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As a woke leftist myself:
You can't, because you are wrong.
But for real: You still can't, because this is a scissor-ish style of statement that has too much cultural impetus behind it for any counterargument that can be delivered in anything less than 1500 pages to be convincing.
Eg, you can be as rational and as reasonable as you like, but all it takes is ONE (1) clip from fox news about current culture war issue, or someone reminding them about whichever black guy most recently got executed by the cops on the street, or just remembering that a defacto legal racial caste system existed in the US until 1964, and they will instantly revert to priors: that is, you are either a bigot, or politically motivated to believe things that are demonstrably untrue.
Don't give up, live your truth and etcetera, but understand that for every "affirmative action is a prejudicial concept that infantilizes racial minorities unjustly and unfairly", there is a "there are millions of people alive today that were forbidden from owning high value property because they were not white".
There is still a lot of common ground to be found.
Left - Black people were not allowed to own high value land in the 50s and still don't own any.
Young populist Right - We are poor doing blue collar work college educated PMC class grifters are the only ones who can afford the now-heavily inflated land.
The answer is the same for both groups. Build more ! But, their hatred for each other doesn't allow them to talk about any of the issues at all.
The point is not to find consensus, but to chip at some of the provably wrong bits of the beliefs held by either side, until we reach 2 opposing but still kinda alright solutions.
eg: There is ample evidence for the left to concede that rent control does not work. Also, Dumping all the homeless/poor/society's most desperate into 1 block will destroy that neighborhood and exacerbate all of those issues. (housing projects deep in Brooklyn). At the same time, the right could also concede that an arbitrary date in the 70s does not make sense a date to have stopped building any and all housing around the US. If the city population goes up by 20%, then the city needs 20% new housing. Mafs.
Just starting there makes for productive conversation. No holy cows need to be slain. No major minds need to changed.
Ofc, in such a world the everyone would hold hands and kiss too..........but I am a hopeless optimist, so I persevere.
Do go on...
Oh... I thought it involved eating...
Arguably that's the entire point of left/right ideologies. It's a simple divide and conquer so the ruling elites can do what they want unmolested.
I think a significant part of the issue is that everyone fails to make a distinction between ethical and unethical rich people. That is, there are wealth generating behaviors that genuinely create wealth in a way that does not exploit everyone else. There are hyperproductive people who are brilliant and take risks that pay off, and work 100 hour weeks for decades, and create good things that benefit society, and then they keep a fraction of the wealth they created for themselves, and this is good. And then there are skeezy "elites" who exploit employees or leech off tax dollars and regulatory capture and rentseeking. And there's a spectrum in between.
And it's important both economically and morally to draw a distinction between these behaviors and get rid of the latter without disincentivizing the former. The naive rightist just assumes that most rich people earned their wealth legitimately and overtaxing them is theft. The naive leftist just assumes that most rich people are thieves who provide no value to society and can be eaten for free with no secondary long term consequences. And both encounter the other viewpoint and see how obviously naive it is, point out hundreds of counterexamples, and walk away safe and secure that their opponents are idiots. Which they are, because not enough people have a nuanced understanding that "rich" is not a moral category which must be inherently good or bad, it's an attribute that someone can achieve via a variety of methods which differ in moral goodness.
I don't think it even requires a conspiracy of ruling elites to create (though they do put their thumbs on the scales), it's just people being overly narrowminded and selectively naive.
This difference looks to me like a disagreement in assigning the burden of proof, as well. The rightist believes that evidence of wealth isn't sufficient to support a prima facie case of exploitation, while the leftist believes it is sufficient. This isn't resolved by figuring out whether more rich people got that way legitimately vs. illegitimately; you also have to assign a threshold for assuming guilt or innocence that may not be the same as the object-level percentages (i.e. do you want to favor punishing the guilty, not punishing the innocent, or minimizing error in either direction?).
Yeah, I think I would respect arguments from either side acknowledging this and arguing about what that threshold should be. I don't see a lot of that, I don't see a lot of nuance or discussion of tradeoffs in burdens of proof, I mostly see extreme all/none arguments from people. Though I suppose at lot of that is observation bias: centrists who have nuanced opinions are more likely to stay silent and don't make angry rants about the pure good or pure evil of rich people.
It is interesting to me though that the bias in the right/left about the burden of proof is the opposite as to what it is for actual crime though. Normally, the left demands a high burden of proof and wants to look out for the rights of people accused of crimes, while the right wants harsh judgements and penalties. Is it just that the left is pro poor people and the right is pro rich and so the burden flips depending on who is being accused? Except that there are tons of counter examples of the left hating certain poor people and right hating certain rich people. But I suppose if one of those people were being accused the left and right would support or oppose strict burden of proofs according to their like of that type of person, so is it just the case that the left and right have no coherent stance on what burdens of proof should be in general, and only have opinions on them downstream of their other biases?
Another complication is that this right vs. left judgment is context-dependent, based on the particular society you're looking at. In a lot of cases, each individual judgment may be more directional than absolute--for example, a rightist might say "our society is too error-prone in judging individual rich people guilty of exploitation; it should do that less," while a leftist in the same society might draw the opposite conclusion. Move the same people to a different society, and they may both find themselves on the same side of a relative center that is positioned differently.
(Also, the leftist critique here is a classical Marxist economic-centered view; the woke left seems to have no particularly strong view of wealth per se, as their societal critique is identity-centered. ...I admit, I'm amused by the the potential question of whether someone identifies as a rich person.)
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