You’re not the only one. There are some old New Dealers and socialists whining about “Identitarianism.” Sometimes to the point of sounding dismissive of complaints about racism.
As a comic book nerd, I tracked down writer Will Shetterly at some point and found that this is a pet peeve of his that he will probably carry throughout his “cranky old man” years. He can probably point you to others who share his viewpoint.
I think there is some truth to the complaint, but I’m not willing to throw out real concerns about racism and the persecution of the deviant for some idea that everything important is really just about class. I’m not convinced even Stalin believed that.
This is largely because conservatives lose their shit over them. Generally, municipal and school-district regulations saying transgender people could use the bathrooms for their identified gender were passed with little fuss or attention from liberals. Conservatives are the ones who made a big to-do about repealing or blocking them.
Likewise, Caitlyn Jenner and racial diversity in awards ceremonies would just be celebrity gossip and show-business shop talk, if it weren’t for conservatives endlessly chewing over them attempting to diagnose deep-seated social malaise of some kind.
It wasn’t much of a commentary on Nazism, more of a brief mention as a historical example, along with Yugoslavia. I don’t think the details of Weimar politics are particularly well known to most people. Now I’m curious what the last commentary on Nazism was that impressed you that can’t be found in a serious history book.
I’m not sure how you reached this conclusion. I was looking for something from Death of the Liberal Class and that small bit from an article seemed apropos, given recent developments. If you’re not familiar with someone you can Google them. Hedges is most well known for being a war correspondent for 15 years for which he shared a Pulitzer, writing some popular books on war and politics, activist work, being one of the few leftist voices to appear however briefly in the American mainstream, and he’s a minister so he can give heavy handed moralizing political talks, which some lefties are into.
The general consensus then was the Republicans would have to reach out to minorities and women and soften their stance on immigration. I don’t recall mainstream writers saying the right would go further right and win. I can give an even earlier prediction from 2009, but I don’t think that would be impressive either. Chomsky did it many times in the 2000s, making similar points about what happens when liberalism fails, Richard Rorty did it in the '90s, and Mencken did it in the 1920s, it’s just everyone thought that one came true in 2000.
That is how I see it as well. But I don’t see modern liberals as being honest. I feel that the social liberal message is hijacked by unscrupulous politicians who merely want power.
How many democratic politicians can you name who had anything to say about the oscars? Five? Two? Even one? I can’t, and a cursory google search isn’t helping me either. It “seems”, and that is the problem. It’s a hell of a lot more convenient for the right-wing if the main issues the left cares about are just minority rights. It’s really convenient if they can drown out all the attempts made to, say, raise the minimum wage, or build new infrastructure, particularly because such attempts form such a crucial counterpoint to the issue of the American right favoring almost exclusively the super rich.
Whose fault is it, though? Even assuming the democrats dump literally all of the civil rights and LGBT rights stuff from their platform, if they completely abandon anything even remotely resembling “identity politics”, will that magically make FOX News report on how they’re pushing a jobs bill?
I can’t say for sure, but I do know that any high school world history class presents it. Not my job to police teens who didn’t pay attention in class. I happen to be somewhat more educated than that, but this really isn’t rocket science.
Let’s just say that I wasn’t particularly inspired to rush right out and find out who he was based on that particular snippet. Richard Dawkins, on the other hand…but he’s a different kettle of fish.
Fox News and Breitbart being notoriously soft on anything throughout their histories. Garbage in, garbage out. Witness the orange-haired conspiracy machine and his deluded followers.
I’m sure it’s changed to some degree, but I think mostly for the better. Fighting injustice in various forms really should be the main priority of liberal politics.
Ah yes, for the good old days of honest politicians, when our leaders were selflessly interested in the public good and were not just out for power! And by “good old days,” I’m talking specifically about…
…okay, help me out here, when were they?
I mean, I guess? In the trivial sense that any time people are misreporting what a group is doing, the group might theoretically find a jazzier way of communicating that leads to less misreporting.
But we’ve got two factors that we should be looking at here:
A media environment that privileges blood and sex above nearly anything else. A bill on improving outdated public infrastructure goes up against a bill telling people where to pee, the first one just ain’t gonna get as many clicks as the second.
A right wing that freaks the hell out about trans rights. Look at North Carolina, where the state is willing to suffer some pretty serious economic consequences in order to keep trans people from peeing in the bathroom they’d prefer to pee in. The right wing in our nation is so focused on these issues, it’s hard to keep the focus on economic issues.
