I recognize that it’s speaking to an underlying emotional truth - something I’ve known on a gut level for a while now but can’t quite put my finger on. I know it’s not, as I’ve seen liberals argue, that it’s an excuse to legitimize violence against them (their own violence is all the justification one needs) or some kind of “No True Scotsman” argument. There’s something deeper and more fundamental, something to do with how the nature of their class position causes them to set themselves apart from and above the vast majority of humanity. Anyone who can help me put this into words?
This isn’t any sort of real philology on my part, but the class interests of the bourgeoisie put them at odds with the vast majority of humanity, and that remains as long as they have that class position. The broad benefit of society is typically even a detriment to them, as it diminishes the totalizing power over their monopolization of what were once the commons, their ability to inflict social murder. There is only one tolerable kind of bourgeois individual, and that is the traitor to their class interests, and even then the existence of those rogue elements must be used to further the project of the destruction of their class rather than as some insipid anecdote that they “aren’t all bad” and therefore that class antagonism can be removed without removing classes.
And all of this is to serve capital, the organizing principal which dominates the actions of the bourgeoisie whether they like it or not, which itself is served by humans but is not human.
So taken literally, yes, obviously it’s hyperbole, but I don’t think you can identify an element of society for whom it is less hyperbolic than for the bourgeois.