Over the past two weeks, pundits from all ends of the spectrum have been scrambling to explain Clinton’s unexpected loss, with reasons spanning from the plausible to the highly dubious; WikiLeaks, Bernie Sanders, fake news, Jill Stein, Russia, bad algorithms and the FBI have all been accused of having sole or part responsibility. Lately, however, a new, entirely bogus culprit has emerged from center and center-left circles: “identity politics” and its close cousin, “political correctness.”
Bill Maher on Real Time (8/11/16): “The Democratic Party…made the white working man feel like you’re problems aren’t real because you’re ‘mansplaining’ and check your privilege.”
It began days after the election, when evergreen PC-hater Bill Maher (Real Time, 11/11/16) lashed out at “political correctness” for Trump’s win, based on what appears to be a gut feeling he had:
You’re outrageous with your politically correct bullshit and it does drive people away. And Islam. You know? Islam. Democrats, there is a terrorist attack, and Democrats’ reaction is “don’t be mean to Muslims,” instead of how can we solve the problem of shit blowing up in America. And, you know, that’s not a good way to get votes.
Even by the standards of TV blowhards, little argument was offered. Maher, like the others advancing this trope, just took his pre-existing hang-up—in his case, what he sees as liberal coddling of Muslims—and projected it onto the electorate. Since Trump sold himself as “politically incorrect,” it logically follows that some original PC leftist sin helped fuel his rise.
Two days later, Vox (11/15/16) would run a softball interview with Jon Haidt, a noted NYU social psychologist and diversity skeptic, headlined “Why Social Media Is Terrible for Multiethnic Democracies. ” Vox Editor Ezra Klein teed up by tweeting, “Interesting: Jon Haidt on why ‘diversity, immigration and multiculturalism’ are ripping apart Western democracies.” Clouded in academic trappings and qualifiers, Haidt advances some fairly toxic victim-blaming:
Multiculturalism and diversity have many benefits, including creativity and economic dynamism, but they also have major drawbacks, which is that they generally reduce social capital and trust and they amplify tribal tendencies.
The academic basis for such a claim aside, Haidt has made a leap from “multiculturalism and diversity” to the specific instance of Trump’s election, based on vague notions of “amplified tribal tendencies.” Who helps amplify those tendencies, and who profits from our history of white “tribalism,” isn’t broached, much less dissected. It’s simply an inevitable law of sociology, and no one—save, of course, the minorities guilty of “identity politics”—are held liable. Haidt continued:
A multiethnic society is a very hard machine to assemble and get aloft into the air, and if you get it just right, you can get a multiethnic society to fly, but it easily breaks down. And identity politics is like throwing sand in the gears.
Politics is always about factions, always about competing groups. At the time of the founders, those groups involved economic interests—the Northern industrialists versus the Southern agrarians and so on.
But in a world in which factions are based on race or ethnicity, rather than economic interests, that’s the worst possible world. It’s the most intractable world we can inhabit, and it’s the one that will lead to the ugliest outcome.
Interviewer Sean Illing lets these highly contestable, downpunching claims go unchallenged, namely the false dichotomy asserted by Haidt—and one very common in this backlash—that economic populism and identity politics are somehow mutually exclusive.
This, of course, isn’t true. Advancing economic populism while understanding that particular groups have specific concerns—such as freedom from discrimination—has always been a mainstay of left politics. Those insisting it has to be either/or likely care about neither, and are content maintaining the status quo.
This was followed by three anti–identity politics pieces published on the same day in the two leading centrist establishment newspapers:
- “The Danger of a Dominant Identity” (David Brooks, New York Times 11/18/16)
- “Higher Education Is Awash with Hysteria. That Might Have Helped Elect Trump” (George Will, Washington Post, 11/18/16)
- “The End of Identity Liberalism” (Mark Lilla, New York Times 11/18/16)
David Brooks (New York Times, 11/18/16): “For much of the 20th century, America had a rough consensus about the American idea.” It’s not clear which 20th century he’s talking about. (Photo: Ian Thomas Jansen-Lonnquist/New York Times)
Brooks began by positioning a strawman: that “pollsters reduced complex individuals to a single identity” and assumed they would all vote accordingly:
Pollsters assumed women would vote primarily as women, and go for Hillary Clinton. But a surprising number voted against her. They assumed African-Americans would vote along straight Democratic lines, but a surprising number left the top line of the ballot blank.
The pollsters reduced complex individuals to a single identity, and are now embarrassed. But pollsters are not the only people guilty of reductionist solitarism. This mode of thinking is one of the biggest problems facing this country today.
