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Comment by kristopolous | Hacker News Reader

That's liberal politics, not left. There's a real, meaningful difference. Liberating identities is a form of liberalism.

There's some dogpiling effect where all these terms which deviate from a current conservative are used interchangeably.

Leftists and liberals really don't like each other and when the liberal parties need to choose between supporting their conservative opponents or a leftist challenger, they almost without exception, join the conservatives to block out the leftists from power.

Many liberals see the left as a far bigger threat than most forms of conservatism and to confuse the these groups is part of the reason people don't think these groups have a coherent vision, because they actually don't like each other and aren't the same.

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That people should be allowed to assume whatever identities they like is a liberal position, but telling people what they cannot say and should not think in relation to identity (or anything else, really) is not. There may be some muddled overlap between those two sets but they are absolutely not the same.

The latter is, generally, a leftist thing. The political left is concerned with egalitarianism, often to the extent that they believe specific and deliberate actions should be taken to reduce inequality. See also: social justice. The identity politicking we're discussing here is predicated on the idea that there are marginalized groups, i.e. folks who do not comfortably fit into the established gender binary and/or gender-sex clustering, and that people outside those groups should change their behavior to reduce that marginalization.

You actually just crossed the two again.

The leftist position is the imposition of the language is yet another form of oppression. Crafting new social hierarchies based on language, like has has existed throughout time, is wildly incompatible with leftism.

Anarchism, Libertarianism, these are closer to leftism than liberalism.

The liberal would reproduce class hierarchies through language and phrasing virtue signaling, ignoring and respecting people based on their use of language. The left has no such masters which is why they have such a hard time consolidating and organizing - there isn't a central cultural idealism.

And just to be clear, I'm perfectly happy with being ahead of the curve on this one and getting the "down votes". I know most people don't currently see or care about this distinction, but it's really important.

The two words begin with "L" and sound alike and the liberal party tries to capture the left like the conservatives try to capture libertarians, but these four things aren't really two things and their differences matter.

> I'm perfectly happy with being ahead of the curve on this one

Making up your own definitions of words != being ahead of the curve.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-wing_politics

Those wikipedia articles defend the distinction I'm making.

As much as I wish you weren't, I think you're actually behind the curve on this. Barely anyone defines left-wing politics this way any more; it's all about idpol and capitalist realism now.

The only important distinction is in self-identification. Who calls themselves a leftist, not who is called one. For instance, look at the program for the left forum 2019: https://www.leftforum.org/program-2019 or the offerings of say Verso books: https://www.versobooks.com or the self proclaimed left-wing news sites like in these times: https://inthesetimes.com or jacobin: https://jacobinmag.com ... there's effectively zero identity politics.

Instead, they critique and criticize it.

For instance, here is a book review from verso

> "...argues that identity politics is not synonymous with anti-racism, but instead amounts to the neutralization of its movements. It marks a retreat from the crucial passage of identity to solidarity, and from individual recognition to the collective struggle against an oppressive social structures"

https://www.versobooks.com/books/2716-mistaken-*%20identity

People who see identity politics in action on news sites indeed call it leftism, along with fascism, liberalism, racism, and socialism. These people are just flinging words around however, they don't draw a distinction between any of those things. They're using those words as a form of profanity, purely emotive.

and here's another example of how leftists do not like identpol, also from verso:

> identity politics is positioned in a variety of Marxist frameworks as ineffectual; as a politics founded on difference, it is inherently incapable of building the broad-based movement needed to destabilise capitalism.

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3853-marxism-and-identity-p...

Or Jacobin, the leftist magazine, smearing it as a form of liberalism (which leftists, once again, do not like):

> But the term “neoliberal identity politics” refers to the way the politics of identity can be — and often are — abused by those in power, to undermine the very politics of collectivity upon which the liberation of all oppressed groups depends.

https://jacobinmag.com/2019/06/elizabeth-warren-bernie-sande...

or the leftist InTheseTimes, clearly criticizing the (liberal) Democratic party:

> Far too many black folks will vote for their worst enemy, if he or she looks like them. That’s why identity politics, which masquerades as a black power strategy, winds up disempowering African Americans every election.

http://inthesetimes.com/article/19762/identity-politics-take...

It doesn't matter whether one agrees with these positions, what's important is to correctly identify who is making them if one values trying to accurately depict reality. These 4 citations from popular self-identified leftist sources think identpol is a bad idea. There's dozens more.

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