I don't think the problem of racism and sexism (two classic "woke" topics) are "Left" problems, which is why it strikes me as odd that I don't see ideas about how to deal with them coming from everyone, beyond a straight denial they exist, or that it's actually the fault of the folks experiencing the discrimination somehow.
It looks like a weird neurotic guilt attack that is probably counterproductive to any future common prosperity. Pushing "Latinx" on Hispanics and discriminatory quotas on Asian students is almost guaranteed to generate some weird backlash. Import of the same ideas to Europe whose racial dynamics is absolutely different (black people from Africa sail here on their own and "we"* mostly want to stop this movement, so pretty much the opposite of American slave history) is almost guaranteed to wake up some old demons.
* Of course there is not a uniform opinion on this among 400 million people, but the last five years have been spent tightening borders, not opening them, and even some lefty parties like Danish Social Democrats joined in.
Sometimes it's an unconscious bias, sometimes is attention seeking, sometimes it's a deflection tactic.
E.g. some "affluent white people" might talk all day about discrimination and never touch the painful topic of wealth inequality across the world.
*BUT* this does not invalidates the valuable goals a whole movement.
If you cherry-pick some examples to dismiss a whole movement you are making a strawman.
That's a big generalization.
Yet it's really unsurprising that a number of affluent people love to talk about race, gender, environment, and many other topic except wealth inequality.
The obvious solution is meritocracy and race/sex blindness. That's the world I wish to live in - non-discrimination & equality of opportunity, not "positive" discrimination (it's always positive for someone) and (enforced) equality of outcome. But the Woke Left has been quite hostile to those concepts recently...
Edit: added "Woke" before "Left" because presumably there's other (liberal) Left that would support meritocracy.
(Edit: this isn’t to say I agree with equal outcome. I think there’s a lot of nonsense stuff in that sphere. But I’ve never myself been able to answer how to consider how to make equality of opportunity happen if we started from an unequal space and inheritance exists which persists inequality.)
First of all, "starts with nothing" isn't specific to black population. Many (most?) immigrants also start with nothing, yet often outperform locals (including whites) (the important question that almost noone is asking, is why?). Among those are Nigerians, so clearly "because they're not black" isn't the correct answer.
Your question already contains the "correct" (IMO) answer, which is: help poor people. To the extent that poverty correlates to being black (or any other categorical characteristic), both solutions are equivalent, except that mine is (1) non-discriminatory (e.g. it helps white homeless people as well), (2) self-correcting (when "racial equality of outcome" is reached and poverty is no longer correlated with skin color, my solution will continue to do "good"), and (3) non-wasteful (why would society spend any amount of resources helping e.g. Obama's daughters, who are by "inheritance" (of political connections) some of the most privileged people on this planet?).
Edit: I might have been too focused on the "race" part of your comment. If you're wondering about inherited inequality in general, well, yeah, that's one of the paradoxes of meritocracy & similar concepts, e.g. assortative mating - the end (stable) state is a society ruled by the (hereditary) "intelligent" class. But I think that's unlikely to happen naturally because there seems to be quite a lot of genetic variation in intelligence (and other traits our society treats as "superior", e.g. height, beauty, etc.); if anything, that's more likely to happen because of genetic manipulation/embryo selection, which doesn't exactly require a meritocratic society...
> Members of the so-called nomenklatura , numbering perhaps a million, have special holiday retreats, access to special medical facilities and--most resented by ordinary Russians--access to special stores that sell imported and Soviet-made goods that are simply not available in the regular stores. Many also have cars and chauffeurs.
> As a practical matter, the privileges are hereditary, since children of the elite have an inside track on admission to the top universities--graduation from which guarantees them good jobs and a place on the nomenklatura list.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-03-17-me-22368-...
Furthermore, 'inequality of outcome' is often times a good thing. We all want a good plumber, a good surgeon, a good baker, a good teacher, a good farmer, a good engineer, either as a service provider or a colleague. Having an 'equality of outcome' system where randoms are promoted to 'good plumber' by fiat in practice makes plumbing dysfunctional. See the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Which leaves open some hard problems:
* Competency leaning hierarchies, vs. power leaning hierarchies.
* Low gini hierarchies vs. high gini hierarchies.
