Yves here. This piece gives a useful, real-world perspective on the issues discussed in a seminal Adolph Reed article. Key section:
… race politics is not an alternative to class politics; it is a class politics, the politics of the left-wing of neoliberalism. It is the expression and active agency of a political order and moral economy in which capitalist market forces are treated as unassailable nature. An integral element of that moral economy is displacement of the critique of the invidious outcomes produced by capitalist class power onto equally naturalized categories of ascriptive identity that sort us into groups supposedly defined by what we essentially are rather than what we do. As I have argued, following Walter Michaels and others, within that moral economy a society in which 1% of the population controlled 90% of the resources could be just, provided that roughly 12% of the 1% were black, 12% were Latino, 50% were women, and whatever the appropriate proportions were LGBT people. It would be tough to imagine a normative ideal that expresses more unambiguously the social position of people who consider themselves candidates for inclusion in, or at least significant staff positions in service to, the ruling class.
This perspective may help explain why, the more aggressively and openly capitalist class power destroys and marketizes every shred of social protection working people of all races, genders, and sexual orientations have fought for and won over the last century, the louder and more insistent are the demands from the identitarian left that we focus our attention on statistical disparities and episodic outrages that “prove” that the crucial injustices in the society should be understood in the language of ascriptive identity.
My take on this issue is that the neoliberal use of identity politics continue and extends the cultural inculcation of individuals seeing themselves engaging with other in one-to-one transactions (commerce, struggles over power and status) and has the effect of diverting their focus and energy on seeing themselves as members of groups with common interests and operating that way, and in particular, of seeing the role of money and property, which are social constructs, in power dynamics.
By David Llewellyn-Smith, founding publisher and former editor-in-chief of The Diplomat magazine, now the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics website. Originally posted at MacroBusiness
Let’s begin this little tale with a personal anecdote. Back in 1990 I met and fell in love with a bisexual, African American ballerina. She was studying Liberal Arts at US Ivy League Smith College at the time (which Aussies may recall was being run by our Jill Kerr Conway back then). So I moved in with my dancing beauty and we lived happily on her old man’s purse for a year.
I was fortunate to arrive at Smith during a period of intellectual tumult. It was the early years of the US political correctness revolution when the academy was writhing through a post-structuralist shift. Traditional dialectical history was being supplanted by a new suite of studies based around truth as “discourse”. Driven by the French post-modern thinkers of the 70s and 80s, the US academy was adopting and adapting the ideas Foucault, Derrida and Barthe to a variety of civil rights movements that spawned gender and racial studies.
Each of these was based fundamentally upon the principle that language was the key to all power. That is, that language was not a tool that described reality but the power that created it, and s/he who controlled language controlled everything through the shaping of “discourse”, as opposed to the objective existence of any truth at all.
For a naive if lively ski-instructing Aussie larrikan, being plunged into the hot bed of civil liberties debate was something of an eye-opener. Not least because there I was, flowing long blonde hair and all, getting it on with the same black, lesbian babe that much of the mono-gendered and rampantly tribade campus had a libidinous eye upon.
I recall several dinner debates in which I really did not understand just how out my depth that I was. At one, a gender studies major declared at a table of twenty women that “all sex was rape” owing to the act of penentration being a simulacrum with violation. When I pointed out that perhaps it was more a case of personal power and volition, as well as who was “on top”, I was unsure if she going to run me through with her fork or take me out the back and roger me senseless.
I was saved from penetration of some kind, by another more savvy girl who suggested that during sex the vagina may, in fact, be engulfing the penis, and so the violation may be the reverse!
Take it from me, dear reader, that the place was in an advanced state of politico-sexual meltdown.
Amusement aside there was something else transpiring that was going to, and has, had a very dramatic impact upon global politics. The post-structural revolution has led directly to the rise of the identity politics that today dominates Left-wing policy-making in Western nations and, concomitantly, the decline of class-based politics.
How exactly this happened is impossible to trace with any precision – though the book “No Logo” does a pretty good job of it – but we can observe the rough manner of transformation.
The post-structural revolution transpired before and during the end of the Cold War just as the collapse of the Old Soviet Union denuded the global Left of its raison detre. But its social justice impulse didn’t die, it turned inwards from a notion of the historic inevitability of the decline of capitalism and the rise of oppressed classes, towards the liberation of oppressed minorities within capitalism, empowered by control over the language that defined who they were.
Simultaneously, capitalism did what it does best. It packaged and repackaged, branded and rebranded every emerging identity, cloaked in its own sub-cultural nomenclature, selling itself back to new emerging identities. Soon class was completely forgotten as the global Left dedicated itself instead to policing the commons as a kind of safe zone for a multitude of difference that capitalism turned into a cultural supermarket.
As the Left turned inwards, capitalism turned outwards and went truly, madly global, lifting previously isolated nations into a single planet-wide market, pretty much all of it revolving around Americana replete with its identity-branded products.
But, of course, this came at a cost. When you globalise capital, you globalise labour. That meant jobs shifting from expensive markets to cheap. Before long the incomes of those swimming in the stream of global capital began to seriously outstrip the incomes of those trapped in old and withering Western labour markets. As a result, inflation in those markets also began to fall and so did interest rates. Thus asset prices took off as Western nation labour markets got hollowed out, and standard of living inequality widened much more quickly as a new landed aristocracy developed.
