Your Erroneous Zones

Our national law begins: "We the People." Explain: Which part of the People is the oppressor, and which the oppressed? What rules of evidence, and what due process, were followed to justify this conclusion? 

Class-warfare leftism cannot be fit into a moral order which operates under the Constitution, for the simple reason that class warfare thinking rests on foregone conclusions which preclude the working of justice. (This is the reason class warfare regimes such as the late Soviet Union and present-day North Korea fail at that aspect of justice which we call civil rights.)
 
In the September 2015 issue of The Atlantic Greg Lukianoff writes:

At the University of Delaware, as part of a diversity-focused orientation program, students reported being made to “take a stance” on one side of a room or another, displaying their personal views on polarizing topics such as affirmative action and gay marriage—even if they didn’t yet know where they stood. Such an activity is not only reductive and unscholarly, it is a classic demonstration of the all-or-nothing thinking I had struggled with.

In the name of diversity, the students' instructors engaged in advocacy:

The resident assistants who implemented the program had been given training materials that sought to define racism, and included statements such as “the term [racist] applies to all white people” living in the United States” and “people of color cannot be racists.” While such claims may be good topics for debate, they seem on their face to be examples of several classic cognitive distortions—overgeneralizing, dichotomous thinking, and an inability to disconfirm. Campus leaders seemed to be telling students that they should overgeneralize, personalize, and magnify problems.

The hidden variable here is class-warfare logic. The oppressor, by undiscussed foregone conclusion, is “all white people living in the United States,” and the oppressed is “people of color.” Proceed to deploy sweeping generalizations.

As noted in these pages a year ago, the employment of class-warfare jargon and logic reduces intellectual analysis to identity posturing and partisan rhetoric. It lowers the level of the debate:

These articles in The Atlantic are being given a lot of slack because they play the race card. Part of our bargain with ourselves as citizens of a society which supports equality and tolerance is to subject criticism of certain subjects to heightened scrutiny. But doing so can impede reasonable debate, as in the related case:

American Jewish liberals have been intimidated or censored themselves into silence, which has only made matters worse. The reason is the need to somehow credentialize yourself as “pro-Israel”, and any criticism is immediately interpreted as being “anti-Israel”. That’s essentially a loyalty test that impedes reasonable debate – and is designed to.

The same failure of thought is appearing in the discourse of many prominent figures of the national press (as the previous article in this weblog argued). Helen Andrews, an American writer living in Australia, contends that the Fourth Estate is more or less unconsciously parroting "the most destructive ideology of the twentieth century. ... a fashionable pundit is being praised out of proportion to his talent":

[Substituting] race for class ... [is] ... [Ta-Nehisi] Coates’s ... game. Like the Fanonists of his father’s generation, who cast the Third World in the role of the proletariat, there is something distinctly Marxist about Ta-Nehisi Coates. You can hear it in his harping on “plunder” and exploitation, in his hard-nosed rejection of bourgeois sentimentality, in his conviction that all suffering is the product of some elite class’s self-serving design, and more recently in his aggressive atheism.

If you ever want to send a chill up your own spine, replace “black people” with “the working class” in one of Coates’s angrier effusions. “The Dream rests on the worker’s back, the bedding made from our bodies … The Dreamers accept this as the cost of doing business, accept the bodies of the working class as currency … The worker is naked before the elements of the world, and this nakedness is not an error but the correct and intended result of policy.” It is no coincidence, comrade! This is why the adulation Coates receives from the mainstream press is so disturbing: not because a fashionable pundit is being praised out of proportion to his talent—that happens all the time—but because it proves we have lost our collective antibodies to the most destructive ideology of the twentieth century. Have the Atlantic readers who find “plunder” such an interesting concept never heard the lyrics to “Solidarity Forever”? (“They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn …”) Do they not remember how that story ends? (Emphasis added)

"The Newsroom" has argued that clarity and accuracy are critical in the media of a democracy, in order for the people to understand the issues before them. Rhetoric which manufactures distrust and hatred confuses the public's understanding of democratic policy. It impairs people's ability to act justly. It may incite those whose mental health is marginal.

Recently this weblog noted Ta-Nehisi's own words:

Terry Gross, continued:

Ta-Nehisi Coates (On the unjustified shooting of Prince Jones by police): Oh, it was devastating. It totally devastated me. A year later 9/11 happened and I just - I had no compassion. I had none. I was cold. I was absolutely, absolutely cold because they killed him. They killed him, and no one was held accountable. (Emphasis added)

Rich Lowry on the same incident:

His monstrous passage about 9/11 is a good summation of where he’s coming from. He writes of the police and firefighters who died running into the burning buildings 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)

Really? Firefighters go about shattering the bodies of black people without justification? One doesn’t read about, say, Anthony Rodriguez, 36, father of six, whose last child was born days after he died in the attack, who joined the Navy before becoming a firefighter, who coached youth basketball, and naturally think of the depredations of white America.

Coates does. This isn’t an act of moral discernment on his part, but a willful effacement of the individuality of Rodriguez and anyone Coates deems part of the impersonal apparatus determined to dispossess blacks.

Under the principles of justice—“By the known rules of ancient liberty,” as John Milton wrote—all are human. We should condemn extreme rhetoric which suggests otherwise as forcefully as we condemn racism or any other crime against humanity. That an outlook which unashamedly proclaims, “They were not human to me” continues to be praised by "progressive" journalists is unacceptable.

To declare that it is open season to discriminate against any group is a reprehensible act of prejudice.