Preliminary Notes on the Effect of the Class Warfare Paradigm on Our Public Discourse

Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. The law regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land are involved. - Justice Harlan, Plessy v. Ferguson

Class Warfare: 

1. Against political democracy, which by definition includes all the people. Proposes rule by the oppressed rather than government (not rule) by the people.
2. Rejects equality. The oppressed class and the oppressor class do not consist of people who are equal but, in the latter case, are in error and need to be corrected. Class warfare considers the wrongness of the oppressor class to be existential, and in that sense, a wickedness which is incorrigible and cannot be corrected.
3. Rejects the rule of law. Class warfare regards the supposed protections and rights of the existing body of law as hypocritical, benefiting only members of the oppressor class. After all, the justice system and its laws allow the existing system of oppression, don't they?
4. Arrogates to itself two things belonging to the justice system in civilized societies: Determination of guilt; and administration of punishment (Example: “Who wants to help me get this reporter out of here? I need some muscle over here.”).*
5. Is inherently ad hominem. The narratives produced by members of oppressed groups are considered true because to recognize the true state of things—one is oppressed and not a member of a free democratic society—confers authenticity lacked by membership in an oppressor group.**
6. Employs a double standard in many areas. For example, members of oppressor groups do not have the same rights as the oppressed. Discrimination by the oppressed against oppressors is approved, but oppressors are accused of discriminatory attitude and conduct.
7. Is anti-intellectual (see 5). There are no "neutral" intellectual positions, free from constraints and considerations extraneous to pure intellectual matters. There is no justification for socially constructed intellectual propositions which are blithely ignorant of the plight of the oppressed (see "state of emergency," below). It is the duty of faculty members to use their platform to unmask oppression and advocate change.
8. Rejects normative concepts of civility, decency, and nonviolence as contributing to structural oppression. (Cf. "repressive tolerance") When modern democratic states give the police and the National Guard a monopoly on legitimate violence, they seek to render the oppressed powerless to fight for justice.
9. Can only achieve its objective through revolution, not by leveraging the structures (elected representatives, the justice system) of the existing oppressive society.
10. State of emergency which overrides all other considerations. Until the present existing state of monstrous injustice is rectified, no one has the right to pursue their own selfish interests. Everyone must be involved in the struggle. "Your silence will not save you."

Remarks by Kate W. to The Atlantic's Chris Bodenner illustrate class warfare influences in current publications. He begins:

Next is a blistering critique from Kate W., who doesn’t want to use her last name “because I work in professional circles (the arts and news media) where anti-Coatesism is frowned upon big time”

What she means is that Ta-Nehisi Coates, who began playing the race card when he leveled the charge of "white supremacy" against the mainstream, is the beneficiary of the oppressor group member double standard. Who he is, according to class warfare dogma, trumps [her] critique of his articles. (5 and 6, above)

She says,

2. Mr. Coates claims that the death of Prince Jones is his political “origin story.” He writes, “After Prince, I fully accepted the laws of gravity.” You see, Mr. Coates is the Reluctant Warrior. This as a very old gimmick but apparently still packs a rhetorical punch for some people. Mr. Coates didn’t want to be in a rage with “White America”! He was just minding his own business when Prince Jones (a friendly acquaintance) was killed by a racist policeman (who happens to be black, but that fact is irrelevant for his purposes) and then Mr. Coates found his worldview rocked. He was now radicalized and fully awake to the horrors of the racist country he lived in.

I’m sorry, but given the fact that Mr. Coates was raised by two political activists—one of whom is a former Black Panther—I am not buying this. Mr. Coates comes by his “radicalness” honestly. It did not take the death of Prince Jones to turn Mr. Coates into a Black Nationalist author. He was raised with these ideas, and based on what I have heard him say in current interviews, he is also raising his son the same way (this is a shame).

