"Those who play the identity politics game..."

[Atamasama]

Most of my bosses/supervisors in my life have been something other than white males. And that’s cool, I’ve never had the misfortune of having to work directly under someone who was incompetent or difficult to work for. (Knock on wood!) If they reached those positions partially through some kind of affirmative action, or to meet some quota, or some other attempt to check off a diversity checkbox I’m cool with that because it worked in my opinion.

But I do remember trying to find scholarships in my last year of high school and finding many opportunities for anyone and everyone who was not white or male, and nothing that applied to me, a poor white male who didn’t have any support. I know, I suppose I deserved it by being born the wrong race and sex but it still seemed wrong to me.

I could never afford more than a couple of years of college but I succeeded well enough anyway, self-taught myself IT stuff and I have a good job.

[LSLGuy]

@astro

You need to define your terms.

The whole point about “live by identity politics, die by identity politics” IIRC goes back to an explanation someone made about why Hillary lost where they said the dems had painted themselves into a corner by relying on and promoting identity politics and identity politics voters as their main base, and that this was dangerous because now disaffected, angry whites were beginning to see themselves, not as an amorphous “majority” but as a specific ethnic group, and to the extent this happened they were easily powerful enough to swing elections.

The general point/warning in the statement was if everyone else is identifying themselves as an “other” with a gripe, eventually the white working class will begin do the same thing on an organized and systematic basis not just in bar conversations. The gist was that working class whites are reacting to having wagging, judgmental political and social fingers pointed at them with group pushback and that liberal whites being aghast they would do this was clueless and naïve.

Agree completely that this is the honest way to interpret the “live by die by” quote.

@ITR_champion

Some Democrats have a little bit of a ‘shoot the messenger’ problem. The party just lost an easily winnable election to Donald Trump and has been repeatedly clobbered at other levels of government. Certain people are trying to communicate a major reason why they keep losing. Some Dems don’t want to listen and learn, but instead only lash out at anybody who mentions the topic, and accuse those people of being racist, sexist, etc…

Mark Lilla wrote a column about identity politics, though he calls it “identity liberalism”.

But how should this diversity shape our politics? The standard liberal answer for nearly a generation now has been that we should become aware of and “celebrate” our differences. Which is a splendid principle of moral pedagogy — but disastrous as a foundation for democratic politics in our ideological age. In recent years American liberalism has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing.

If Democrats wanted to win, they would pay attention to what he is saying. Instead, most seem to have decided that he’s a racist and sexist, of course. Likewise Bernie Sanders:

But it’s not good enough to say, “Hey, I’m a Latina, vote for me.” That is not good enough. I have to know whether that Latina is going to stand up with the working class of this country, and is going to take on big money interests.

One of the struggles that we’re going to have right now, we lay on the table of the Democratic Party, is it’s not good enough to me to say, “Okay, well we’ve got X number of African Americans over here, we’ve got Y number of Latinos, we have Z number of women. We are a diverse party, a diverse nation.” Not good enough. We need that diversity, that goes without saying. That is accepted. Right now, we’ve made some progress in getting women into politics — I think we got 20 women in the Senate now. We need 50 women in the Senate. We need more African Americans.

But, but, here is my point, and this is where there is going to be division within the Democratic Party. It is not good enough for someone to say, “I’m a woman! Vote for me!” No, that’s not good enough. What we need is a woman who has the guts to stand up to Wall Street, to the insurance companies, to the drug companies, to the fossil fuel industry. In other words, one of the struggles that you’re going to be seeing in the Democratic Party is whether we go beyond identity politics.

More sound words of wisdom. And how to Democrats respond. By saying Bernie Sanders is racist and a sexist. And a white supremacist too, apparently.

So identity politics has a definition, and attempts to dismiss it as merely a term that white men use to attack anyone else are incorrect.

But …

What Sanders said in your quote is totally identity politics. But it’s the identity of economic station, not the identity of skin color or religion.
Defining “identity politics” as “racial group politics” or “religious group politics” is essentially a way of defining it as a failed and evil left-wing tactic.

It’s exactly like the Rs labeling anything advocating the interests of the working classes as “class warfare”, while advocating anything benefitting the shareholder class as “good for America”.

A key part of politics in the age of *anything goes *is to demonize the opposition by the very terms of debate. Ideally the debate never happens because your choice of terms carry the day and squeeze the opposition completely off the playing field of legitimacy.

It’s simply “We’re Americans; they’re anti-American communists” using slightly less blatant terminology. Which thin fig leaf was enough to decisively fool a hefty chunk of people concentrated in a couple of long-suffering states.