* Low skill societies vs high skill societies.
* Skill acquisition. Help broad swaths of the population acquire proficiency in useful $skill.
Note that in practice equality of outcome systems have been successful only in flattening hierarchies by essentially bulldozing them into the ground, bringing everyone down (other than the new hierarchy leaders) into material, spiritual and skill poverty.
Indeed poor black immigrants to this country do extremely well also.
All this is detailed extensively in the vision of the anointed by Thomas sowell (an accomplished black man from this era)
A core problem is what this means. A lot of people insist that we previously lived in a meritocracy and that things like admissions tests are pure representations of this meritocracy, so that moving away from these systems is an attack on a purely level playing field of meritocracy.
But we don't all agree with this. The same people who you criticize do not agree that we have achieved equality of opportunity. Not even close. For a very clear example, we see wealth opening huge numbers of doors for people regardless of actual merit, either through access to training, or access to connections, or as a backstop that enables people to take risks.
What you consider hostility to these concepts, other people think are essential to achieving these concepts.
Noone (sensible) is claiming that any system is a meritocracy. "Meritocracy" is just an ideal, like "equality", "fairness", or "airplanes not crashing", and it's unlikely we'll ever achieve this ideal, but that doesn't make it not worth fighting for.
So, while obviously objective exams aren't "meritocracy", they are without doubt more meritocratic than not having objective exams.
If "these people" really wanted to move towards greater meritocracy (as opposed to abandoning meritocracy), they'd support things like, abolishment of "extracurricular activities" in college admissions, or legacy admissions, or maybe even things China's limit on the amount of tutoring kids can do (I personally thing this is both too extreme and ultimately counterproductive, but at least we can all agree that it's with the right goal in mind - increasing meritocracy).
I agree that "wealth" is a problem, but the answer is having more objective measures, not less.
This is where we disagree dramatically. And this is why it is so frustrating to have people tell me that I "hate excellence" for supporting policy changes. By holding this assumption it enables you to both
1. Hold that meritocracy is an ideal
2. Conclude that people pushing for changes must oppose meritocracy
But I simply do not agree. To me, admissions exams are like the Leetcode interviews that people decry here. The test something, but that thing is largely disconnected from actual work and instead just becomes an obstacle course.
> If "these people" really wanted to move towards greater meritocracy (as opposed to abandoning meritocracy), they'd support things like, abolishment of "extracurricular activities" in college admissions, or legacy admissions, or maybe even things China's limit on the amount of tutoring kids can do (I personally thing this is both too extreme and ultimately counterproductive, but at least we can all agree that it's with the right goal in mind - increasing meritocracy).
I am involved in local politics to change the admissions program for a public magnet school. "Woke" activists proposed a merit lottery, a system where all students who met a minimum GPA and math-level requirement could be entered into a random lottery for admissions. This was criticized by opponents for being "anti-meritocratic" and even "racist against asians".
The eventually enacted policy maintains a "holistic" application, which does not consider race but does include these other topics. This received precisely the same criticism from opponents. Activists on the "woke" side preferred the merit lottery to this outcome.
So what I see here is that activists, at least in the situations that I am personally involved in, do support things like the abolishment of extracurricular activities in admissions systems.
Sadly, when they are promoted on the grounds of obtuse academic wokeness or identity politics, people instinctively infer that the real goal of such policies is to hand out undeserved benefits to minorities at the expense of a legitimate meritocracy.
Instead, what made headlines was garbage like "I just don’t buy into the narrative that any one ethnic group [Asians] owns admission to these [selective] schools" from the NYC school chancellor. A clear attitude that all racial groups are entitled to proportional representation in selective schools regardless of performance.
Have you spent time with activist groups?
What was the minimum GPA? Who can apply? Are admissions limited to a geographical area or not? Who determines the GPA? If the answer is "teachers", how easily can that be gamed? Why not a similar but much more objective and harder to game system, e.g. admissions exam followed by a random selection above a, say, 80% cutoff point (e.g. first narrow the pool with an exam, then halve it again randomly)?
> but that thing is largely disconnected from actual work and instead just becomes an obstacle course.