But Brooks never cites a single pollster that actually did this—likely because none did. Pollsters argued that certain groups would have a greater or lesser tendency to vote for Clinton, not that they any would vote uniformly. Never mind, though—Brooks has a pre-existing grievance with identity politics, and showing it somehow tricked pollsters is essential to contriving this grievance into his piece.
In typical Brooks fashion, he went on to equate anti-racism with racism:
But it’s not only racists who reduce people to a single identity. These days it’s the anti-racists, too. To raise money and mobilize people, advocates play up ethnic categories to an extreme degree.
To fight back, people targeted by racists occasionally “raise money and mobilize people” who, like them, are also targeted by racists. The horror! “Why isn’t there a White History Channel?” inanity has its most influential booster, and he’s a bespectacled “moderate” at the New York Times.
George Will, whose piece is too lazy to examine in depth, does what George Will has been doing for 30 years: He lists off some anecdotes of ostensibly goofy political correctness, then tacks on a half-assed concluding paragraph about how it “might have” led to Trump.
Historian Mark Lilla (New York Times, 11/18/16) “In recent years American liberalism has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity.”
Mark Lilla’s op-ed is much longer and far more pernicious. The Columbia historian doesn’t even bother to attach his statements to sociology, instead speaking in solipsistic terms about his own trip to Europe. Like Haidt, he engages in false dichotomy, presenting Clinton’s appeal to blacks and LGBTQ as somehow dismissive of the “white working class”:
But when it came to life at home, she tended on the campaign trail to lose that large vision and slip into the rhetoric of diversity, calling out explicitly to African-American, Latino, LGBT and women voters at every stop. This was a strategic mistake. If you are going to mention groups in America, you had better mention all of them. If you don’t, those left out will notice and feel excluded. Which, as the data show, was exactly what happened with the white working class and those with strong religious convictions.
Lilla provided no evidence, even anecdotally, that the white working class felt “left out.” It’s just something he asserts, but never connects the dots.
He went on to glibly dismiss writing that focused on specific communities, mocking stories about transgender people in Egypt:
However interesting it may be to read, say, about the fate of transgender people in Egypt, it contributes nothing to educating Americans about the powerful political and religious currents that will determine Egypt’s future, and indirectly, our own. No major news outlet in Europe would think of adopting such a focus.
Except one European paper, the Guardian, did adopt such a focus last year (in a wonderful piece everyone should read). Lilla’s screed can’t seem get its straw liberals in order.
Similarly, he laments “high school curriculums” that focused on “the achievements of women’s rights movements” while ignoring “the founding fathers’ achievement in establishing a system of government based on the guarantee of rights.” No evidence is offered of these high schools that have erased the “founding fathers” from history classes, nor is it clear why it’s so urgent women’s rights studies pay due deference to Thomas Jefferson and Co. over the scores of other philosophers who’ve written on the issue of rights.
Others, such as the Des Moines Register’s Froma Harrop (11/15/16), Reason’s Robby Soave (11/9/16) and Damon Linker and Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, both at The Week (11/16/16, 11/18/16), also piled on—as did “new atheist” personality David Rubin and popular comedy writer Seth MacFarlane. These 11 high-status observers agreed: The PC police fueled the Trump backlash.
There’s only one problem: There isn’t really any evidence provided. No studies proffered, no exit poll dissecting, no empirical basis for this conclusion at all. It’s just a vague feeling, something that seems true. There’s a supposed problem—an excess of political correctness and identity politics—but it’s not connected to the topic at hand: the election of Donald J. Trump.
But let’s be generous. Even if, for the sake of argument, one accepts the premise that “political correctness” fueled Trump’s success, what’s missing from the conversation is that few people—the above pundits not excepted—derive their ideas of political correctness from first-hand experiences.
Often the perception of “political correctness” is heavily filtered through Fox News and right-wing radio’s cartoon version of it. Day in and day out, center and center-right outlets highlight and distort the most obscure excesses, typically on college campuses, to feed a narrative to its audience that white men are under siege by conspiratorial liberal forces. But the majority of Trump’s supporters haven’t been to college in decades, nor are they interfacing first-hand with these academic enclaves; rather, they’re presented with anecdotes on television and a bustling market of anti-liberal films that stoke a vision of a dystopian PC police state.