[Martini_Enfield]

@Quartz

Do you not think that some straight white men see people being promoted because of their gender or colour or whatever and not because of their ability? Do you think they might have a valid grievance? Equality means equality of opportunity, not equality of result; if you’re promoting or recruiting someone for a reason other than ability then you’re discriminating against the other candidates.

I agree with this point; and further, in my experience, pointing it out to people advocating for non-Standard White Guys to get priority in hiring etc invariably results in a response of “Too fucking bad.”

[Kimstu]

@Atamasama

But I do remember trying to find scholarships in my last year of high school and finding many opportunities for anyone and everyone who was not white or male, and nothing that applied to me, a poor white male who didn’t have any support.

Really? Because I just went on a scholarship search site looking for scholarships available to a white male HS senior, including consideration of financial need but with no specified disability or any other special conditions, and the search got a couple hundred hits.

You may not have found any scholarships specifically targeted to white male students, but I very much doubt that there were no scholarships open to white male students.

[Little_Nemo]

@Martini_Enfield

Do you blame them? Honestly?

I believe in a fair go for everyone but at the same time, I totally understand people not being impressed about basically being worse off than before, all so a group of “others” they don’t know or interact with can have more of something those Standard White Guys might argue they already had anyway.

As I said, I am one of them. I certainly understand it. I just don’t think I’m entitled to it.

When I was working I had people above me who were black or female or hispanic or openly gay. If I had been working fifty years earlier, that would never have happened. If a black person or a woman or a hispanic or, god forbid, a homosexual had gotten a job at all it would have been the lowliest job in the business. And they would have stayed there; the idea of promoting one of them over a Standard White Guy would have been unthinkable. Obviously, as a Standard White Guy, I would have benefited from this highly biased system. But that doesn’t make that highly biased system right.

[LinusK]

@PigArcher

And yet, more people voted for her than Obama.

Still looking for a workable, non-snarky definition of “identity politics.”

That’s just wrong.

2008 Obama: 69.5 million - 53%
2012 Obama: 65.9 million - 51%
2016 Clinton: 65.8 million - 48%

[LinusK]

@astro

You need to define your terms.

The whole point about “live by identity politics, die by identity politics” IIRC goes back to an explanation someone made about why Hillary lost where they said the dems had painted themselves into a corner by relying on and promoting identity politics and identity politics voters as their main base, and that this was dangerous because now disaffected, angry whites were beginning to see themselves, not as an amorphous “majority” but as a specific ethnic group, and to the extent this happened they were easily powerful enough to swing elections.

The general point/warning in the statement was if everyone else is identifying themselves as an “other” with a gripe, eventually the white working class will begin do the same thing on an organized and systematic basis not just in bar conversations. The gist was that working class whites are reacting to having wagging, judgmental political and social fingers pointed at them with group pushback and that liberal whites being aghast they would do this was clueless and naïve.

That sounds about right.

[LinusK]

@snoe

To take the argument a step farther: many events conspired to make Trump win the election, including, probably, quite a few that would have been determinative if they’d happened differently. (My top-two guesses: Comey’s letter and Clinton’s overconfidence rooted in misleading polling.) Hindsight is 20/20; I’m inherently suspicious of anyone who uses this election to prove the point they were harping on BEFORE the election.

Getting back to the OP: playing any game is risking losing the game. I suspect that many of the most conspicuous people who “play the identity politics game” are not terribly focused on winning; they want to make a moral/ethical point. A cynic would call this virtue signaling (“Look at those racist losers”); a believer would call this speaking truth (“Look at the suffering Group X is experiencing, largely ignored”).

I am inclined to be very sympathetic to the aims of “identity politics” folks. It’s sometimes frustrating to see them making choices that seem tactically unsound, but I also think that speaking truth, even to those who don’t want to hear it, and might turn against you, is a sound long-term strategy.

(Ideally, we’d find a way to balance these impulses to be both correct AND effective right now.)

But the suffering of groups liberal elites care about is not ignored. Just the opposite, in fact. The suffering of people they don’t give a shit about, on the other hand… well, that’s pretty much ignored.

[Budget_Player_Cadet]

@LinusK

But the suffering of groups liberal elites care about is not ignored. Just the opposite, in fact. The suffering of people they don’t give a shit about, on the other hand… well, that’s pretty much ignored.

Wat.

To date, being trans still means a massively inflated suicide rate, discrimination against you in things like employment and housing, often an inability to access good mental or physical health care, and often denial of your identity to the point where you can’t even go to the fucking bathroom. Sure, people are now talking about it (after how long?), but the discrimination is still incredible prevalent, and in many parts of the country, being reinforced by the dominant political party.

Meanwhile, what groups do you consider liberals to “not give a shit about”?