This assertion is AFAIK quite nebulous. SATs and similar tests are correlated with IQ and with probability someone finishes university and with later life outcomes. Some say that high school GPA are better predictors, which might be true, but the real question is, how easy are they to game? A metric is only really useful if it doesn't change substantially when it becomes a goal. You might disagree regarding SATs (there's quite some disagreement and proper research into this topic is both hard and very politicised) but whatever other solutions you're proposing, should first be assessed based on how subjective (easy to manipulate/game) they are.
Same thing as Leetcode interviews, really. Everyone knows they suck, noone has come up with anything better yet.
Of course GPA isn’t flawless. You’ll find that activists also seek to solve pipeline problems at lower grades. But this is a rapid retreat from “an objective measure is obviously better” to “this specific measure is better than proposed alternatives.”
Using exam score cutoffs was discussed. Generally, people prefer gpa to exams because there isn’t the same explicit cottage industry of exam prep (yes, private tutoring obviously exists) and it includes a wider range of material than what is included on the test. Exam score cutoffs was also deemed unacceptable and similarly called racist and destructive by the same opponents of the proposed policy.
I don't really see any purpose in randomization, except anti-meritocracy pro-diversity. It is potentially excusable at the edges to account for the inherent noise of measurement (i.e. is 3.4 GPA really that different from 3.6 GPA) but there's no real reason that someone with 4 GPA shouldn't have a greater shot at admission than someone with 3.5 GPA.
Of course, if your distrust in GPA is so great that you oppose even that, then... what even the point of GPA in the first place? We should be working towards improving the metrics, not eliminating them.
But otherwise, this whole randomisation business is like, "Would you like to be operated on by the surgeon, or by the nurse? Oh, wait, let's flip a coin."
We are discussing high school education admissions right now. The kids being evaluated are 13. What is schooling for? Do admissions exist to make sure that some unqualified kid never gets access to a strong education? That conservative approach can make sense for life-or-death interactions like surgery, but nobody dies if a "less qualified" kid is sent to TJ (actually, since suicide rates have increased as the school has gotten more competitive, it might actually save lives).
GPA measures several things at the same time. It most explicitly measures what you have done. But in admissions we want some measure of future potential. This is not aligned perfectly with what somebody has done in the past. Were we to change grading to a continuous evaluation of future potential then I'd be much more accepting of a stricter hierarchy in admissions, but I am extremely skeptical that such a metric would be achievable without introducing tremendous biases.
My GPA in middle school was about a 4.0. But when I review my life, the reason it was so high included many many things that were unrelated to my future potential as a student.
We can also take a step back and consider why we even have limited-access accelerated education in the first place. GMU is just down the street. Even discussing the idea of opening up accelerated education to anybody who wants it is also considered being "an enemy of excellence" by opponents.
Finally, your note about surgeons and nurses is interesting, given the history. Prior to understanding of germ theory, it would have been preferable to be operated on by a nurse. Obviously, this is an extreme example but it clearly demonstrates how widespread understanding of "merit" can actually be totally broken.
I agree though that there's no good reason for gatekeeping education. In fact, in my ideal world, you'd have per-subject fast tracks available for anyone (or, more generally, non-age-specific schooling). For example, I always excelled at (and was interested in) math (other subjects, like physics and chemistry, I just excelled at but wasn't that interested in), so I think both I (individually, in future earnings) and the society (collectively, in future value/invention/...) would benefit tremendously if I was given harder math classes at an earlier age. There's a lot of kids like me, and in other subjects as well. But this would require better metrics and identifying such students earlier (even without any rate-limiting, simply to identify talent and steer it in the right direction).
The recent admitted class for TJ has seen absolutely enormous increases in the population of economically disadvantaged students as well as students on the autism spectrum or with other neuroatypical situations.
It therefore (in my mind) provides a more just system of allocation limited access to accelerated education, while we live in a world with such limited access.
> I agree though that there's no good reason for gatekeeping education. In fact, in my ideal world, you'd have per-subject fast tracks available for anyone (or, more generally, non-age-specific schooling).
My experience has been that promoting these policies receives even greater criticisms that me and my friends are racists who hate excellence. It is ridiculous to me that FCPS has a gated system for accelerated learning when there is a commuter-focused college right there. But if I go to school board meetings and suggest that we take resources and allocate them for this purpose, I'm called an "asian-hater".