To this extent, liberals couldn’t really dial down the “identity politics” in an effort to assuage white conservatives even if they wanted to; the Murdochian echo chamber will just move the goalposts and cherry-pick new outrages. Centrists and liberals accepting the premise of out-of-control political correctness as something that can be dialed down have done all of the heavy-lifting for the right wing—and, increasingly, white supremacist forces—without critically analyzing whether the average voter’s perception of “safe spaces” and “thought-policing” is at all connected to objective reality.
Same with immigration, terrorism and a whole host of right-wing soft spots: They are serious issues, to an extent, but they are racialized and then magnified a thousandfold by a partisan media machine that feeds off and profits greatly from white grievance. Playing into its hands by telling the most vulnerable populations to shut up and table their pursuit of rights won’t prevent these panics; it’ll only feed into the basic premise that it’s a problem in the first place—all the while putting the burden of fighting Trumpism on the backs of those most vulnerable to its ugly effects.
A lack of sufficient economic populism on Clinton’s part is a reasonable critique, and one some of these pundits are perhaps hinting at. But absence of populism isn’t evidence that “identity politics” is to blame; it’s evidence that Clinton’s economic outlook is centrist, and would be regardless of whether she said “black lives matter” or targeted messages to the LGBTQ community.
Every one of the above pundits who is blaming identity politics and political correctness for Trump, it can’t be stressed enough, hated identity politics to begin with, and would have regardless of who won. They’re jamming a long-held dislike into a topical and convenient narrative—an act that could be dismissed as cynical self-flattery if it wasn’t, in the face of an upsurge of reactionary politics, also helping provide ideological cover for racists and demagogues.
Adam Johnson is a contributing analyst for FAIR.org. You can follow him on Twitter at @AdamJohnsonNYC.
“Political correctness” is the disingenuous rhetoric employed by conservative pundits to sweep under the rug issues that they do not want to face squarely. It’s sad to see commercial news outlets and NPR employ this term uncritically.
Agreed. The ‘political correctness’ meme is propaganda meant to convince observers that left-liberal positions aren’t *really* correct, and that anyone who claims to believe otherwise is probably just going along with the Eeeevil Liberal Conspiracy out of fear.
lol
Here’s some issues I’d like to address squarely, but can’t:
Women and men don’t have the exact same desires, and men have a different IQ distribution; thus a lack of women in a field has no necessary correlation to sexism.
According to police statistics, black men are shot proportionally to their crime rate – though, humorously, they are harassed, beaten, and so forth, more often than they commit crimes.
Illegal immigration depresses the wages of those who live here, “Taking their jobs”.
Need I really go on? The truth is that political correctness is the disingenuous doctrine employed by liberal pundits to sweep under the rug issues that they do not want to face squarely.
No one on here even suggests the role of voter suppression. It is all about blame–blame Clinton, blame the Democratic establishment, and on and on. Do you really think these results would have occurred without the Supreme Court gutting the 1965 Voting Rights Act, state politicians (all GOP) enacting voter i.d. laws and
reducing the number of polling places and voting machines or purging voters from the registry?
The first thing we must do is pass FEDERAL voter photo i.d. And the only requirement is a photo on the FEDERAL Social Security card. The SS card can then be updated every ten years or when someone moves, just like a driving license. And the best thing about it is that Republican state politicians have no say in the entire matter.
The true issue with identity politics is the uncritical support of many for neoliberal imperialists like Clinton and Obama due to their identities.
But Maher et alia’s enmity aligns in some measure with a joke popular among whites when I was growing up in apartheid Miss’ssippi in the ’60s
“What does ‘NAACP’ stand for?
Niggers Ain’t Acting like Colored People.”
I am sorry if I sound PC but “neoliberal imperialist” is a meaningless insult. There is no definition of “neoliberal” that even a minority would agree on. If you want to criticize a centrist why not use the accurate word and call the person “centrist”?
No it’s not. Neoliberals support free trade with little or no environmental or labor concerns, and privatization of the safetynets. Imperialists support military and economic domination of the resources of foreign lands, without out the concent of the people in those lands. Obama and Clinton fit both categories.
Changing the subject doesn’t change the fact that Obama and Clinton accused all who criticized them of racism or sexism or both, and they are the ones responsible for severing the link between minority and women’s rights and economic justice.
What the hell is a centrist?
None of this should be surprising to anyone who contemplated the prospect of Hillary losing prior to the election. The Kubler-Ross Grief Cycle includes Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance, though, as the Cycle deals primarily with death and other irreversible situations, there is no place in the Cycle for either Learning or Wisdom.
