Years ago the left came upon a useful new term: “the most vulnerable.” The use it to describe a portion of the population they purport to represent. Definitions vary, but it’s most often poor people and people of color, including Latinos. The left also sometimes includes sexual minorities, Third World inhabitants, children, drug addicts, the homeless, the mentally ill, the elderly, immigrants, and people with disabilities. Obviously, these categories can and do overlap.
Progressives, who are as aware of the importance of coalition building as any other political group, traditionally lumped all these categories together, in the hope that they vote, as a gigantic block, for progressives. But there’s emerging evidence that this block is splintering. Not all of these groupings enjoys being associated with the others. Some feel taken for granted. This is why we saw, in the 2024 election, such a shift to the Republicans, especially at the presidential level.
It’s not clear who invented the term. Ghandi allegedly used it decades ago when he said, “The true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members.” Regardless of who invented it, when you hear someone these days utter the phrase “the most vulnerable” you can bet your paycheck it’s a liberal Democrat. The party—my party—has made its stock-in-trade the poor and working class ever since the FDR’s “I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished” in his second Inaugural Address of 1937. The New Deal, followed by LBJ’s Great Society and every other Democratic social program since, was designed to help those people.
Noble stuff. Nobility, or perhaps noblesse oblige, has always been a pillar of the Democratic Party. But somewhere along the line this feeling of obligation to the poor and disadvantaged changed from something noble to something unwholesome. It became, not a desire to help the destitute, but an excuse to stay in power, and to replace our free-market system with something more akin to Communism, along with that ideology’s penchant toward authoritarianism and groupthink.
This penchant is more pronounced in Oakland than perhaps in any other American city. We have politicians who say, in effect, “We’re in office to make sure that the people we define as ‘vulnerable’ have the same resources as wealthier people.” And so we get racial or “equity” goals, redistributive quotas, affirmative action, preferences in contracting, sky-high taxes and parcel taxes, and all the other abnormalities of a communized economy that destroys private property, induces crime, and drives businesses away. We might be having a different conversation if this particular economic and social ideology actually worked, but it doesn’t—as is readily apparent to anyone looking at Oakland today.
One of the weapons the left utilizes in its “most vulnerable” argument is guilt. We’re told that if we disagree that structural racism is the greatest problem people of color suffer from, then we’re defending a racist system because we, ourselves, are racists. This is a clever allegation from the left; they’ve honed their message for decades. But there’s one problem that the left hasn’t been able to solve: intelligent people know that the left is wrong. They know they’re not racist, and for the left to insist they are leaves them with a sour taste. The public sees the grift, graft, corruption and outright lies coming from the left, and is intellectually and morally repelled. As one person expressed it on Reddit, “I want to help the vulnerable but we have so many people cosplaying as vulnerable.”
Cosplaying. An interesting word generally interpreted as role-playing for selfish motives. In this case, consider a drug addict who has no interest in leading a productive, contributing life. He sits at a freeway ramp all day with a sign that says, “Hungry, out of a job, please help.” He expects sympathetic liberals to shower him with dollars because, hey, that’s what liberals do. But he’s not really “vulnerable.” He’s lazy, cynical and negative, unwilling to work the way the rest of us do, but expecting the rest of us to take care of him. The Reddit correspondent accurately identifies the problem here. When so many people profess to be victims, but we know that many or most of them are phonies, we’re less inclined to help them. The same goes for panhandlers who beg for a dollar or two. We know why they want the money: for their fentanyl or their malt liquor. Little wonder so many of us ignore them.
This isn’t compassion fatigue, as the liberal media portray it. It’s recognizing grifting when we see it. There truly are people who need our help, but it’s pathetic that most of the “vulnerable” people that progressives claim to love are poseurs just looking for a handout. It’s not our responsibility to give free money to grifters.
Steve Heimoff