My family saw a similar thing happen to them many years ago. The local GT programs were drawing students only from a select few (almost entirely white) schools and it turned out that a lot of this was due to how students were identified as candidates. My parents sought to change things, which did not deny any access to white students but instead expanded access and funding so that simply more people had access to accelerated education and... my parents were called "white traitors" by neighbors.
This is why I get so worked up about this stuff when people claim that support for a particular form of admissions exam is by definition support for promoting merit or promoting excellence.
Water treatment plant workers? President? Honors program students? All of these roles are subject to countless forms of discrimination against people for lacking intelligence, lacking the right identity, lacking educational attainment, lacking all sorts of things.
Thus the only two resolutions I see to the problem are simply thus. Kill absolutely everybody, thus establishing perfect equity and equality. The other solution is to use lotteries absolutely everywhere except for perhaps a special class of lottery runners (an unfortunate meritocracy), in dating, in work, in schooling, that made it so that everybodies outcomes in life was absolutely arbitrary, and thus equal and equitable.
What we have in Wokeism is a pseudo-politics, in that, it make no material demands. The woke concern is against alleged "implicit" forms of racism which "harm" graduates jockying for position within large corporate structures.
It reads a little like "what happens when the upper middle-class discover that they too may, possibly, have been discriminated against".
A plain reading of this seems false. Wokism definitely makes demands.
I don't think this has anything to do with wokriem
Also providing a little context to what I assumed was meant by “material demands”, based on the quote from GP below.
> The most virulent forms of racism are a symptom of material conditions, eg., that poor black people live uniformly in one area, and rich white people in another.
That’s because “Wokeism” doesn’t exist. Being “woke”, was never a descriptor of a politics but of the state of being aware of and engaged in social and political issues affecting a disadvantaged (originally, specifically Black American) community. It’s now morphed into a label assigned by outside group to anyone whose politics the speakers disagrees with for being too focussed, or focussed in the wrong way, on identity issues. So, yes, there is no coherent material program of Wokeism, because Wokeism isn’t a thing.
Now, within the broad mass that any user of the term labels “Wokeism”, there are many groups that have within them extensive, coherent lists of material demands,
Whether you like the term or not, it is very hard to simply deny the revolution in identity construction currently taking place.
Watch the latest CIA advert which emphasises neauvox-oppressed identity markers over. It emphases how the CIA allows you to 'be yourself' qua how you are a member of an oppressed group.
Whatever you want to call /that/, this is what I am talking about.
You claim this is denial, but that's a biased reframing of the stated solution. This is a potential solution, but is not acceptable to the 'woke'
Most of the discussions around systemic racism and sexism fundamentally boil down to the topic either poverty or violence from police.
Poverty:
Specific groups are over-represented in the impoverished population, sometimes across generations. We, correctly, have identified systemic bias as an contributing factor to these trends.
Imagine a hypothetical society where the means of comfort (good food, safe and adequate housing, new clothing, entertainment, etc...) are available to people that need them, regardless of whether or not one is employed. Now ask yourself, would racism and sexism have the same bite that it currently has? If one's ability to live comfortably is not based on systemic bias, one would be disingenuous if they said "yes".
Life gets a lot easier when one can ignore shitty racists and sexists without fear of losing their means of survival. It would be nice if racists and sexists didn't exist, but if everyone had the means to ignore them without fear of repercussions, that's almost as good.
Violence from police:
A few observations from the last few years of police violence and the BLM movement:
-There is a large portion of shitty individuals within various police forces that enjoy victimizing victimizable individuals
-Racialized groups are more victimizable than the average
-Police violence, although concentrated against minorities, also victimizes everyone to some degree, regardless of race or gender.
What practical solutions have come out of all of the years of outrage and protests? Instead of using "master/slave" software terminology, my company now encourages "leader/follower", while all of management is patting its back for "fighting systemic racism". Huh?