I haven’t read or viewed a single pro-Hillary source discussing the exposure of their candidate’s vulnerability on such issues as Wal-Mart board membership, Iraq war and Patriot Act supporter, Secretary of State cum War Criminal (Libya, Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, etc.), fracking, NAFTA/TPP/TTIP, Goldman Sachs BFF, general bellicosity towards Russia, subversion of the election process during primary season with Bernie Sanders or any other substantive issue that might have kept a voter from supporting her. Perhaps, when they reach the Acceptance level, cooler and wiser heads will prevail.
Al Gore won the popular vote in 2000. The Democratic Party did nothing to eliminate the Electoral College, perhaps because an entire gender didn’t then feel so personally cheated; my guess is that we would have already seen this kind of popular critique in 2008, had Obama won the popular vote, but lost the election.
In Reynolds v Sims (1964), the Supreme Court declared that state legislative districts had to be based on roughly equal population. This resulted in state senates redistricted to represent an equal number of people, in the same manner as the state assemblies. Where, state senates still exist, the class distinction between the two houses might be all that remains of any difference. In Reynolds, the court spoke only to equity, as the U.S. Senate represents the same undemocratic allocation of power, but its establishment in the Constitution, itself, means that an undemocratic institution remains as part of the bedrock of this Constitution and this country.
Wouldn’t it be encouraging to see the Democrats still in office take concrete and honest steps to begin the process of making One Man-One Vote, the law of the land regarding not just state legislatures, but to federal elections, as well? Fair is fair.
You don’t see pro-Hillary sources dwelling on your issues because, on most of them, it’s obvious to anyone who supported Hillary or Bernie that Trump was worse. She gave speeches to Goldman Sachs; he appointed a white nationalist Goldman Sachs exec as Chief of Staff. She wants universal surveillance, he wants universal surveillance and torture. She voted for foreign adventures; he argued to go on the same foreign adventures when he had the chance, and wants more countries to build nukes. Her supporters appear to have used their insider access to the DNC to support her against Bernie; Trump’s supporters had all the evidence of this supposed corruption in May and sat on it until all the state primaries were over.
The Bush/Gore election led to significant popular critique of the Electoral College, and the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact was introduced in 42 states in 2007 – rather before Obama’s share of the popular vote was relevant.
There might have been a few voters whose measure of a candidate is not the level of disgust with which they held that candidate’s primary opponent. Some might have even voted for down ballot measures and ignored the Hillary vs Donald conundrum.
Please note that Hillary did more than vote for foreign adventures, she was, in the case of the Libyan fiasco, its chief proponent. She was the person who famously cackled, “We came, we saw, he died,” upon viewing the death, by anal bayonet insertion, of the Libyan chief of state.
She actively supported the coup against the government in Ukraine and the installation of a neo-nazi government there; and has threatened a “no-fly” zone over Syria, both actions inviting armed conflict with Russia. She has been a supporter of every “trade agreement” mentioned (NAFTA/TPP/TTIP). Trump has advocated diplomacy with Russia, and has opposed the rotten trade deals peddled by Mrs. Clinton.
Many people dislike narcissistic, solipsistic, rabble-rousing blowhards, whichever major party has the temerity to offer to the public as the answer to all problems–whether Donald or Hillary. Some of them vote Green or Libertarian. And some might be so desperate, in these times, that they vote for what they want to believe…even if they no longer believe in much of anything.
I doubt that any empire collapsed in silence. I suspect that there are more strange times ahead.
My condolences to you, for the loss of your candidate.
It’s sounds as if you’re at the Bargaining level.
Please note that you appear to be propagating false information.
First of all, the real news coverage reports that Hillary’s quip was after being VERBALLY told of Gaddafi’s death. While it is theoretically possible that her informant went into detail about supposed impalement, it is also entirely probably that her informant just said ‘Gaddafi’s been killed’. Preliminary research suggests that the October 2011 reports gave a sanitized account of Gaddafi’s killing and the torture was exposed later; that being the case, it is VERY probable that Hillary was unaware of the torture.
Second, your use of the term ‘chief of state’ gives the (probably unintentional) impression that you believe leading a country should exempt one from punishment for torturing and killing one’s citizens. Gaddafi’s actions, to the best of my knowledge, merited death. They did, however, merit a CLEAN death – those who bayoneted a helpless prisoner deserve punishment just as much as those who tortured Gaddafi’s own prisoners do.
