No, White Leftist; We Aren't Closer to Class Consciousness. Here's Why.

Ahhhh, the never-ending plight of Tiktok activists...

The most irritating political conversation to have is one with someone that is almost correct, the one that has all the right convictions and observations but arrives at a conclusion you just completely disagree with. Someone in such close proximity to correctness is almost worse than someone extremely far from it. Irritation from these such people has permeated my mind increasingly since the December shooting of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Since this shooting, and the influx of edits that subsequently followed it, white leftists have compared the United States’ precarious situation to the beginnings of the French Revolution, claiming we are on the precipice of a revolution of our own. Since the eye-roll inducing stunt of the temporary Tiktok ban, this rhetoric has only increased in volume.

“I’m so happy that people are realizing that “republicans VS democrats” only exists to distract you from the fact that it’s actually “top VS bottom.”

- User 1800titties (hilarious username) on Tiktok.

Also for your reading pleasure:

“We are THIS close to class consciousness. THIS CLOSE. We’ve been living in an oligarchy. It’s BEEN top vs. bottom. IT'S BEEN rich vs. poor.”

- User beethebee._ on Tiktok.

Before I continue, I believe it pertinent to make myself clear on two things:

1. I have no interest in heavily defending the Democratic Party nor the two-party system as a whole. It is not a secret to many that both parties uphold oppression and that neither are anything close to what many Americans deserve.

2. I do not hate white allies. I understand their necessity, and I understand that their strength (whiteness) is their weakness (whiteness). When someone is genuinely attempting to advocate for groups they are not part of, they might make some small mistakes along the way that should be corrected but not necessarily acerbically scorned. The same applies for heterosexual allies, male allies (for which I am one and try to be a better one each day), and able-bodied allies (for which I am one of those as well). An effective battle for liberation requires commitment from and attention paid to every single demographic.

In fact, it is that very principle—one of inclusivity-–that brings me to my issue with this popular Tiktok rationale. Simply put, the class struggle is far too interconnected to all other systems of oppression to make the current state of America be anything close to a class conscious, or mere ‘top vs. bottom’, society. The Republican Party that leftists are supposed to view as their comrades in the fight against the unethical elite cannot even admit that people of color are currently still systematically oppressed in the United States—let alone even imagine that one’s race can be (and in many cases is) tied to their economic status. It is no coincidence that the skin on the billionaire bones the online working class intend to lick clean are wrinkly white, male, and cis-heterosexual while concurrently black people and Native American women had the highest share of people living below the poverty line in 2020. It was Martin Luther King Jr. who said it best:

“We must see now that the evils of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism are all tied together…You can’t get rid of one without getting rid of the others.”

Let the creator of the term “intersectionality” explain it further:

“It’s not simply that there’s a race problem here, a gender problem here, and a class or LBGTQ problem there. Many times that framework erases what happens to people who are subject to all of these things.”

- Kimberle Crenshaw for an interview with Columbia Law School

There is no effective class consciousness without a race consciousness, no effective race consciousness without a gender consciousness, no effective gender consciousness without a queer consciousness, no effective queer consciousness without a race consciousness, and no true effective progress without an intersectional consciousness. We cannot have a French Revolution of our own because many conservatives are equally interested in waging culture wars against imaginary DEI hires and the less than 1% of high school athletes that happen to be transgender as they are in piling their vituperation atop of unethical billionaires through the rapid-fire taps of their fingertips in war-like comment sections. Do you think it possible to effectively change predatory capitalism without confronting an entirely predatory bigoted disposition? How do you expect to march with a man that still does not believe you should exist? How on Earth could you protest next to someone who believes you are a more sizable threat than the entity the both of you defaced picket-signs for? This all returns to the immortal Lyndon B. Johnson quote:

“If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”

- President Lyndon B. Johnson to Bill Moyers.

Once again the political foe that is so close to correct but is wrong nonetheless peers its head: you both distrust the failing government; he just mistrusts you even more. Whether we would like to admit it or not, the Republican party currently upholds systemic oppression and only plans to further their plans of suppression throughout the 4 years they control the presidency, House, and Senate. None of us are free until we are all free, and we will not all be free unless we take on a more intersectional understanding of class, race, gender, sexuality, and disability.

Echo chambers are duplicitous in the sense that they inherently make us believe we understand the world when we do not. We cannot be on the brink of class consciousness if a majority of our country voted against the rights of minorities, many because they believed the costs of their eggs would be cheaper. If we really were close to class consciousness, conservatives would have realized that the neighbors they might have wanted to deport and black college students they might have wished to revoke affirmative action from likely couldn’t afford their groceries either. But because this realization has never and might not ever come, Luigi Mangione will oscillate between being a meme and a movement, and conservative United States citizens will vacillate between fascist and freedom fighters.

We will never start a revolution—let alone have a successful one—until we escape our deleterious echo chambers and remember we have more in common with our neighbors than the men that won the ballots. This movement can not be ‘red vs. blue’ or ‘top vs. bottom’; it must be the system vs. the people it subjugates.