Against Identity Politics
foreignaffairs.com
foreignaffairs.com
I'm sure that it's more likely that female voters would lobby for a sexual harassment bill than men; its already been shown that Asian voters gathering in opposition to affirmative action moves because they feel that their kids are targeted (see NYC specialized schools, Harvard). Even throughout the 2016 election and the postmortem most news outlets focused on the "identity" of the white, middle aged, "heartland" / rust belt voter who has been shafted by globalization.
It seems to me the term identity politics and everything that comes with it is simply a backlash against groups that have been traditionally marginalized but who are now entering the political arena and making demands.
If your definition of the two terms is identical, perhaps you should look for some subtlety that you might be missing but causes other people to differentiate.
For example, maybe there is an attitude that acknowledges political interest groups tend to be made up of constitute group(s) that share more-visible property(s) than a political goal. But wants to de-emphasize those other properties compared to the political interests of the group and raise the importance of principled policy reasoning above surface-level characteristics. I dunno... just spitballing here.
>Even throughout the 2016 election and the postmortem most news outlets focused on the "identity" of ...
Election reporting is disappointingly focused on hot takes and the horse race. Does anybody actually find utility in the focus on the stories about Little Timmy falling down a well rather than a more systematic analysis?
TBH, it's hard to take anything else you say seriously when you claim that nothing much has changed in America since the revolution 240 years ago.
And, regarding your other points: the concept that people deserve certain inalienable rights because they are human, rather than because they belong to certain a group, is the moral foundation upon which women's suffrage, black emancipation, and the civil rights movement are all based. It would be really stupid to dismiss this idea in favor of a system where groups fight it out for political power. And it would be doubly stupid for members of less powerful groups to do so.
A majority of the civil rights leaders were African Americans. A majority of the women's suffrage movement were women. Just last year you had the investor class lobbying for special deals in the tax code so that the estate tax was lowered. What I'm saying is that you can look at any political issue today and find that the driving force behind it is usually driven by some ideology based on identity. NIMBYs drive NIMBY policy because they are homeowners. Young people are more concerned about policies that would alleviate student debt, rural farmers want their animals to graze on federal land. Everywhere you look identity politics are at play because fundamentally your identity (age, race, sex, profession, lifestyle) helps shape who you are and what you care about.
I think if you look closer you'll find that more are motivated by values rather than immutable characteristics.
And that's the problem with identity politics - it elevates immutable characteristics over shared values and assigns a type of original sin ("white privilege") to the identity it sees as the cause if its woes ("old white men").
It's disgusting.
There were thought leaders in both groups who rose above the crude politics of identity, and were able to promulgate a politics of principles. A problem with leaderless movements is that the philosophy can devolve to a Least Common Denominator of crude identity. Even wholly ideological movements can devolve in this way to become identity politics.
In internet discussions too often do people want to drop the history of hundreds of years of identity based politics, and I think it's because now identity politics are being used in a way that they feel threatened by.
The proper way to fix that, is to become better at applying the principles. That would be a step forward. It would be a step backwards to start saying one group is bad and another group should be elevated due to characteristics.
In internet discussions too often do people want to drop the history of hundreds of years of identity based politics
There are many views of history, and the way that minority groups lift themselves up is not well represented in the public discourse.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3w0X71d9Z08
I think it's because now identity politics are being used in a way that they feel threatened by.
If identity politics are being used to divide people and devolve public discourse into toxic in-group/out-group, then I think there is indeed a threat there. If identity politics are being used as a substitute for principles, then there is indeed a threat to society.
I know that's an article of faith in the American civic cult, but it's not at all grounded in fact. The original Constitution is a pile of pragmatic compromises between competing factions faced with an immediate practical crisis, which they approached from radically different viewpoints and sets of principles.
On the contrary, white people are so not okay with white identity politics that the mere accusation of racism is a stain which will taint a public figure for the rest of their life. And actual, documented racism is usually a career ending event.