Much as I appreciate your condolences wrapped in passive-aggressive psychobabble, they are unnecessary. My candidate lost THE PRIMARY to Hillary, and I waited to vote for Hillary until it was clear that the election was going to be close – while I distrust Stein’s character (solipsistic blowhards are NOT limited to the major parties!), her official platform is much more to my liking than Hillary’s, and Johnson actually agrees with me on key issues that Hillary does not.
I can see analysts trying to attribute Hillary’s loss to the trade plans; personally, I find ‘NAFTA sux’ arguments unconvincing, since the core flaw that NAFTA & co had was failing to guarantee free movement of people to go with free movement of capital, and one of Trump’s rare *consistent* positions was opposition to freedom of movement. However, others do disagree with me on this.
> Politics is always about factions, always about competing groups. At the time of the founders, those groups involved economic interests—the Northern industrialists versus the Southern agrarians and so on.
> But in a world in which factions are based on race or ethnicity, rather than economic interest…
He’s gotta be kidding. I would say one of the biggest ‘political factions’ ‘at the time of the founders’ were enslaved people, defined by ‘race or ethnicity’. Of course, a disfranchised political faction, by definition.
They were ‘defined’ by economic interest (of their enslavers as a first cause of course) as well as “race or ethnicity.”
The fundamental roots of our society which encode ‘political factions’ and ‘economic interest’ in ‘race or ethnicity’ still affect the plant that has grown from them.
And if you think those enslaved people were somehow outside the bounds of ‘society’ — yeah, that you forget to even _consider_ them as a “political faction” in what was already a “multiethnic society” says a lot about what you are not seeing currently as well.
tru
Obama and Clinton were indeed supported uncritically because of their race and gender. Anyone who criticized them for any reason was called racists or sexist on the Democratic forums. They did indeed abandon the working class, by supporting Free Trade, & Privatization of the safetynets. Then when the working class gave up voting for democrats, the working class were accused of being racists, who only objected to being poor and white, not just poor. This despite the fact that the states that were lost were traditional Yankee states, like Iowa, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. We don’t need to produce statistical analysis of these plain facts.
You say Obama and Clinton were supported uncritically, yet your evidence of that is… the hostile response to people criticizing them. How exactly does this work? People reply angrily to posts that don’t exist?
Yes, there are people who will shout ‘racist’ or ‘sexist’ in response to any criticism. However, blaming that for Hillary’s loss doesn’t make sense. Team Trump’s supporters included plenty of people who insisted that criticism of Trump was misandry or anti-white racism, that calling people racist is racism, that calling people sexist is sexism, and that any disagreement with conservatives who weren’t white men was some mixture of misogyny and white supremacy.
Obama won the popular and electoral vote. This suggests that the voters were not THAT annoyed by the knowledge that somewhere out there some obnoxious person thinks all of Obama’s opponents are racist. Hillary won the popular vote. This, again, suggests that voters were not actually deterred by the fact that somewhere out there some obnoxious person insists that only sexists would vote against Hillary for any reason.
Now, the argument that the Dems failure to push far enough to the left and the high-level fondness for free trade eroded support has potential – but IIRC one of the states that went Trump also picked Scott Walker a few years back, which is not exactly a sign of a hotbed of leftist sentiment.
the problem here is that it wasn’t just “people”; it was the candidates themselves and mainstream media. When Hillary accused Bernie of sexism, or for that matter when Obama accused Hillary of racism, that should’ve been a massive fucking faux pas. But identity politics dictates that only a black man can censure a black man for such an accusation, and so forth; combined with media bias, it was a wrap.
I don’t think anyone said criticism of Trump was misandry, much less someone in the mainstream media. Anti-white racism? This is retarded.
Calling white people as a whole racist can be racist, and often you do see that, but out of your entire paragraph that’s about it dude.
If our first identity is not American, then it becomes more confusing as to who is on our team. Being proud of our identities is important, but, putting them above our citizenship is trouble.
And political correctness has gone too far. From not being able to state facts, such as “men are better at mental rotation”, to students being able to select “His Majesty” as a gender pronoun. Fox news is making hay with it, but, they are not defining it.
There are 2.3 million reasons why Hillary lost. Identity Politics and political correctness were less important than the economic outlook, IMHO. But to claim that they could not have had any role is bogus.
LOL, another butthurt fauxgressive dude who mistakes his emotions for “facts” (no, really, gender has dick to do with “mental rotation”), calls all interests other than his “identity politics.”