But let’s take him at his word that this one event changed him. Please allow me a point of personal privilege here: I have a good friend (a white person) who is a quadriplegic as a result of being shot during a robbery by black men. I was also personally robbed at gunpoint by black men (in a separate incident) but was more lucky than my friend and lost only money. 

If I were to follow Mr. Coates’s example, I would paint all black Americans with this brush. I would become “radicalized” and henceforth say that all black people are dangerous criminals. Does this make any sense, intellectually or morally? I hope not. 

But when Mr. Coates tells this story, Charlie Rose, David Brooks, David Remnick and Jon Stewart fall over each other to fawn over him. Why are the two examples different? Why is bigotry against white people acceptable when bigotry against blacks is anything but?

As K.W. describes Coates' narrative, he is using anecdotal argument. One bad experience justifies global guilt and punishment. A larger issue is that our democracy asks us to exhibit what the Founders called toleration. The double standard (6) and the emergency (10) allow Coates to violate standards of decency (8).

It's actually worse than that As a commentator relates:

He writes of the police and firefighters who died running into the burning buildings [the twin towers on 911] in a forlorn effort to save all the people whose bodies were about to be obliterated into dust, “They were not human to me. Black, white, or whatever, they were menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could — with no justification — shatter my body.” (Emphasis added)

Generalizing from one black policeman to the firefighters who lost their lives trying to save strangers in burning skyscrapers is beyond excuse. Firefighters don't carry guns, carry out arrests, or in any other way commit violence. Coates' extremism should have resulted in a national uproar. The fact that it didn't shows how completely class warfare dogma has corrupted our thinking and eroded our sense of human decency.

 K.W. describes ways in which the double standard (6) even applies to cause and effect:

4. The book’s thesis is perhaps the most troubling part but certainly the most hyperbolic: “Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage.” Here is where the circular logic comes into play. When it is pointed out that the vast majority of black people who are murdered are murdered at the hands of other black people, Mr. Coates conveniently blames even this on White Supremacy. 

For him, it’s as simple as this: there is literally nothing a black person can do wrong that is their fault, in a cosmic sense. Every moral, ethical or legal crime is caused by the effects of White Supremacy. Some people, including myself, characterize this as racism. Denying that black people are capable of being agents of their own life or destiny is the ultimate kind of bigotry.

K.W. describes Coates' abundant false accusation:

5. The white-shaming throughout the book. Mr. Coates seems to think it’s OK to insult all white people in the gravest ways possible. All white people exist on a spectrum that has “benign neglect” and “free rider” on one end and “violent torture murderer” and “slave master” on the other end. All white Americans are guilty; it is only a matter of determining where they fit on that guilt spectrum. 

In Mr. Coates’ world, to wake up white is to wake up a guilty person. This acts as a kind of mirror image to his view of black people, who have no responsibility for anything in Mr. Coates' world.

In a free, democratic society, it is a very serious thing to bear false witness and level false accusations. To repeat, in our politics the determination of guilt, let alone punishment, belongs to the justice system and to the justice system alone (3, 4). Historically, the class warfare ideology has played fast and loose in applying the label, class enemy. For Marx, it was the commercial culture of the emerging modern world. In our contemporary class warfare culture, who is guilty is dependent on your vested interest. If you're a feminist, the oppressor is men. All of them. If you're a minority, it is white folks. All of them. Rules of evidence, due process, and the constraint of applicable law are nowhere on the horizon.



(*) As such, class warfare veers toward mob rule. Here are the constraints which proper justice has and class warfare lacks:

1. Due process
2. Rules of evidence
3. A controlling body of law developed over centuries, which the court must not violate

(**) We're employing an expanded conception of the argumentum ad hominem. Ad hominem usually refers to a demonstration or argument which purports to discredit a proposition by discrediting its author, as in Hitler's dismissal of theories of relativity as "Jewish science." In the larger sense, ad hominem is held to be a fallacy because a person cannot be an argument, either to discredit or to validate. For example, the belief that political democracy is discredited because a great thinker such as Plato said so, is a form of ad hominem. A person is not an argument.