Yet, the word has disappeared. Or has it?
I would like to propose a typology that might make it easier to understand the intellectual convolutions that necessarily accompany this mental deformity, and possible some of the emotional imbalances and psychopathologies.
There are four basic classes in Leftist mythos: the metaphysical enemy, the Leftist/intellectual class, the Victim, and the practical enemy.
Within orthodox Marxism, these classes are of course the Capitalist, the “revolutionary” (which is always a lie: they carry out coups, usually in small numbers, and then sell them based on lies), the proletariat, and of course the bourgeoisie.
But what MATTERS is that the intellectual is at the center of the universe, that they have an excuse for being at the center of the universe, that they have a cause which can never be won, and that they have a practical object of hatred.
Roughly speaking, the “capitalist” has transformed into the “Corporation”. Now, leftists have nothing against corporations, per se. Harry Reid no doubt, like everyone else, gets most of his money from people who run or own corporations. But the concept is so vague, so vacuous, so MUTABLE, that it comes to connote the emotional equivalent of the Bogeyman. Those corporations, they sneak up on you in the dark. . . .
The practical object of hatred, the people who can be demonized in the particular, were the middle class. This was possible when large numbers of people, particularly in the very class driven and class conscious Britain, actually belonged to the lower classes.
But the average worker at Ford today has a better standard of living than most of the richest Britons of a century ago. He is middle class. The proletariat can no longer be argued to exist, and is thus no longer a suitable Victim.
Here is the thing, though: precisely because they intend no Good, precisely because the sole point of the exercise is getting power, Leftists can never formulate a positive campaign for anything. They must sow hatred, and use that as a means of building the sort of consensus that can be leveraged for power.
Who, now, has replaced the bourgeoisie? The Racist. Think about it: blacks aren’t going anywhere. They have been taught for half a century to wait for a boat that will never come in, and to BLAME the lack of a boat on targets selected for them by the professional propagandists.
And in the same sense that the bourgeoisie was always largely a rhetorical construct, so too is the racist. Our country is virtually devoid of actual racists of the old school variety. No doubt we have many people who have had first hand negative interactions with black people, but that is quite a different thing than the blanket consensus of Left wing retrogressives that anyone who opposes them can be assigned a class and hated for it. I would hazard a guess that even people who threw racial epithets at Obama did so simply because it was easy. CLEARLY, Obama has nothing in common with most blacks in this country. As I have said several times, I literally find myself unable to think of him as black. I literally forget he is black, and cannot fathom people who consider it a success that someone with darker skin pigmentation won the race for the White House twice. Why should skin color matter, in itself, ever?
All of this is subtle. It only appears with reflection and time, and that is precisely why the task of left wing propagandists is create so much noise and motion that nobody ever stops and thinks at all.