As for “our citizenship”? When PoC, women, LGBT people, and disabled people are treated as full citizens with full rights that don’t get regularly used as a bargaining chip, you can get back to me, Broseph.
hey Yon
come jump on the Trump Train, where we won’t treat you like crap for speaking your mind. Also, we won’t start any idiotic wars, we’ll fix trade, and corporations are going to go back to what they should be – tools for wealth generation for the American workers and the government. Sound good? Oh, we’ll also be revitalizing the inner cities, doing more for black people than the entire Democrat party combined. Hop aboard anytime, friendo :)
trump is a scummy politician and a con artist, just like Hillary Clinton. He will do none of the above.
Amartya Sen wrote a book, some time ago, called Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny. In recently reading Fawaz Gerges’ book ISIS: A History I thought about Sen. Gerges claims that ISIS is a creation of identity politics; the group’s identity is hyper-Sunni, believes in violence, and claims to be going somewhere. Gerges describes some of its leaders as “sectarian psychopaths.” Near enemies for the group include other Muslims. The question for me is, “how do you move millions of brains in progressive and nuturant directions?” realizing that some can’t be reached, while not allowing them to be pulled in violent strict-father trajectories. George Lakoff claims that we, progressive and nuturant people, are failing to communicate what it is we stand for; and one of the ways in which we do this is by segmenting the electorate in a reliance on census categories. People could say things like, “We can’t be free living in a carceral state, or while being targeted daily by a militarized police force” instead of focusing on racial disparity, and refusing to attend to the fact that the majority of those being killed are white. I think that identity politics is a much to serious thing to be left to people like Bill Maher, and others quoted here.
John,
Your self-identification as “progressive and nuturant (sic)” is exactly the problem. It is smug. And, it is why this article is misguided. Those speaking for the supposed oppressed have forgotten that they themselves are not the oppressed. They are smug elites who see themselves as the next stage in human evolution while the rest of us are worthy only of their advocacy. The reaction of middle America to identity politics is not necessarily a reaction against those groups labeled as society’s supposed victims, but against those who claim to speak for them, who create the categories, who coin the rhetoric. We have to stop putting up with sophomoric elitist nonsense like this article and call these folks to account: you are not the oppressed, you have no special insights, and occupy no higher moral plane. So please give the sanctimony a rest.
Guess you didn’t read the article properly, eh David? No claim to special insight or occupation of a higher moral plane. Just a well-deserved rebuke to the ‘smug elites’ (Brooks, Will, Lilla, Maher et al) who are trying to use Trump’s election as an excuse to sell out the victims of racism and misogyny.
I think there is an important nugget here regarding how Left/Progressive people aren’t on the same page and distracted. The smug elitist progressive speaking for supposed victims is a problem in that there aren’t enough non-elite progressive people getting their voices to the public. I’m happy to at least have ersatz progressive representation in the NYT, NPR, TV,etc…better than nothing, but rather than rejecting it we must add the ingredients that are missing, the voices that are missing, we should be speaking for ourselves in these forums. The Brook’s, Will’s Maher’s of the world would do well in understanding this as it is the main reason their clueless. And they need to understand that the progressive movement can’t thrive if we are beating each other with our own sticks and don’t think for a moment the alt-right is ignoring that fact and possibly fueling it.
This analysis is only slightly less shallow than the anti-PC backlash it attacks. There is nothing inherently progressive about identity politics. If they are completely dissociated from a critique of capitalism and imperialism—which they basically are in the US—they are NOT progressive. The other side of the coin would be a narrow focus on narrow economic interests, which the American labor movement has been hugely guilty of, to the point of become another “special interest” group. The point is that the US system thrives on divide and rule: the possibility that all of these struggles could come together productively must be avoided at all costs.
But divide and rule also means that sectional and identity struggles become extremely useful if they can if they remain atomized. Everybody is aware of how Republicans exploited “reactionary” identity politics. But people need to realize that “progressive” identity and sectional politics are can be exploited just as successfully. The Dems have done this masterfully, though obviously not well enough to beat Trump. Obviously, the mainline Democrats have not put forth a genuinely populist platform since LBJ, and have NEVER been able to come up with a genuinely progressive platform. They’ve always been a business party. But their raison d’etre is that they are “progressive”, and they want to drive the thought that they are not out of people’s heads. So what do they do? They seize upon, repackage and aggressively market identity and sectional politics.
