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One of the things about the Baltimore setting that has helped Simon and his works avoid being trite social justice fodder is that in a significantly majority black city the racial dynamics aren't oppressor/oppressed. The cops are black, the politicians are black, the wealthy are black, the criminals are black. So while the Gun Trace Task Force (and the Baltimore PD) victimize mostly black men, the GTTF itself is also majority black, and is ultimately investigated and brought to justice by (at least in the show) an all-white team. The white police commissioner who gets sympathetic treatment is fired and replaced by another corrupt black one. Simon has always seen the drug war and policing primarily through a class lens.
100% Agree and Simon is the kind of "lefty" that I will spend extra time and effort trying to engage with because of his own self-discipline and refusing to adopt the easy but wrong (and, worse, intentionally deceptive) sentiments of the woke / progressive sphere.
But the class lens is still a difficult circle to square because of its high dependence on chronology. In Season 2 of the Wire, we're exposed to the plight of the dying dockworker industry in Baltimore. These are quite literally the almost mythical "working class" of the 1950s and 1960s who, on one high school education level income, could buy a home, a car, raise 3 - 5 kids (the Polish are Catholic!), enjoy BBQs and little league etc. They did this through comically illegal political patronage, state sanctioned segregation, and, following that program's demise, strongly self-enforced neighborhood segregation. If ever there was something like "systemic racism" and an "oppressor class", it was boldly exemplified by just these sort.
But in the early 2000s, they're so economically displaced that a major subplot of Season 2 is how the younger generation (Nicky and Ziggy) involve themselves willingly in the drug trade in order to (again, literally) move out of their parents' basements.
So, where exactly is my sympathy supposed to lie with these classes? Sure, rich people are always generically evil in some sense or another. But where does one class begin and end? Where does one single group of the same people (i.e. Frank Sabotka) stop being oppressor and become oppressed (or vice versa?)
This is one of my macro problems with the broadest possible "left" - despite their professed hatred of hierarchy and social group demarcation, they explicitly base their worldview on a static grouping of people based on criteria that is inherently dynamic! They even build wild hacks to get around this by creating mental "concepts" like "poverty mindset" and "whiteness is a state of mind."
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