Which is the wrong choice?
I didn’t make exactly that choice; I grew up believing the older, more liberal and individual version of progressivism. But I did have to choose between what the movement had become and my understanding of being against bigotry, and chose the latter, despite it being painful. Events since have made me feel more and more vindicated in that decision.
Except that you’re incorrect about progressivism. You haven’t even tried to prove it. We’re not just going to accept that this is the way it is just because you say so.
I have no idea how I’d go about proving it. What evidence would increase your confidence I am right (or decrease your confidence I am wrong)?
The same way you persuade people of any claim: cite your sources. If your only sources are your personal experience, then we can also consider your personal experience and know what it entails on this board; but that ends up getting, by definition, personal.
Without sources, and without access to your personal experiences, your claims about progressivism are completely unpersuasive, and wholly irrelevant to this discussion.
You haven’t even tried. If you present some evidence to support your argument, at least I could consider it. But you haven’t offered anything.
Out of curiosity, what exactly in DemonTree’s comment do you dispute?
It seems to me both obvious and uncontroversial that the oppressor/oppressed axis forms the center of progressive beliefs. I’d have a hard time believing that any progressive would really argue against this.
That this belief axis might run into some trouble when it comes to Jews is also obvious and unsurprising, since they have been historically oppressed, but against the Palestinians they take the role of oppressor. That this would result in some less-than-thoughtful progressives taking on antisemitic views seems like a logical outcome.
I don’t accept that the “oppressed/oppressor axis”, whatever that is, is the center of progressive beliefs. There are oppressed people, and oppressors, but not everyone belongs to one or the other, and there are many other considerations for how a progressive approaches an issue.
One of Demon Tree’s points is that progressives tend to be slow to notice (or, perhaps, to call out when they notice) anti-Semitism from the Muslim community. So the evidence for such claims tends to take the form of an absence of activity, which is a little tricky to cite on a message board. For example, when Rashida Tlaib said, on 11/03/2023, that “From the river to the sea is an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction, or hate.” there was (as far as I can tell) no outcry from progressives on any major college campus.
Now, I want to be clear on this; Tlaib’s statement, posted on Twitter less than a month after the worst anti-Jewish atrocity since the Holocaust, while several hundred bodies still lay unidentified in Israeli morgues because they’d been mutilated beyond recognition, was shameless, gas-lighting, Jew-baiting bullshit. It was like if, less than a month after George Floyd was killed, some politician had gone on Twitter and said “Well actually, ‘All Lives Matter’ is just an inter-racial statement of solidarity against police violence”. The outcry from college progressives would’ve been louder than Krakatoa, and rightly so. So why was their reaction to Tlaib’s statement (which, if anything, was even worse) so terribly muted?
Tlaib was (rightly) censured by some in her own party, but there was no censure from college progressives as far as I know. Why not? The way I see it, they either agreed with Tlaib, or they disagreed but didn’t think it was politic to call her out. Neither paints college progressives in a good light with respect to their ability to recognise and/or combat anti-semitism.
Well, I can’t speak for all progressives, but there’s a nuance there in progressive sources that is often overlooked by critics. For example, (from my ancient memory) in Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he talks about the oppressed/oppressor relationship, but it’s not a dichotomy, it’s kind of a dual identity we all live with.
Then again, people in academic circles make certain decisions about what kind of oppression matters more. My social work curriculum had a required year-long course on American Racism with a specific focus on the Black-white binary. We weren’t required to spend all that time on the oppression of women**, or Asians, or Jews, just Black people. Of course various marginalized group issues were addressed in all of our courses, but for whatever reason the school thought the Black-white binary was more important than any other kind of oppression. I’m sort of okay with that, because it was a tremendously enlightening class sequence that probably did a lot of good, but still, there’s a hierarchy there. And you see it in the way the progressive label BIPOC centers the experiences of Black and Indigenous people and just lumps everyone else in as a person of color.
I recently wrote an application where I was required to report how many of our board members were BIPOC and I had to leave the two Jews out because they very much don’t count for the funder’s purposes. I see it all the time.
So I think the argument from oppression is an oversimplication of the problem but I don’t think it’s completely without merit either. Serious scholars may understand the nuance but I don’t expect that out of your average college student.
**I found that particularly interesting given that we were overwhelmingly women going into a gendered profession.
Ok, so you don’t even accept the language in the first place. And yet I can search your posts and find many hundreds about oppression. You really don’t think that’s the primary way of framing issues among progressives? It doesn’t take much more than looking at what’s written on the signs at progressive protests.
Of course. But that’s true of any political ideology. And yet there’s usually some primary way of framing a debate; a starting point from which further discussion can follow. Less-than-thoughtful people–like young college students that don’t yet have any sophisticated ideas–don’t necessarily get past this starting point. So they get confused and the primary framing of oppressed=bad takes more priority than it should.
If it means what I think it means, it’s relevant to many progressive issues stances, but not all. But progressives who say or do anti-semitic things aren’t getting there by utilizing progressive stances (whether about oppression or something else) - they’re getting there from ignorance, misunderstanding, or outright bigotry. Blaming Jews for the actions of the Israeli government (as an example) is an entirely unprogressive stance.
Right. Obviously I can’t speak for DemonTree and don’t know what they think. My point here is in line with what you’re saying–sure, there is extra nuance here if you dig deeper into progressive thought, but we shouldn’t necessarily expect that from your typical college student. And yet they are presented with the oppressor/oppressed framing, and while that isn’t sufficient anywhere, in the case of Jews specifically the limitations become very apparent. And can lead to what amounts to antisemitism.