But all of those things—women's suffrage, black emancipation, and equal rights for blacks—were won not by appealing to group identity, but by appealing to the universality of being human. After all, it is men who voted to give women the franchise. And it was whites who went to war for black emancipation and then voted for universal civil rights. Those are all examples of people going against their group interests.
It was both, and I think you need to do some research on the different methods of outreach that each of these movements utilized. Susan B Anthony organized conferences for all women and she launched a magazine for women. These types of movements are two sided, you need to gather the "oppressed" on one side and the folks who are progressive and can be persuaded on the other, you're looking at this without enough nuance IMO.
It would be one thing to make demands on the basis of unfair treatment with regards to universal principles. It's another thing to make demands merely on the basis of identity. People should be treated with fairly because of merit and the "content of their character." People should not be treated with because of their age, their sex, who they are attracted to, or their skin color.
What we should also recognize in 2018, is that tribalism itself is toxic. Tribalism can also be attached to life choices, political stances, and subculture, and those sorts of tribalism can be toxic to the same order of magnitude as older forms, such as those based on ethnicity. Tribalistic toxicity stemming from immutable characteristics is arguably worse, because people are trapped on a side. This is why identity politics should be avoided in general.
A politics that would be humane should be about principles and policy, not identity.
This is also why the association of principles like Free Speech with particular identities, even identities of choice, is also particularly corrosive.
I think the problem with the term identity politics is that people have a very limited view of identity. Being white in America is apart of your identify, being gay is part of your identity, living in a big city is a part of your identity, being college educated is a a part of your identity. Each of these things and dozens more help to drive your political viewpoint and what you lobby for.
I think for the most part the political groups that have been branded as "identity politics" are all about fair treatment for all, these groups arise usually when fair treatment is not given to them specifically and so they lobby on their own behalf.
Look at Black Lives Matter, this is an organization / movement that sprung up after multiple killings of black men by police and is focused on police reform. You can call this identity politics if you want but then I would also say that Right to Life groups who protest abortion because of their Christian beliefs are also identity politics. So are PACs funded by wealthy individuals who would like to see their taxes cut. This is what I mean when I say all politics is identity politics.
Our basic social instincts are designed around identity politics formed along ethnic lines. What we really need are politics around principles, however. It's the same general evolutionary lag as with our instincts around food. We are wired-up to eat as much fat and sugar as we can, whenever we can, which suited us just fine for most of our history. So too, are we wired-up to be nice to our own tribe and quite hostile to the other. In 2018, just giving into either set of basic instincts is likely to kill us, however.
BLM is a mixed bag as far as examples go - it's loose organization has resulted in a pretty broad message, and sometimes that message has gone well into the range of the bad type of identity politics (see e.g. https://torontosun.com/2017/02/11/black-lives-matter-co-foun... ).
The problem is that these people aren't arguing for fair treatment. They are arguing for unfair treatment, but just unfair treatment that now favors them, and this treatment is determined by group identity (i.e. men=bad so you can hate any man).
If that's the approach, then to me it reveals that any rhetoric about fair treatment is just that, rhetoric, and what is really wanted is power.
The problem with this is that when you think of identity politics you think of the extreme end. Which is the main point of my original post. People equate identity politics with extremism -- my argument is that identity politics is actually at the core of all politics. You can utilize extreme rhetoric arguing any point. But if all you see is the extreme then well.. I can't help you.
If you are indeed a part of a more moderate and nuanced politics, then I think you could help by calling out the extremists and speaking up for principles. Where people "on your side" are showing tacit approval to extremists, you should call them out.
If you can point out where the nuanced and more moderate politics are put forward from your side, then also point that out. From where I am sitting, it seems like the extreme part of "idpol" is the loudest and seemingly the most representative part.
I think everyone who isn't very interested in this matter is only seeing the extreme. At least that's all that seems to reach me. Maybe the identity politics people could do a better job of showing their reasonable side.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/03/francis-fukuya...
