Most of us are familiar with the expression “addition through subtraction”:

A phrase commonly used by coaches to mean that your team can get better not by adding more talent, but by shedding people or practices that are inhibiting your success.

This process works in a meritocracy.  In a democracy (not a republic), what’s needed is raw numbers, and particularly a majority.

There are two ways to attain a majority in a democracy.  One is to have and present better ideas — to reason with the electorate that the ideas that you have for running the country, state, or town are better than your opponents’.  Throughout American history, we’ve seen the pendulum swing between more liberal and more conservative periods of power, as the populace reacted to current circumstances and often the policy outcomes of the previous administration.  

Bereft of ideas, and unable to positively reason with the populace that your ideas are better than your opponents, the second-best option for acquiring voters is to stoke envy, resentment, and division.

Saul Alinsky: “The despair is there; now it’s up to us to go in a rub raw the sores of discontent, galvanize them for radical social change.”

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels popularized this notion in their Communist Manifesto, when they asserted that “the history of society is the history of class struggles.  The struggle between the oppressor and the oppressed.  The bourgeoisie and the proletariat.”

Your plight is due to not any lack of effort or bad life choices on your part, but “systemic oppression.”  The system is holding you down.

As capitalism expanded, particularly in Western culture and more particularly in America, the distinctions among classes began to erode.  With a burgeoning middle class, and the mobility that people experienced in breaking through class boundaries, the struggle among “classes” began to wane.

Marxists in their deviousness, influenced by Marcuse’s recognizing that their class argument wasn’t getting them the numbers that they needed to overthrow the status quo in our democratic system, began to expand the list of those oppressed to a myriad of “intersectional” grievance groups.

In David French’s 2018 thesis “Intersectionality, the dangerous faith,” he highlights the rise of grievance, where virtually every issue in American life can and must be filtered through the prisms of race, sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity.  Race, class, sex , sexual orientation, and gender identity are Marxism’s modern-day proletariats.

Democrats, their media propagandists, and their shock troops (BLM, Antifa, LGBT, Palestinians, etc.) are actively rubbing raw the sores of discontent among these various intersectional groups in order to stoke envy in order to add to their voting bloc through the division of the American populace.

Blacks, Hispanics, indigenous peoples, Asians, Jews, Islamists, gays, lesbians, transgenders, non-cisgendered, feminists — all are oppressed, they are told, by white supremacy, male hegemony, and religious bigotry.  Even white leftists are convinced to join the oppressed class in order to atone for their past oppression.

What we’re seeing in America today is this intersectional narrative being shoe-horned into whatever event comes about.  A few knuckleheads breach the Capitol — white supremacist, domestic terrorism.  Insisting that schools open so that your kid can get an education — white supremacy.  Oppose tyrannous edicts being imposed by your governor or local bureaucrat — white supremacy.  Oppose men and boys using the same bathroom or competing in the same sporting events as your daughter — white supremacist, male hegemony.  Oppose undocumented, COVID-infected, trafficked illegal aliens breaching the border — white supremacy.  Oppose your church being targeted for not hiring people antithetical to your faith — white supremacy, religious bigotry.  A sex addict kills eight women, of whom six were Asian — white supremacist, domestic terrorism.

Rather than making the case that their ideas are better than their ideological and political opponents’, the Democrats (Marxists) are demonizing anyone who doesn’t bow to their woke (CRT/DIE) religion.  The demonization will continue.  Their attacks will soon move from rhetoric and cancelation to violence, for if their cause is just (in their minds), and their opponents are devils (or Nazis), then any means necessary in service of our defeat is justified.

This is America’s new (woke) normal.  Buckle up.

Image: JoslynLM via Flickr, CC BY 2.0.