Here are some actual practical solutions to this issue:
-federally-mandated body cameras for all overt police officers that are always-on, and record to multiple external and publicly-viewable archives
-police review bodies with actual teeth to punish criminality amongst police officer
-a legal mechanism to permanently bar an individual from any kind of policing, country-wide
-removing "verbal evidence from a trusted officer" as admissible evidence in court
"Wokeness" is just yet another socially-acceptable form of discrimination, where us commoners have been pitted against each other playing some stupid "privilege points" game based on physical appearance. It's divisive, and is not actually moving us towards a healthier society. We should be looking towards our government to solve the actual issues that are aggravated by (and not caused by) sexism and racism.
Racism is a system of hierarchy where one race is inherently good and normal and others are deviations from that, or at least every race is good or bad in some ways and there is an implied value judgement in every assertion about them. Not every person doing a racism necessarily fully commits to racial pseudoscience but if pressed they'll have to justify their conceptions by citing them. Racial mixing of course is unacceptable as it goes against this order and since the racial social castes are a natural order, any attempt to overcome them is bad and anyone making it further than their kind is expected to should either be celebrated for their excellence (and everyone else be held to their standard to demonstrate their insufficiency) or be viewed with suspicion because they probably cheated or got handouts.
Sexism is a sexual hierarchy with women being one way, men another and everyone who doesn't neatly fit into either category being deviant and a troublemaker. It's not so much about one sex being better at all things than the other, much like racism, but about there being a natural order and everything being well as long as people follow it.
Economic right wing thought posits that there is a natural order in that poverty is largely a failure of the individual and can be overcome with sheer will so wealth is the just spoils of success and personal quality and charity is the only acceptable form of welfare because it is for the wealthy to decide how to allocate their deserved riches.
This is also why right-wing people have recently picked up the term "Marxist" (or even "Neomarxist") to describe not just socialists but also progressives in general, even when they lean economically more right-wing than left.
The question of how you align within that spectrum is mostly a question of whether you think a natural order exists and/or should be enforced in each of these dimensions (and there are probably more). Most Democrats don't want to abolish private ownership, they just want more regulations to shift some of the wealth to the lower classes, i.e. balance out the hierarchy rather than getting rid of it. They are however more likely to be opposed to the idea of a natural order in social questions.
Absolutely not: it's the left that's usually the favor of giving more power to the most oppressive and monopolic hierarchy there is, the government, while the right is fighting to dismantle it.
If you consider US democrats to be "left", you are sadly mistaken.
However there's a word for anti-authoritarian leftists. We're called anarchists. Not all leftists are anarchists and not all leftists are anti-authoritarian. Even authoritarian leftists (or "statists") generally believe in the end goal being the ideal of a stateless, classless society.
Statists just tend to believe the only way to get there is with an intermediary socialist state established through a communist revolution and led by a vanguard party who directs the economic, social and philosophical evolution of the people towards bringing about communism. The differences between those groups are largely about what that intermediary state should look like and at what point it can be dissolved.
Some of the aspirationally communist states of the 20th century justified their continued existence with communism having to be rolled out globally simultaneously for it to b successful. Some instead argued that what they had achieved was "real socialism", heavily implying that's as good as it gets and any critics were utopian idealists who'd rather tear down the local optimum in the hope of an unachievable ideal. The USSR opened its markets and collapsed under the dual load of its bureaucrat aristocracy and capitalist oligarchs, China pivoted to Dengism to contain their "capitalist experiments" with the promise of a greater good coming from the temporary toleration of exploitation.
But for anarchists (and mutualists, who fall somewhere between anarchism and statism) the biggest problem tends to be that they usually either start out or end up surrounded by nation states with standing armies who want none of their nonsense.
The most promising approach seems to be dual power, i.e. building anarchist structures[0] within existing states through cooperation and solidarity so that when they inevitably collapse in the future, the people can fall back on those structures as an alternative to just reasserting the old (hierarchical) power structures.
[0]: To preempt the obvious joke: contrary to the portrayal of "anarchy" in most media today, anarchists don't believe in no organizations, just no hierarchical power structures, i.e. usually they agree with consent-driven forms of bottom-up organizing. The one exception tend to be egoists (see Stirner), but most anarchists try to ignore them because they're weird.
When Stalin came to power, one of the first things he did was too purge all the anarchists and other non-authoritarian socialists. Thus most leftists despise Stalin and what he did. Mao, too.