Not well. Some of the problem comes from misunderstanding figures like Beauvoir and Freud; some comes from reducing the work of complex writers like Rousseau and Nietzsche to a single philosophical bullet point. A lot comes from the astonishingly blasé assumption—which was also the astonishingly blasé assumption of “The End of History?”—that Western thought is universal thought. But the whole project, trying to fit Vladimir Putin into the same analytic paradigm as Black Lives Matter and tracing them both back to Martin Luther, is far-fetched. It’s a case of Great Booksism: history as a chain of paper dolls cut out of books that only a tiny fraction of human beings have even heard of. Fukuyama is a smart man, but no one could have made this argument work.
Oof, no thanks. This article alone makes me want to subscribe to the New Yorker, if only in thanks for saving me the trouble of reading this book.
Identity politics was exploited by Julius Caesar in his program of divide and conquer against the overarching Celtic cultural group. I think it is having a similar divisive affect on western society today.
This is an essay with the same name from 2015: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/lupus-dragonowl-agai...
and this is a politically incorrect drama about identity politics written by, err, the unabomber: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ-Upb4Szms
In my experience at least this is true: anytime I've tried to engage in a discussion with someone who is into identity politics, I've been told that I may say one thing, but my actual intentions are nefarious, that I'm full of fear and hate, and that my view is meaningless since I'm a white hetero male. There is no need to talk to me because they already know everything about me and what a horrible (or at least very blind) person I am.
I think the Left would do well to try to minimize "idpol" if for no other reason than strategically it's a disaster - it chases away tons of potential allies.
My personal experience is with the Left and certain people being extremely in-your-face about it and (ironically) pre-judging me by my gender, sexual orientation, and skin color.
But yeah, I think identity politics exists everywhere on some level, it gets corrupted and bad the further you go towards the extremes of the spectrum, but for better or for worse on the Left there seems to be more of an overt part of the narrative currently (which leads to e.g. https://goo.gl/V47VH8).
The United States is 65% white. How you gonna get to 51% of the vote when your primary message to white people is "check your privilege"? Bonus points when it's coming from a 25yo making $200k a year.
That said, the primary message is basically the entire message in a world of soundbites.
This[0] is the democratic party platform. Can you point to the portion that says "White people; Check your privilege"?
If you were not talking about the democratic party, as I've assumed you are, I'm sure you can find the party platform of the group you are referencing.
[0]: http://s3.amazonaws.com/uploads.democrats.org/Downloads/2016...
Not about the broader democratic party, which very much includes me and many others who get annoyed as hell by the divisiveness of the above group. And I'm certainly not talking about the platform. If people voted based on that instead of media soundbites, we'd have a different country.
[1]: If you're a democrat, and you find that Hannity and Limbaugh are excited to quote you, please shut the fuck up immediately until you understand why they love you so much.
Never met an adult who's typed that nonironically.
Maybe there's a messaging problem, and maybe the people I'm grossly offending in this thread are part of it. If they can't handle liberal techie me without being triggered, how could they possibly converse with Joe Sixpack?
The fact that you're trying to act like there are a group of Democrats that actively, universally hate white people and proudly call themselves "sjw" is destroying any remaining credibility you have. It's also just painfully embarrassing to watch happen.
These people exist and they are huge in silicon valley. God bless ya if you haven't encountered them.
It seems like your position is that "everyone gang up on white men" is a winning strategy because we've now sliced off a minority that doesn't get to 51%.
Ethics of that aside, it hasn't been working. Obama and Bill Clinton won on thinking and inclusiveness. Not on division and resentment.
Clinton and Obama received almost exactly the same criticism that you've made here of (presumably, you haven't actually named a target except by vague implication) current Democrats, by both those outside the party and some of their critics within the party. Sure, it wasn't well-founded, but it was no less well-founded than your criticism.
Obama in particular was very careful not to do that.
So were random conversations with Obama supporters.
> Obama in particular was very careful not to do that.
