Democratic Party for decades and, in the process, deprive the Republicans of one of their trustiest weapons.
The reaction from the right was swift and sure: “Class warfare!”...
“What [the GOP is] really accusing the Democrats about is saying that there are classes in America — that classes exist,” said Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at the University of California-Berkeley’s School of Information.
Use of the phrase “class warfare,” has roots in the socialist theorists of the 19th century, and entered the American political lexicon in the 1950s and ’60s, when fears of spreading communism were at their height, according to Nunberg, who has studied how the term has been used in politics.
His chart of the phrase’s use shows it rising steadily starting in the late 1980s, and emerging, in 1989, as a Republican Party talking point....