Anarchists, syndicalists and other leftists were literally building decentralized structures before the Bolsheviks swooped in and decided the public would need decades of ideological education before it could be trusted to make any decisions about their lives and "helpfully" started making the decisions for them. It doesn't help that many of the leftists outside Russia who were critical of Bolshevism were murdered by German paramilitaries and later more indirectly by the USSR while trying to fight fascism in Spain.
Saying you have a good understanding what "left" is because you were born in the USSR is like saying you have a good understanding of what pasta is because you've been eating Yum Yum noodles for a decade.
Have you read Kropotkin? Bakunin? Proudhon? Bookchin? There is a wide range of leftist thought outside the very narrow niche within Marxist-Leninist-Maoism that still uncritically defends the USSR.
Actually, yes. Lenin, Trotsky, Lenin and Mao too.
You try to explain the consequences of communism with "few bad apples"; well, at least it's not a "no true scottsman", I have to give credit for that. However, there have been so many cases of leftists coming to power and building a state, and the only one I know that didn't end is tragedy was Israel — and even it resulted in financial crisis and eventual move to capitalism.
Of course, it's opportunists and sociopaths who come to power. You're absolutely right about that. But it would be silly to explain all these outcomes as fault of particular individuals, even if they are at fault. It's the principles behind the system itself, which make it vulnerable to this kind of attack.
Essentially, the problem is with this: every kind of leftism makes moral behaviour nor a matter of personal choice and responsibility, but something mandated by the state or a quasi-state organisation. This sounds very good in theory, especially for the people who are sensitive to the wrongs of the world. But in practice, it makes those organisations infallible and creates in their place a perfect vessel for said opportunists and sociopaths.
State power is like The Ring from LOTR. It's very seductive to use it for good, but absolute power corrupts absolutely. It should be not used, but destroyed.
It seems odd to tar specifically anti-statists with wanting to create a state. Anarchy being literally the antonym of hierarchy, statism is the complete antithesis of anti-authoritarian left-wing politics.
The right doesn't want to dismantle government at all. It wants to own it.
The idea that "left means more government" is also very ahistorical and feels uniquely like a product of modern American political discourse. The origin of the left-right distinction is literally the abolition of feudalism, i.e. replacing a fixed hierarchy by birthright with egalitarian democratic elections. By 1776 standards the founding fathers were left-wing radicals. The right would have literally defended the Crown.
If you understand left-right as Democrat-Republican, your view doesn't hold true either. Republicans generally want to void labor protections, reduce taxes, cut social welfare and lift environmental regulations, but they also always want to increase the military, intelligence and police budgets. Republicans also tend to want the state to enforce their idea of morality, e.g. by prohibiting (secular or non-Christian) same-sex marriages, criminalizing abortion or restricting sex education and access to contraceptives. They want to enforce what they see as the natural order through punishment whereas "the left" wants to counteract it through support. Prison abolitionists tend to be on the left, not the right.
The government isn't hierarchy. The government is an institution that interacts with hierarchy. As are large corporations for that matter. Reducing the government budget and shifting more economic power to corporations doesn't reduce hierarchies, it only takes power from elected officials to unelected shareholders.
If you believe in an unregulated free market capitalism, you literally support the hierarchy of the market and you believe in a natural order. Or to put it in words that feel less icky if you think of yourself as an anarcho-capitalist: that people should vote with their dollars on what goods and services should thrive or fail.
If you believe money is power and you believe it's good and natural for some people to have many orders of magnitude more money than other people, you believe in a natural order. This is what leftists call a hierarchy and leftists don't like it.
Note: I'm not saying leftists don't want a big government. I'm saying leftists (even outside anarchism) want to get rid of the state. They just disagree on how to get there. And for reformists that answer usually involves using the state one way or another.
Look at how many Black Americans supported the Loyalist side. Many of the American Founding Fathers were slave owners and supported the continuation of slavery. The British Empire promised freedom to American slaves who supported the Empire, and it mostly delivered on that promise. Both sides were very racist, if judged by contemporary standards, but I think there is a decent argument to be made that the racism of the British was on the whole a lot milder than that of the Americans.