And yet, to the extent that is true, he was still charged with it by critics just like you, because plenty of people in his base did it, and so that was—to them—the primary message of Obama's party.
Of course, he was also a accused of doing it directly with his own statements, not just being the face of movement which did it, particularly after his “evolution” on LGBT rights during his first term, and also specifically in his speech addressing the killing of Trayvon Martin.
I mean, you want to compare the Trayvon Martin story to stories of techies pitching a fit about the word "blacklist" in a codebase? That's the kind of thing I'm talking about, in case it wasn't clear. Can we not differentiate?
This is incorrect on several levels.
But, most centrally, I'm saying people like the rich 20 year olds have been around forever, that people have been attacking the Democratic Party about them forever, they aren't a meaningful change from what has been around for decades, and your implicit claim that they are a change from Clinton and Obama is erroneous I. comparing fringe non-politicians that may seem locally significant in your social circles to career politicians who are also succesful Presidential candidates and being surprised that the former have a less carefully crafted political presentation for mass appeal, which is an unsurprising observation with no particular significance.
25yos making 200k working for the man and then lecturing others who make less about privilege is pretty new.
I get what you're saying about singling out the dumbest individuals in a movement, but as techie liberals, I think we have an obligation to police. Just like principled conservatives vs their racists.
Closer to 77%.
Oh, you meant non-Hispanic White.
> How you gonna get to 51% of the vote when your primary message to white people is "check your privilege"?
(1) US elections are often won with a plurality (and sometimes, e.g. 2016, simple minority) of the vote, 51% is not required.
(2) No major US political group has that as a major message.
As far as the message.. one can send a message by omission. If you spend a lot of time pandering in a race-based manner to every group EXCEPT this one racial group.. some people might take that the wrong way. Especially if you've got a small, loud minority telling them to take it exactly that way.
My solution is to drop the race-gender-whatev based pandering and move to shared ideals. It's how democrats win. They lose at the tribal game every time. How you gonna wrangle 20 different identities against a single more cohesive identity that also outnumbers you?
"Check your privilege" isn't a phrase that anyone seriously uses. Do you deny that privilege exists? Do you think that the only people who talk about privilege are non-white? Do you think that the concept of privilege makes all white people evil, or is a message that is un-hearable to all white people?
You just showed more about your own biases than you did anything to advance any conversation here. Then you double down further in the thread about "Social justice warriors" being a real thing (it's literally only ever used as a boogeyman by people with really broken, wrong thoughts about "privilege" as an abstract concept, so thanks for confirming that I guess.)
It's not even a "primary" message. What politician advanced that message recently? Which politically-affiliated political action group has "check your privilege" as a mantra? And here I am, again, pushing someone for evidence when it's painfully obvious that there's nothing there other than unsupported biases.
Could you be a little more specific about what my thoughts are on privilege as an abstract concept? I've been wanting someone to tell me about that.
How did my childhood impact these views?
Assume good intentions.
I've been around a lot of younger people who actually unironically say this stuff lately. No joke. Ask others on the board working at SV-based companies hiring out of college.
"Portland, is your white fragility showing?"
https://www.wweek.com/news/2018/04/24/in-true-portland-style...
I observe that a number of antifascists have been documented to be into a form of "idpol" based on tribalism of subcultural affiliation of choice -- to the point where they are willing to do physical violence against people because they merely "seem" a certain way.
There are many affiliations which are not immutable, but which are very hard to change and closely held or prized. I don't think that people should be coerced to give those up. Perhaps the tearing of such identities of choice is only 70% as toxic as identity based on immutable characteristics, but 70% of awful is still pretty awful.
It's better to convince than to coerce.
With these views there will be no place at all for him on the left. He will just be picked apart by the dogs. because this is not a message they will wish to hear. must be hard to grow old and see the side you identify with betray its old cause and grow into something else and just not know where you belong anymore. we all need an identity, after all.
Doesn't mean he's wrong for disliking both identity politics and presumably Trump but he's no liberal.
i'm more interested in how he sees himself than what he is.