The nature of humans and their relationships is complex and interesting. It involves friendship, hate, cooperation, competition, love, impulse, greed, work, betrayal, family, tribes, envy, sympathy and dozens of other emotions.  

Great writers and even bad ones have written billions of words on these powerful feelings, and how they function and dysfunction in groups of humans. Writers keep writing about them and their readers keep reading about them because they strike a chord within us. We witness them in our everyday lives.

Democrats have reduced it all to one thing: class struggle. In this class struggle, everyone is pigeonholed into one of two competing categories: the oppressed and the oppressors. But beware, there are some arbitrary exceptions because there’s something of a hierarchy of oppressors and oppressed.

For example, if your skin color is dark, then you’re oppressed. Unless you’re a dark-skinned Asian who wants to be judged fairly on merit, or a Black man like Martin Luther King, Jr. who wanted to be judged on the content of his character, or a political conservative like Justice Clarence Thomas or Professor Thomas Sowell or Secretary of State Marco Rubio – in which case you’re an oppressor.

If you’re a man who likes to pretend he’s a woman, then you’re oppressed. Unless, like Caitlin Jenner, you object to men pretending to be women competing against women in women’s sports – in which case you’re an oppressor.

If you like to do sexual things with people of your own sex, then you’re oppressed. Unless, like several of President Trump’s appointees, you happen to be politically conservative – in which case you’re an oppressor.

If you’re one of the 51% of humanity who is a woman, then you’re oppressed. (Never mind that you live six years longer than your oppressor.) Unless, like most women, you think men don’t belong in the women’s locker room – in which case you’re an oppressor.

If you haven’t made much money because you’ve chosen to use your time doing things other than working hard at well-paying jobs, then you’re oppressed. Same goes if you’ve made plenty of money but you’ve chosen to spend it all.

Enough about the oppressed. On to their oppressors.

If you’re a white man, you’re an oppressor. (That’s true even in Africa where white men are a distinct minority because . . . reasons.) Unless you’re a white man who chooses to use his time doing things other than working hard at well-paying jobs, and therefore has no money or has spent it all – in which case, as mentioned, you’re oppressed.

If you’re . . . well . . . hmm.

I planned to set forth the other types of oppressors but straight white men are pretty much the only ones. Oh, and Thomas Sowell, Martin Luther King, Jr., Clarence Thomas, and a couple billion Asians.

Credit this oppressor/oppressed view of humanity to Karl Marx, an intellectually feeble straight white man hiding behind a grotesque beard of pseudo-intellectualism. Of the myriad human emotions, he was blind to all but one: envy.

His envy led to his famous formulation for how to run an economy, which I paraphrase:

“From each according to his ability to make things, and to each according to his desire to have them.:

Marx’s formula doesn’t work for obvious reasons that are replayed predictably through the course of history. People who have the ability to make things stop making them if those things are taken away from them, and people who desire those things are never satisfied with what’s given to them if they aren’t required to expend any energy to get them.

Of course, the government can force people who are capable of making things to keep making them, even if they know those things will be taken from them. And that’s what socialist states wind up doing. But then you’re not running an economy, you’re running a slave labor camp. That’s not a sustainable plan. 

The Democrats are blind to this logic and this history, perhaps because they want to see themselves as part of the oppressed du jour, to whom, conveniently, the oppressors du jour owe a living, and a good one at that.

Hence the Democrats’ obsession with heroizing losers who are failures in life, from the Rosenbergs to George Floyd to Hunter Biden. For a Democrat, the greatest achievement is to be a failure and therefore a victim, because that means you’re oppressed, and that means you deserve sympathy – along with the material things that your oppressors made and you want. 

Give the Democrats some credit. They’re good at the first element of this non sequitur – the element of failure. I would say they’re still working on the other elements, but that would suggest they’re engaged in an activity they’re unwilling to engage in – work.

Until Democrats learn to achieve and celebrate more than just failure – until they learn to walk the walk of complex human emotions and relations – they still have talk. They can still talk the talk of oppressor/oppressed and perpetrators/victims. From such simple talk, they evidently derive great pleasure.

I think Shakespeare, Tolstoy and Faulkner might say . . . yawn. I know I do.