The U.N. defines social justice as the view that everyone deserves equal economic, political, and social rights and opportunities.  Few would find fault with that definition.  Problems arise, however, when elements in a given society disingenuously analyze and define the genesis of social injustices and then impose public policy to ameliorate or eliminate them based on such analysis.

Social injustices and the degree of success attained in resolving them are multi-factorial and complex, involving such things as ethnic traits, cultural mores, family structure, and even geographic impositions.  Armenians and Jews have put historic genocides against them during WW1 and WW2 in the rearview mirror.  Blacks have been slower to recover from slavery and segregation.  Whites in Appalachia are entrenched in perpetual poverty.  Upward mobility is strongly related to growing up in an intact family.  Differences in I.Q. and physical abilities are operative on an individual basis.  Inequality is inherent in nature.  To be sure, caste systems, prejudices, and phobias also play a role in determining the attainment of social justice.

A prudent approach to the resolution of social injustices would require objective analysis of those factors underlying its penetrance in affected groups.  An attempt could then be made culturally and politically to resolve them.

Enter the social justice warriors of the left.  In homage to their oppressor/oppressed construct of civil society, leftist activists choose to blame all social injustices on society’s oppressive forces — white privilege, patriarchy, and capitalist greed — the left’s avenging angels.  Its major thrust is to attack and punish the oppressors, not elevate the oppressed.  Redistribution, tax the rich, reparations.  Debase merit.  Cancel culture to punish oppressors who dare to question leftist policy.

Their narrative is widely disseminated by sycophants in media, academia, political action groups, the government bureaucracy, corporate H.R. departments, and now even in science and health care think-tanks.  These are elitists who exist in a world of ideas and concepts, not in a world of goods, services, competition, self-interest, market forces, or reward for merit.  They are ideologues, self-appointed messiahs of their own Sermon on the Mount.  They exist in an insular fraternity of self-confirmation and self-righteousness, disconnected from the exigiencies of terrestrial existence and looking with disdain upon anyone who questions or defies their moral certitude.

Their message resonates with a wide audience of those who for any reason feel aggrieved, threatened by, or vulnerable to subjugation by the system, those whose expectations exceed reality, and those recruited into victimhood by indoctrination.

Their activism devotes little or no attention to addressing internal cultural and behavioral issues in affected communities in any effective manner.  Bussing, urban renewal, welfare, affirmative action, prosecutorial leniency, D-I-E, and open immigration (social justice for “amnesty”-seekers) are Band-Aids providing symptomatic relief, not remedies.  Such initiatives are typical of the superficiality of leftist policy — knee-jerk, “feel good,” providing immediate gratification without concern for ultimate consequences, but bolstering the left’s liberal image.

Like all leftist initiatives, social justice activism morphs into a punitive ploy to attain political control.  The social justice movement is thus designed to pit the proletariat (the oppressed) against the bourgeois (the oppressors), wreak revenge upon and weaken the later, keep the proles in place with hollow, ineffective hope and change, and position the Democrat party in control of the new order.

Image: JoslynLM via Flickr, CC BY 2.0.