Reparations: Americans Still Don't Recognize Attacks on Liberal Values Phrased as Left Ideology

Political articles in the United States are generally written from the perspective of the left, or of conservatism, or of liberalism. Left and conservative are belief systems or ideologies; that is, positions are often held because of values other than truth or correspondence-to-reality (such as conventional wisdom, orthodoxy, or political correctness). Liberalism, our earlier article The Liberal Founding posits, is an information system, somewhat in the model of its immediate predecessor, the scientific revolution of the latter half of the Seventeenth Century.

A defining characteristic of left thought is its groupy outlook. Politics is a matter of an oppressed group, seen as virtuous; and an oppressor group characterized as thoroughly evil. Thus what any given left attempts to do is to battle, punish, or eliminate an evil group. The Marxism-Leninism of the late Soviet Union, having complete control, exiled, imprisoned, or executed virtually the entire middle class in its territory within a few years of the revolution. Similarly, Maoist communism, in a bloodbath, eliminated the Chinese middle class.

This personalistic approach contrasts with the methodology of modern liberal societies, which seek to build good institutions, enact good laws, secure the civil liberties of the citizen, and discover policies which advance the public good.

From earlier post Liberal, Left:

1. The most famous three words in liberalism: “We the People.”
2. The left's most famous phrase: “Workers of the World, Unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains!”
3. The left characterizes virtue as a property of a group (the oppressed). It takes a personalistic approach to evil, in the form of an implied out-group which chains the oppressed worker. The battle against evil, it is implied, will take the form of a war against a group of people who are, as a foregone conclusion, evil.
4. This is in contrast to liberalism, which tends to see evil—at least the evil which a political system may seek to remedy—as error resulting from ignorance. To personalize evil, and in the process demonize certain types of people and create conflict, is seen as a category mistake. It can lead to what Frederick C. Crews called a “reckless dispensation of guilt.”*
5. “We the People,” by contrast, suggests harmony, cooperation, and altruism.
6. In all of this, the left is thinking in terms of groups, oppressed groups versus oppressor groups, not in terms of the rights-bearing individual. This is a mind-set which does not place much emphasis on civil liberties. A person believed to be a member of a "reactionary" group tends to be treated as guilty of the sins ascribed to that group. 
7. This can lead to the person so identified to be punished for a wrong committed by another person, which is manifestly unjust.
8. The plight of the oppressed is taken to be more important than the interests and needs of individual members of the oppressed group. “Workers of the World, Unite” calls for solidarity rather than moral reflection and principled action.
9. This is collectivism, which Karl Popper, in The Open Society, described as a politics where the group is everything and the individual is nothing.**
10. The process of identifying certain people as members of oppressor groups is profiling. The process of targeting the person profiled is discrimination. The general modus operandi of the left is in practice inherently discriminatory.    

Ta-Nehisi Coates' The Case for Reparations is in many ways a classic example of anti-liberal, anti middle class left argument. The preceding article describes the groupy quality (3) of Coates' thinking:

An earlier post concerning Coates' fallacies argued that Coates does not see a society of equal, rights-bearing citizens, 

"caught in an inescapable network of mutuality," but a polity irrevocably divided between oppressed race and oppressor race. "Once that fact is acknowledged," Kevin D. Williamson suggests "then the case for reparations is only moral primitivism: My interests are inextricably linked to my own kin group and directly rivalrous with yours, i.e., the very racism that this program is in theory intended to redress." (Emphasis added)

There is also the simplistic thinking of (6) above, which attributes to everyone considered to be a member of the oppressor group the supposed characteristics of the group:

The crime with which reparations activists charge the country implicates more than just a few towns or corporations. The crime indicts the American people themselves, at every level, and in nearly every configuration. A crime that implicates the entire American people deserves its hearing in the legislative body that represents them.

Coates gives us an example of the left theme, "an oppressor group characterized as thoroughly evil":

Black nationalists have always perceived something unmentionable about America that integrationists dare not acknowledge—that white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it. ... What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt. (Emphasis added)

Coates appears to be more interested in punishing the guilty (7) than in constructive reform:

Coates' intent is apparently to fix the blame rather than fix the problem. [J. D. Vance]: "There’s no talk, however, of what to do now, how reparations would help, or why we ought to focus on settling an old score instead of charting a new course. ... But it must be said: breaking hearts is far easier than healing them."

In a 2008 autopsy of the last campaign for reparations (roughly fifteen years ago), Walter Olson wrote:

To the extent the reparations movement had used its brief time on stage to encourage national introspection, Americans had reached a different conclusion from the one that the activists had hoped for—a rough consensus, in fact, that whatever the right approach to the nation’s perennial problem of race relations might be, ventures into anger-mongering and random expropriation weren’t it. (Emphasis added)

The final problem with Coates' modeling his argument on left ideology is that it is in the nature of ideology to be misleading or flat-out wrong, because ideology inherently rejects feedback from reality. Daphne Patai once said, "The whole point of being an ideologue is that new information doesn't disturb your worldview." In Coates' "white supremacy"/reparations articles there is a characteristic mixture of ad hominem, false equivalency, fallacies of distribution, withholding of exculpatory evidence, and vagueness:

Where one would expect specifics, Coates presents generalities. W. James Antle III:

But when it comes to what reparations would look like or how they would work, Coates has little to say beyond “we should support” John Conyers’ bill to study reparations. And while he insists the failure of this proposal to advance “suggests our concerns are rooted not in the impracticality of reparations but in something more existential,” he doesn’t give us any reason to think he is talking about a workable policy that would tangibly improve people’s lives.

Coates waves away as irrelevant the most obvious questions: “Who will be paid? How much will they be paid? Who will pay?” Many of us suspect these questions are ultimately unanswerable . . .

It appears that Coates' articles concerning "white supremacy" and reparations are meant to appear to be in the great tradition of American reform, like Martin Luther King's successful civil rights campaign. But as noted in these posts, Coates' language is strikingly different from that of MLK and other reformers. Liberal campaigns appeal to "the better angels of our nature." Coates, victim of the left theme of incorrigible evil groups, can't pull that off. "The process of identifying certain people as members of oppressor groups is profiling. The process of targeting the person profiled is discrimination. The general modus operandi of the left is in practice inherently discriminatory."

(*)From Tikkun:

What makes Crews's account so compelling, however, is his brilliant writing combined with his quite accurate condemnation of the way psychoanalysis came eventually to be practiced, especially in the United States: "its deliberate coldness, its cultivation of emotional regression, its depredation of the patient's self-perceptions as inauthentic...its reckless dispensation of guilt."

(**)C. R. Hallpike (hallpike.com/EvolutionOfMoralUnderstanding.pdf‎):

What Sir Karl Popper has called the ‘closed society’: ‘the magical or tribal or collectivist society would be called the closed society, and the society in which individuals are confronted with personal decisions,the open society.’ . . . For Popper, the closed society can be justly compared to an organism, in which ‘slavery, class and class-rule are “natural” in the sense of being unquestionable.’. . .

So, therefore, in a closed society ‘the tribe is everything and the individual nothing’