The British Empire, including what is now Canada, officially abolished slavery in 1833; the United States would not finally abolish it for another 30+ years. (And it took a bloody civil war for America to do it; the Empire’s abolition of slavery was largely peaceful.) But in actual fact, slavery was de facto rendered legally unenforceable in most of (what is now) Canada by a series of court decisions in the 1790s, so in practice slavery was abolished in Canada over 60 years prior to its abolition in the US.
While there was widespread social discrimination against Black people in 19th and 20th century Canada, it was generally much milder than in much of the United States. The British and Canadian legal systems generally accepted the theoretical legal equality of all citizens regardless of race, even though it often failed to enforce that theoretical equality in practice; by contrast, the legal systems of many American states contained explicit discrimination against Black citizens.
Lynching was a great scourge on American history, of which Black people were the disproportionate (but not exclusive) victims. Many Americans defended lynching as a form of democracy. Judges, law enforcement and prosecutors in the US were very sensitive to public opinion – in part due to their widespread direct election – and were often loathe to properly investigate, prosecute and convict lynching cases if public opinion appeared to approve of the act. Likewise, many American jurors believed that it was appropriate for them to defer to public opinion in deciding cases, and return "not guilty" verdicts in popularly approved lynchings even when the evidence clearly pointed to guilt.
By contrast, the British Empire strongly objected to people taking the law into their own hands, and would-be lynchers in Canada faced far greater odds of successful prosecution for murder (and its then near-mandatory death penalty) than in the US. British culture–including among politicians, law enforcement, prosecutors, judges and jurors–prioritised upholding the rule of law over popular opinion to a much greater extent than American culture did. Due to this cultural difference, lynching was extremely rare in Canadian history – a mere handful of isolated incidents, compared to many thousands in the US.
So, who were the "egalitarians" and "left-wing radicals" in the American Revolution? I think we should seriously consider the possibility that the American Revolution was in fact a reactionary right-wing movement, widely supported by slave owners who lived in fear that the British Empire might forcibly liberate their slaves, and not really a "left-wing" one.
Chattel slavery was directly tied to scientific racism, which is literally a system of hierarchy and the belief that the system is both natural and good (e.g. the "white man's burden" ideology that slavery is good for the slaves because they're unfit to survive on their own).
You won't find any political movement that neatly fits into the "left-right" spectrum. In retrospect even the often lauded direct democracy of ancient Greece was deeply undemocratic because it was restricted by its very narrow definition of citizenship. Under scientific racism Black slaves were barely considered human and even if you only consider white people the US still didn't let women vote until the suffragettes fought for it and won.
My point wasn't that the founding fathers should be considered leftists. My point was that the original historical definition of leftism was opposition to the king of France during the French revolution because that's how the seating happened to be arranged in the National Assembly in 1789 (notably before the American revolution, but close enough to make the point).
As feudalism became less relevant, the meaning began to shift by becoming more generalized. I'm not arguing about morality here but definitions. The 18th century definition of left and right was almost entirely about royalty and the aristocracy. The generalized definition I summarized evolved considerably later.
White loyalists didn’t believe in the Divine Right of Kings either. That ideology was promoted by the Catholic King James II, who was overthrown in the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688. The Hanoverian monarchy (to which George III belonged) was ideologically opposed to it because if true it would mean the 1688 revolution was illegitimate, and hence Hanoverian rule of Britain would be illegitimate too. The main supporters of Divine Right of Kings were Catholics and the Jacobite rebels in Ireland and Scotland, not Protestant supporters of the British government. In fact, some Jacobites supported the American Revolution - such as Hugh Mercer.
> Chattel slavery was directly tied to scientific racism,
The Atlantic slave trade was already well underway when the theory of “scientific racism” was first being developed. And it didn’t become widely popular until the mid-19th century, by which time slavery was approaching its end. It was a post hoc rationalisation for chattel slavery, not a cause.
> My point was that the original historical definition of leftism was opposition to the king of France during the French revolution because that's how the seating happened to be arranged in the National Assembly in 1789 (notably before the American revolution, but close enough to make the point).
The French Revolution was (in part) a revolution against the “Divine Right of Kings”, but the American Revolution wasn’t, since the British had already rejected that ideology in the revolution of 1688. If you define “leftism” as merely rejecting that then both sides in the American Revolutionary War were “leftist”, and the British Empire was a “leftist” empire