Читать книгу Clarence Thomas and the Tough Love Crowd - Ronald Suresh Roberts - Страница 14

Almost everything written about “black conservatism” concedes that it lacks a constituency. The real-fact trick is thus indispensable for the Toughs in a way that it is not for those with popular support. Lacking a constituency, the Tough Love Crowd needs the claim of truth in order to stay aboard the progressive project. The Toughs think oppression is immoral. Yet to many people their own agenda looks oppressive. They concede that their agenda involves bitter medicine, but they deny that it departs from their commitment to the dispossessed, claiming that it simply faces truth. They need this claim of truth to discipline a recalcitrant constituency and make it see its real best interests. But suppose their truth is a Trojan horse? The fact that many people doubt claims of objective truth creates an uneven playing field, to the disadvantage of the Tough Love Crowd. They speak on our behalf except they sound like our opponents. If their truths are ideological fetish, their love is rough self-pleasuring. And we be* more protected with their Trojan swords sheathed.³⁵