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You could just be specific. I'm not suggesting you need a comprehensive list of every single person involved, but you should be able to provide some key identifiable institutions or people. It is extremely relevant who they are because you cannot possibly draw useful conclusions about them otherwise. A nebulous "they" has no interests.
All rhetoric serves an interest. Vagueness makes it impossible to interrogate claims or simply obfuscate their absurdity. The motives of the "powers that be" to assassinate Trump are not something anyone can examine because there is no clear reference.
Of course, the real answer to all this is that the "ruling class" is a fiction - the people and organizations that wield power are fragmented and frequently at odds.
This is entirely compatible with the concept of the ruling class and I should say necessary to understand the reasons of formation and collapse of the category. Everyone is indeed always at odds, a ruling class is a group of people that are sufficiently organized that their internal squabbles don't jeopardize domination of their external enemies.
Let us consider a salient and inarguable example of a ruling class, the Soviet nomenklatura.
No sane student of history would deny that these people had vicious internal fights, often to the death. But then nobody would deny either that they were a ruling class. They formed an organized minority of people who ruled over the majority of Soviet population.
Insofar as they were ready to favor their social circle over the population at large, they held power, and it slipped from their fingers at the precise exact time that their inner divisions became more powerful than the pact they held against the population. In the 1991 Yanayev coup, when fellow party members stopped being friends, and became enemies.
In some abstract sense, perhaps. And everything is also political in that sense. But it dissolves the category into uselessness. Rather, as I think you're saying, refusing to front a list of names serves the interest of dissidents. Which is also suspect.
Fair enough, but I then don't think we ought to take sides if we want do do a descriptive inquiry. Talking about the ruling class, whatever it is, and the ruling class, a specific one; are both valid and useful in my view.
I guess we agree in the sense that we then ought to bring up different models of the establishment and its behavior, and compare them against the situation. I think that's productive and we should cultivate a number of such models if we want to understand the world as it is.
I simply want to prevent us from the demand of fronting a perfect prediction model for something that is desperately trying not to be observed.
I'd like some more details too. President Biden is obviously part of the American ruling class. I couldn't name anyone else who inarguably is though. Is Marjorie Taylor Greene part of the ruling class? Are New York Times journalists? Are American generals? Is Peter Thiel? Is Donald Trump himself? Supreme Court justices? State governors? If you're saying Trump is at risk of being assassinated by the powers-that-be, I want some more details on which powers exactly those are, because there are a lot of powers in America. Many of them hate Trump, many of them hate each other, many of them hate Trump and also hate other people who hate Trump.
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