I agree with you - in theory. Unfortunately, most people (including those people who hold progressive views that I agree with) don’t appear to arrive at conclusions through careful reasoning and examination of their initially held beliefs.
So while progressivism certainly shouldn’t boil down to a simple opressor/opressed dichotomy, in practice, it sometimes does among those who lack intellectual rigor.
It just so happens that college is a great place to find people who have plenty of political awareness and enthusiasm, but who are still working on developing the rigor part.
The fact that some college kids who consider themselves Team Progressive didn’t consider the implications of the phrase “from the river to the sea” (or even which river and which sea are under discussion) is certainly unfortunate, but it actually has very little to do with progressive ideology.
Yes. I believe what I and others are specifically rejecting are the highlighted parts of the statement:
It is only “obvious” that those factions or cliques within progressivism that are loud and in your face over the “opression olympics” get lots of publicity. But not that this particular angle of looking at the world is THE thing that defines progressive thought.
OTOH, is IS true what Spice_Weasel and Babale stated, that it is too easily grabbed on by those with less inclination for nuance as if it were so.
Do you have any evidence for that belief or just a bias that since you are a progressive then progressives cannot be Jew haters?
Sorry but there is a fair of Jew hate on the Left, blurring the line between thinking that Israel has no right to exist into standard anti-Semitism.
Lots of documentation of that out there.
It’s been around. Just growing. This from 7 years ago.
Note that I have not said this is the only thing. Just that it forms the center, or primary way of framing issues. It comes up time and time again, not just via “oppression Olympics”, but in academia as well. Spice_Weasel’s caveats are well-noted, but IMO demonstrate the point. The nuance is in noting that it isn’t a perfect dichotomy, and that oppression can be context-dependent, and so on. But the thinking is all relative to that original framing. And un-nuanced thinking tends to regress to a simple dichotomy (as it does for pretty much any other political ideology).
Arnold Kling gave this breakdown of the major strains of American political thought:
Progressives organize the good and the bad in terms of oppression and the oppressed, and they think in terms of groups. So, certain groups of people are oppressed, and certain groups of people are oppressors. And so the good is to align yourself against oppression, and the historical figures that have improved the world have fought against oppression and overcome oppression.
The second axis is one I think Conservatives use, which is civilization and barbarism. The good is civilized values that have accumulated over time and have stood the test of time; and the bad is barbarians who try to strike out against those values and destroy civilization.
And the third axis is one I associate with Libertarians, which is freedom versus coercion, so that good is individuals making their own choices, contracting freely with each other; and the bad is coercion at gunpoint, particularly on the part of governments.
Well, it’s more complicated than that, but as a first approximation I think it’s reasonable. I wonder if there’s a fish-breathing-water effect going on; the language of oppression is so central to progressive politics that they only perceive the corrections to it. And likewise for the others. But it makes communication difficult, because conservatives (within Kling’s categorization) are not perceiving the oppressed/oppressor axis at all. They support Israel because it appears to be a civilization/barbarism dichotomy, with Israel being a fairly well-functioning nation and Palestine being nearly a failed state. How that came to be, or the current power imbalance, is irrelevant. So people talk past each other.
Those characterizations are pretty nonsensical.
Conservatives aren’t about “barbarism vs civilization”; marching with tiki torches while chanting about Jews or storming the capitol isn’t “civilized”. Conservatism is much better understood as ingroup vs outgroup. Acts of barbarity (say, letting people drown entangled in a fence rather than processing them through our immigration system) are forgiven as long as they are directed towards the outgroup.
Same goes for progressivism, which is not about oppressors/oppressed dichotomies but instead about advancing the human condition, both through advancements in science and technology and by restructuring society so that the fruits borne by these advancements are shared by a wider swathe of society.
Overturning systems of oppression is an important part of that, because oppressed people do not fully share in the fruits of these benefits. But it’s notnthe entirety of progressive ideology.
Hold up–she said that she thought antisemitism was “mostly conservatives.” Your cite says that 21% of victims of antisemitism said they were attacked by left-wing activists. That leaves 79% that aren’t left-wing activists, which seems to back up her claim (unless there are a lot of apolitical antisemites out there attacking people, which I suppose is a possibility).
Absolutely the antisemitism on the left is something that needs to be dealt with. But there’s a really ugly attempt by some on the right to use it as a way to attack left-wing ideas, falsely blaming those ideas for antisemitism. It’s showing up in this thread, and it’s pernicious unhelpful and should be called out.
Neither conservatives nor progressives reliably stand by their ideals, whatever they may be. See: this thread.
That’s essentially just a less charitable way of saying the same thing, especially if the in-group is pretty well-off and has a credible claim to having a functioning society, as American conservatives do. “Barbarians at the gate” and all that.
There’s no shortage of rejection of science and technology among progressives, and among the more virulent strains of progressivism is the belief that what we think of as science is actually Western science, or even patriarchal Western science, and that other societies have equally legitimate claims to the workings of the universe.
It’s completely racist of course, this belief that only white males have access to the scientific method. And no, it’s not universal among progressives but it’s also not remotely a strawman, either. If one elevates the idea of oppressor/oppressed too highly, it’s not a stretch that one might see science itself as a form of oppression. And so we see that play out in certain areas.
As Frank Wilhoit once proposed:
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.