[LinusK]

@marshmallow

This is relevant on the left as well, as it represents a sizable fracture point. Generally the socialists want to focus on class issues, whereas liberals want to focus on race, sex, and sexual identity. The former went Bernie, the latter went Clinton. Both have some fair critiques of the other.

That’s a good point.

I’d add that focusing on class has the danger of actually costing you something - if you’re wealthy, I mean. Focusing on bathrooms, not so much.

[LinusK]

@PigArcher

What evidence do you have that blacks only voted for Obama because of race or Hilary because of gender? Do you think it’s at all possible that people might consider multiple factors in deciding who to vote for, such as policy positions and may consider that better for the nation as a whole?

I didn’t make any such claim.

I do think, though, that Obama was right not to make an issue of his race. He was always very careful about that.

[LinusK]

@Left_Hand_of_Dorkness

Bullshit.
As to the OP, let’s look at equivalent quotes:
-Those who play the liberty game should be prepared to lose it.
-Those who play the civil rights game should be prepared to lose it.
-Those who play the abolition game should be prepared to lose it.

Some things, it turns out, it’s ridiculous to characterize them as a game. “Identity politics” is one of them.

The idea that cis white men should be the only group without an identity is anathema to anyone I’ve met who believes in social structures linked to “cultural, ethnic, gender, racial, religious, or social interests.” Indeed, most folks on the left want to make the shared cultural identity of white men explicit rather than implicit. Thus words like “cisgendered”. Thus jokes about “White Steve” instead of “Steve” if you’ve got two dudes named Steve in your office. Too often being white, male, cis, het, etc. are considered not only default, but invisible characteristics.

So there’s a mass of people who treat whiteness as an invisible characteristic. On the left, you’ve got people who want to call it out and call out certain ways in which society advantages people for whiteness (relative to other racial identities) and want to end those advantages. On the right, you’ve got people who want to call it out and increase the advantages for whiteness.

That’s where Trump comes in.

If your point is that racists are gonna be racists, sure, I agree with you. If your claim is that they’re only doing it because of leftists, that prior to a focus on racially-based social structures it had never even occurred to Trump’s ilk that maybe they should be racist, you’ve got a difficult case to make.

Yes, I’ve heard those arguments too. What’s interesting is that those on the “left” who want to make white-male-right-handed-cis-gendered- blah-blah-blah into an identity group also want to attach strictly negative attributes to it. So much for MLK, and his dream.

[msmith537]

@LinusK

Yes, I’ve heard those arguments too. What’s interesting is that those on the “left” who want to make white-male-right-handed-cis-gendered- blah-blah-blah into an identity group also want to attach strictly negative attributes to it. So much for MLK, and his dream.

People act as if just because a person is a white male etc etc they are afforded certain advantages. Like my Race Card gets me in all the fancy clubs or something. We may not experience all the disadvantages of being a minority, but it’s not like if we don’t work hard we won’t lose our jobs (or if our company moves offshore).

And that’s why Trump won. Because you have all these white people in rural communities and Rust Belt manufacturing towns who saw their jobs disappear due to outsourcing and globalization. They’re not experiencing the “white privilege”.

[LinusK]

@ITR_champion

Some Democrats have a little bit of a ‘shoot the messenger’ problem. The party just lost an easily winnable election to Donald Trump and has been repeatedly clobbered at other levels of government. Certain people are trying to communicate a major reason why they keep losing. Some Dems don’t want to listen and learn, but instead only lash out at anybody who mentions the topic, and accuse those people of being racist, sexist, etc…

Mark Lilla wrote a column about identity politics, though he calls it “identity liberalism”.

But how should this diversity shape our politics? The standard liberal answer for nearly a generation now has been that we should become aware of and “celebrate” our differences. Which is a splendid principle of moral pedagogy — but disastrous as a foundation for democratic politics in our ideological age. In recent years American liberalism has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing.

If Democrats wanted to win, they would pay attention to what he is saying. Instead, most seem to have decided that he’s a racist and sexist, of course. Likewise Bernie Sanders:

But it’s not good enough to say, “Hey, I’m a Latina, vote for me.” That is not good enough. I have to know whether that Latina is going to stand up with the working class of this country, and is going to take on big money interests.

One of the struggles that we’re going to have right now, we lay on the table of the Democratic Party, is it’s not good enough to me to say, “Okay, well we’ve got X number of African Americans over here, we’ve got Y number of Latinos, we have Z number of women. We are a diverse party, a diverse nation.” Not good enough. We need that diversity, that goes without saying. That is accepted. Right now, we’ve made some progress in getting women into politics — I think we got 20 women in the Senate now. We need 50 women in the Senate. We need more African Americans.