There are about 10,000 trans people in North Carolina, if I understand math. Sure, the Democratic party might be able to win a few more votes by throwing them under the bus, by giving up on issues of justice and human rights for minorities–and it must astonish octopus that they don’t, given how crass and power-hungry he believes liberals to be. But the liberalism I believe in can hold more than two ideas in its mind at once: it’s possible to fight both for economic issues for the working class, AND for issues of basic human dignity for minorities, without seeing them in conflict.
It’s a continuation of the same core principle: equality.
The problem is some white men feel entitled to special treatment. When they’re offered nothing more than equality, they feel like they’re getting less than they deserve.
This is a misrepresentation. Liberalism is defined by giving voice to the minority. Giving voice to those who have been ignored or abused doesn’t make it anti – white, male, Christian, whatever. Those that want to have a “White Culture” or a “Day Without Men” are mostly tone deaf to the fact that they are the established culture and do not promote the positive contributions of those groups, but more likely represent the suppression of the minority. Remember the root word of “Liberal” is “Liberty”. That means the freedom to live your life following your own moral code while being respectful of others.
Only in that conservatives have trouble listening. Progressive messages are often complex nuanced ideas that go right over the heads of the conservatives, so they latch onto little snippets like “You didn’t build that”, or “we’re going to put coal miners out of work”, and even though the context gives rise to the exact opposite meaning of the snippet, that snippet is all they hold on to.
Good point. Can you thik of a good way to get the media to spend as much time trying to explain to it’s audience the details of a economic or infrastrucure plan as they do on sensational news coverage of controversial topics?
I can, it’s called NPR.
Now, can you think of a good way to get conservatives to pay attention to that news, rather than the sensational news that riles them up?
Well, obviously, people who voted for the so-called president did not read the platform, or the bills, but instead concentrated on the stories about race or gender that get them riled up.
If you have a suggestion on how to get people to pay attention to politics before they go and vote, I’m all ears. But blaming the message because people refused to hear it is counterproductive.
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People get their news from Facebook, sharing links posted from primarily online sources. And verily among the links that my liberals friends send my way from sources like Slate or The Daily Beast, there’s a lot of showing off how much they care about Muslims and transsexuals and any other group that’s popular this month, and a lot of gasping at the horrible pay gap between multi-millionaire Hollywood actresses and multi-millionaire Hollywood actors, and other stuff of that nature. And by comparison, very little about pocketbook issues that affect working class Americans. Yes, there’s an occasional lecture from Bernie Sanders about minimum wage, but it tends to get buried under the other stuff.
What LinusK is saying is what many people are thinking about the Democrats and liberal institutions. Liberals can retort that that’s not what they should be thinking, but it is what many people are thinking, so if the Democrats want to win elections and liberal institutions want to regain popular trust and support, perhaps some attention should be paid.
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YES! PAY ATTENTION! If you don’t pay attention to what the liberals are saying and doing,and only going off of what the most sensational news outlet will tell you, or what stories are popularized on facebook, then you will not get a good read on what is really going on. It does require some level of engagement on your part. Expecting to have complex policy spoonfed to you in a way that keeps you entertained enough to pay attention is unrealistic
While I will agree that many politicians will run with a message that resonates in order to improve their electoral chances, I think your brush there is a bit broad. I am only concerned that you believe that, you will be completely unable to make any political decisions that are rooted in reality, but instead will allow yourself to be led astray by those who would use your belief in an absolute corrupt democratic party to get away with their own corruption.
Your statment implies that liberals are all liars
Why does giving voice to minorities not become anti-white or anti-male but giving voice to whites or males become anti-minority? Is there something especially evil about the majority that they can not have a voice without suppressing others?
Whites and males already have “voice”, in this context, and always have. Pushing for more “voice” for white people and men is like pushing for disability payments for healthy and active adults.
Giving voice means leveling the playing field. It needs leveling because it’s already skewed in favor of the majority. The people who argue that raising minorities up is persecuting the majority is, in essence, asking to maintain that skew.
To paraphrase, to someone with advantages, equality feels like persecution.
there’s a difference between raising minorities, which is OK, vs. pushing down majorities, which is not OK. The latter was tried by Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin, and Mao Zedong. It didn’t work out too well. Sadly, the left seems to lean towards that. There will always be people who live better than others; its human nature. We’ve eliminated virtually all forms of legal sex and race discrimination; the Civil Rights and Women’s Lib movements are over, but the left needs a cause celebre.
It’s too easy for pro-minority to turn into anti-majority, and too many people fall into that trap.
As a minority American, I have nothing against the concept of a White/Caucasian Heritage Month, I think it’s only fair - just like I have nothing against Tom Brady being given the Super Bowl MVP trophy, even though the majority of quarterbacks in the NFL are already white.