The Hidden Classism in Left-Wing Social Justice Ideology
Left-wing social justice ideology supposedly seeks to empower and lift-up oppressed or marginalized people, while educating privileged people to become aware of their privilege. But this ideology often goes wrong when people focus primarily on the more visible categories like race and gender, and ignore the less-visible, more intangible category of social class, which relates closely to education and social connectedness.
In this video I explain how the way left-wing ideology plays out nowadays, especially in US politics and on the internet, it often ends up being deeply classist, looking down on, and judging people with lower levels of educational achievement.
I talk about how leftist discourse becomes a "stupid game" in which people judge others superficially by their ability to use the "correct" terminology, without actually listening to or engaging more deeply with what people are saying. I explain how this practice is used to bully and exclude people, and how it ends up being hardest on the people who have less educational access, less free time, and who are less-connected into networks of people using the left's terminology.
I then look at how a person's ability to grow beyond bigotry is itself a function of privilege, and thus how the left's moralizing, personal attacks, and condemnation of people who voice bigoted viewpoints or ideas, is itself a form of classism.
I talk about how I don't like the direction our country is going in, how I am frustrated with the results of the recent presidential election and the bigotry of the Republican party and Trump movement, but how the left has its own form of bigotry and how they are both part of a system.
I conclude by talking about how we ultimately do not control anyone other than ourselves, so that in order to tackle these tough problems, we need to begin by examining our own viewpoints and beliefs and rooting out the bigotry in our own thinking, and how on the left, the main example of this type of bigotry is classism. I talk about how classism alienates people from listening to the left, and thus keeps forms of bigotry more prevalent on the right, like racism, homophobia, or xenophobia, persisting.
I know this is a tough topic and these problems are not going to be solved overnight, but I hope this video presents a genuinely novel perspective that will cause some people to question their viewpoints and ultimately help us steer society back in a better direction.