But, but, here is my point, and this is where there is going to be division within the Democratic Party. It is not good enough for someone to say, “I’m a woman! Vote for me!” No, that’s not good enough. What we need is a woman who has the guts to stand up to Wall Street, to the insurance companies, to the drug companies, to the fossil fuel industry. In other words, one of the struggles that you’re going to be seeing in the Democratic Party is whether we go beyond identity politics.

More sound words of wisdom. And how to Democrats respond. By saying Bernie Sanders is racist and a sexist. And a white supremacist too, apparently.

So identity politics has a definition, and attempts to dismiss it as merely a term that white men use to attack anyone else are incorrect.

Some Democrats. Where I live, Bernie signs still outnumbered Hillery’s, right up until the election was over. Nice post.

[LinusK]

@greenmario

I don’t think they want special treatment, it’s just that some people absolutely butcher trying to explain the concept of privilege. One ham-handed attempt tried to explain it as ‘playing life on easy mode’. I imagine it would be difficult to maintain a relationship with a peer that you knew believed that they worked harder than you to be in the same position.

It’s an uncomfortable concept to be sure. It’s also uncomfortably married to race. I think it would be better packaged by stressing that privilege comes mostly with being in the majority rather than being white.

Privilege comes mostly from wealth.

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@LinusK

But the suffering of groups liberal elites care about is not ignored. Just the opposite, in fact. The suffering of people they don’t give a shit about, on the other hand… well, that’s pretty much ignored.

Remind me which party has supported labor unions the most, versus which party has worked over the last thirtyyears to dismantle the societal structure which has done the most to protect the working class?

The idea that Democrats ignore white working class voters is ludicrous. Republicans have done a bangup job of engaging in populist demagoguery in a way that lies to people about who the social elites are (hint: professors and actors ain’t who’s hurting the working class). But you can’t judge truth by how many votes it earns. Just because Trump’s demoguic lies got almost as many votes as Clinton’s economic policies doesn’t mean they have objective merit.

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@LinusK

Yes, I’ve heard those arguments too. What’s interesting is that those on the “left” who want to make white-male-right-handed-cis-gendered- blah-blah-blah into an identity group also want to attach strictly negative attributes to it.

It’s “interesting” in the same way that what my daughter told me this morning is interesting. She told me that if a narwhal and a horse had a baby, it’d be a unicorn.

Lemme take that back. What she told me was also a fantasy unsupported by any evidence whatsoever, but it was a way more interesting fantasy.

[LinusK]

@Crazy_Canuck

Thanks for proving my point. Did you actually read the cite?

Well, if Bernie’s a white male, what else does he need to know?

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@ITR_champion

More sound words of wisdom. And how to Democrats respond. By saying Bernie Sanders is racist and a sexist. And a white supremacist too, apparently.

ITR, I am shocked–SHOCKED!!!–that you would misrepresent a link. Did you read it and not understand it, or did you not even read it?

@Quentin James

I made a bit of a provocative statement on Facebook this week when I posted, “I like U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders but his comments regarding identity politics suggest he may be a white supremacist, too.” I was referencing a statement he gave this week in response to a question about more diversity in the Senate. It is my opinion that Senator Sanders’ response was demeaning, patronizing and came from a place of white supremacy. Did I call Sen. Sanders a white supremacist? No. Do I think his comments come from a place of political thinking that is awash in white supremacy? Certainly.

(emphasis added).

Now, it’s worth looking at Quentin James. You all know who he is, right?

No?

C’mon. He’s got 202 followers! We’re talking a major player on the hard left!

I’m pretty sure I could post a video of my kid telling stories about unicorns and narwhals and have 300 followers within a week.

The only reason we’re reading about this is because ITR found a hardcore rightwing blog that found James’s blog, and the hardcore rightwing blog decided to distort what James said, and ITR passed it along to us in the same distorted form. So here we are.

This is no way to conduct a debate. Your cites ought to say what you claim they say.

[LinusK]

@The_Other_Waldo_Pepper

I just googled Vote For Hillary Because and the first page of hits seemed to consist entirely of She’s A Woman results. Also, googling Special Place In Hell brings up a whole bunch of interesting stuff about how women should vote for a woman because she’s a woman, and they’re women, and women women women women.

I can’t help but wonder if some men, upon hearing that sales pitch, said, huh; as a man, am I supposed to be voting for men because they’re men? Is there a special place in hell for me if I don’t support male candidates? This is all so new to me!

Fortunately, there’s no special place in hell for men - according to feminists, I mean. They’re free to vote for the best candidate. One of the many privileges afforded to men.