First they did it with the labor movement, ostensibly championing it, but actually making it an appendage of the party. Once they had sucked all the blood out of it and became the party of Wall Street, they had to find other hosts. So they cultivated Black elites, the feminist movement, gays, the cause of multiculturalism etc. They made themselves a party that was “welcoming” to all these groups, unlike those Republican assholes. It was a great way of looking “progressive” without having to do anything about it. And precisely because the whole point was to avoid doing anything progressive, they could NOT add populism and anti-militarism to the mix, because then it would be for real (just as under LBJ they could not add anti-militarism to the mix). Identity politics and political correctness had to _substitute_ populism and anti-militarism. It was a cheaper solution too, since anti-homophobia and “anti-racism” generally don’t require any transfer of income unlike the earlier populism of Cold War democrats.In fact, they don’t even require the Dems to spend any political capital. This is what Adolph Reed called “posing as politics”.
Anyone who thinks political correctness is not at all problematic, must consider the fact that it can serve as a powerful distraction from the actual crimes of the state. It can also serve a useful mask. If Bush had called Iraqis “sand niggers” THAT would have caused a huge outrage. Instead he merely launched a neocolonial invasion of Iraq, causing the deaths of over a million people—that was merely a mistake. When John McCain called Vietnamese “gooks” that was a scandal. The fact that he became a war hero by slaughtering hundreds if not thousands of them from his helicopter does not raise many eyebrows. Still think there is no problem with political correctness as it _functions_ in American politics? It creates the illusion that there only problem in America that needs fixing is someone’s potty mouth. Simultaneously, it encourages people to spend all their time figuring out who’s insulting whom—or better yet, who’s insulting them—and less time thinking about exploitation and unifying political solutions. “Posing as politics” indeed.
So you can laugh at the lazy bashing of identity politics by the establishment all you want. BUT you have not said one word about how that very same establishment has clung to power by exploiting and hollowing out those very same identity politics, so you’ve said _nothing_. When identity politics and PC are used that way, people eventually stop caring. They see it as just so much deceptive marketing or as an annoying distraction. Meanwhile, the real problems are swept under the PC rug, where they fester, and eventually you get Donald Trump.
You guys certainly have not been doing any of this—quite the opposite. But the rest of the country has and that’s simply not something that can be ignored. The establishment voices are reacting , in their usual self-serving way, to something that is quite real. It is a problem for them, since they see that
…the old ways of doing politics are not working.
“One exception was Justin Babar, who said he voted for Mr. Trump as a protest against Mrs. Clinton. He blamed her husband’s policies for putting him in prison for 20 years.
As for the claims of racism that have dogged Mr. Trump, Mr. Babar wasn’t so worried. “It’s better than smiling to my face but going behind closed doors and voting against our kids,” he said.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/us/many-in-milwaukee-neighborhood-didnt-vote-and-dont-regret-it.html
That’s the kind of stuf I’m talking about.
*mic drop*
This guy wins MVP for best comment. Identity politics + unbridled support for Neoliberal economic suffering is the real source of the criticism. You can pay lip service all you want, but the voters in Indiana know that their state got boycotted over attacking gay people, and not when their governor cut off the state from receiving Medicaid.
Thanks for taking the time to articulate an articulate and truthful response to this problematic post.
Nailed it. This post was jejune and reactionary to the point of being throwaway.
While I agree with the outcome of this article, the word “liberal” is quite confusing here, and that does erase important conversations on the horizon.
Identity politics, in its strongest iteration, is not a liberal phenomena. It takes, at its core, the assumption there is no universal morality, and that equality and liberty must always be conflict. This needn’t be so. And the strongest statement of liberalism requires interpreting concepts such as equality and liberity so that they reinforce each other.
It is this interpretative strategy, which is based in universal morality, that does challenge identity politics when it argues there should be laws or administrative acts for hate speech, microagressions, trigger warnings, and safe spaces. It views these assertions as improper uses of state power and a misapplication of the concept of harm that underlies its use.
This does not mean, as the articles you’ve cited argued, that basic issues of dignity, that are not broader uses of state power, should be discarded as utter ‘identity politics’. Liberalism believes the opposite–that these are essential issues to becoming a more equal and fair state that anchors itself in universal principles.
‘Identity politics’ as practiced by the American left-liberal (who is centrist or rightist by most of the world’s standards) generally appears to originate from the assumption that there IS a universal morality, and that equality of opportunity and justice in outcome are both morally desirable.
Beware the temptation to assume that your own morality is the only one that anyone else could possibly believe in! In practice, you will find that an awful lot of people you disagree with not only believe in their own morality, but think their own morality is UNIVERSAL and therefore whatever they want to do is opposed only by solipsists. There are plenty of people who think that the lists of trigger warnings on MPAA and ESRB ratings don’t match up with their morality, for example…
From my understanding of Adam’s work, he generally uses “liberal” more or less in accord with the internationally standard usage of the term: an ideology of both formal liberty and formal equality, but both conceptualized in largely economic terms within a market capitalist system. There’s certainly room for the logic of “identity politics” within this kind of liberalism, rooted in the idea that the identities of individual economic actors shouldn’t dictate their positions within the economic hierarchy of capitalism, but that economic hierarchy isn’t treated as a problem in and of itself. In an ideal liberal world, just because you’re black/trans/female/Muslim/etc. doesn’t mean you can’t be a CEO while a straight cis male WASP sweeps the floor of your office for a fraction of your salary, and if there are socially imposed obstacles to such a scenario, state power has a justified role in correcting them.
By contrast, the ideological constellations considered “leftist” or “socialist” refer to conceptions of liberty and equality that can only be realized by transcending and/or abolishing the basic premises of capitalism altogether. In leftists’ view, liberals have a naive and utopian objection to identity-based oppressions and fail to understand that these oppressions are themselves created or at least reinforced by capitalism, which can’t function without treating large swathes of the human population as exempt from liberal norms of freedom and equality. Every actually existing form of liberal capitalism throughout history has involved such exceptions, including the enlightened liberal tolerance of much of our current global ruling class, whose avowed universalism in their personal affairs gives way to illiberal oppression through the calculated realpolitik of global imperialism. For example, Hillary Clinton’s role as a glass-ceiling-smashing figurehead in US domestic politics isn’t treated as precluding her comfortable alignment with racists/misogynists like the Israeli apartheid regime or the Saudi monarchy, and so on.
Only in the moronic and anti-intellectual confines of mainstream US political discourse is “liberal” considered synonymous with “left”, let alone “very liberal” with “socialist”, an alleged equivalency that would make Karl Marx and JS Mill both roll over in their graves. Adam seems to be clued in to this distinction, and when he uses “liberal” in the bastardized American sense it seems like a tongue-in-cheek reference to the idiocies of that discourse (e.g. “a narrative that white men are under siege by conspiratorial liberal forces”) and shouldn’t be taken as his own understanding of what “liberalism” actually is. As far as I know he considers himself a critic of liberalism from the left.
The author forgot to mention his own self-identification as a “cis male” and his uncritical support of the faux-almagamated bourgeois essentialist hetero-handicapped identity cults (L/G + lots of other letters I’m losing track of) and their divergent — and often contradictory — programs for hetero-wholeness (I believe they call them “rights”) rather than for liberation from bourgeois social constructs. It is liberation that is the foundation of leftist thought. The author is confusing that with his cultural “left” (equals identitarian liberal) politics. The author does seem qualified, however, to write for Jacobin.
Nah, you sound much more like a Jackoff Bin candidate than he does.
“Lilla provided no evidence, even anecdotally, that the white working class felt “left out.” It’s just something he asserts, but never connects the dots.”
Right, Hillary herself did that by not campaigning in Michigan and Wisconsin. (Not as if both don’t also have black working class types.) And camp Hillary couldn’t even be bothered to come up with money to pay canvasers in those very important states. I’m basing this on Huff Po reporting.
Yep, then generally, Hillary thought that the votes minorities and women would make up for the frack you she told the working class of many different colours.
Please keep promoting this sort “thinking” (sic) whenever possible.
The complete denial of reality it exhibits will guarantee a Trump win in 2020.
It can’t be identity politics, that would leave FAIR with no platform!Seriously, there is no media outlet less objective about this subject than FAIR, the irony is epic.
The article rather missed the point.
The problem wasn’t with identity politics per se, but that the Clinton campaign and its media surrogates focused on it (along with “Trump is an a-hole” and “nefarious Russians”) to the exclusion of nearly anything else.
And did so while ignoring or actively disparaging anyone providing feedback or attempting to get the campaign to pound on any of a dozen issues important to key voting constituences.
Sorry, but you lost all credibility with me when you called Haidt a “diversity skeptic”. The man has actually founded an org with the explicit mission of increasing diversity in academia. (heterodoxacademy.org)
“I think that diversity, immigration, and multiculturalism are right at the heart of the sociological problem in Western democracies, ”
-Jonathan Haidt ( from the interview linked in the up)
Looks like you’ve found an excuse to dismiss the argument instead of confronting it, and I’m really sorry to ruin it, but the words I quoted are clearly those of someone skeptical of diversity.