Meanwhile the global Left looked on from its Ivory Tower of identity politics and was pleased. Capitalism was spreading the wealth to oppressed brothers and sisters, and if there were some losers in the West then that was only natural as others rose in prominence. Indeed, it went further. So satisfied was it with human progress, and so satisfied with its own role in producing it, that it turned the power of language that it held most dear back upon those that opposed the new order. Those losers in Western labour markets that dared complain or fight back against the free movement of capital and labour were labelled and marginalised as “racist”, “xenophobic” and “sexist”.
This great confluence of forces reached its apogee in the Global Financial Crisis when a ribaldly treasonous Wall St destroyed the American financial system just as America’s first ever African American President, Barack Obama, was elected . One might have expected this convergence to result in a revival of some class politics. Obama ran on a platform of “hope and change” very much cultured in the vein of seventies art and inherited a global capitalism that had just openly ravaged its most celebrated host nation.
But alas, it was just a bit of “retro”. With a Republican Party on its knees, Obama was positioned to restore the kind of New Deal rules that global capitalism enjoyed under Franklin D. Roosevelt. A gobalisation like the one promised in the brochures, that benefited the majority via competition and productivity gains, driven by trade and meritocracy, with counter-balanced private risk and public equity.
But instead he opted to patch up financialised capitalism. The banks were bailed out and the bonus culture returned. Yes, there were some new rules but they were weak. There was no seizing of the agenda. No imprisonments of the guilty. The US Department of Justice is still issuing $14bn fines to banks involved yet still today there is no justice. Think about that a minute. How can a crime be worthy of a $14bn fine but no prison time?!?
Alas, for all of his efforts to restore Wall Street, Obama provided no reset for Main Street economics to restore the fortunes of the US lower classes. Sure Obama fought a hostile Capitol but, let’s face it, he had other priorities. And so the US working and middle classes, as well as those worldwide, were sold another pup. Now more than ever, if they said say so they were quickly shut down as “racist”, “xenophobic”, or “sexist”.
Thus it came to pass that the global Left somehow did a complete back-flip and positioned itself directly behind the same unreconstructed global capitalism that was still sucking the life from the lower classes that it always had. Only now it was doing so with explicit public backing and with an abandon it had not enjoyed since the roaring twenties.
Which brings us back to today. And we wonder how it is that an abuse-spouting guy like Donald Trump can succeed Barack Obama. Trump is a member of the very same “trickle down” capitalist class that ripped the income from US households. But he is smart enough, smarter than the Left at least, to know that the decades long rage of the middle and working classes is a formidable political force and has tapped it spectacularly to rise to power.
And, he has done more. He has also recognised that the Left’s obsession with post-structural identity politics has totally paralysed it. It is so traumatised and pre-occupied by his mis-use of the language of power – the “racist”, “sexist” and “xenophobic” comments – that it is further wedging itself from its natural constituents every day.
Don’t get me wrong, I am very doubtful that Trump will succeed with his proposed policies but he has at least mentioned the elephant in the room, making the American worker visible again.
Returning to that innocent Aussie boy and his wild romp at Smith College, I might ask what he would have made of all of this. None of the above should be taken as a repudiation of the experience of racism or sexism. Indeed, the one thing I took away from Smith College over my lifetime was an understanding at just how scarred by slavery are the generations of African Americans that lived it and today inherit its memory (as well as other persecuted). I felt terribly inadequate before that pain then and I remain so today.
But, if the global Left is to have any meaning in the future of the world, and I would argue that the global Right will destroy us all if it doesn’t, then it must get beyond post-structural paralysis and go back to the future of fighting not just for social justice issues but for equity based upon class. Empowerment is not just about language, it’s about capital, who’s got it, who hasn’t and what role government plays between them.
All sex is not rape, but most poverty is.
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“All sex is not rape”
Not true. Some sex IS rape.
You mean, “not all sex is rape”
Is rape sex?
Only for the rapist.
The personal rewards from the sexual act come from the giving, not the taking. For sociopaths sex is an expression of power– war or politics by other means. We could name names from the presidential election circus, but that would be an all-inclusive group starting far earlier than the infamous JFK.
forcible sexual intercourse sounds like sex to me , and what’s with all the rape apologists ?
You need to reread this article – he didn’t get the syntax wrong – It’s a reference to something said by someone he describes in his treatise.
+1
Richard is correct. His phrase “not all sex is rape” is unambiguous. The ambiguous phrase “all sex is not rape” can mean “(all sex) is (not rape)”, that is, “sex is never rape”. In this article it is meant to be “it is not true that all sex is rape” or “~(all sex is rape)”.
This is the article’s phrase that he is negating: “all sex was rape”, and the proper way to negate this is “not all sex was rape”. Imaging the parentheses around the phrase “all sex was rape”.
Fortunately, the essay does not hinge on one phrase…Nor to the dictates of “identity politcs.”
>. The ambiguous phrase “all sex is not rape” can mean “(all sex) is (not rape)”,
I’m sorry but no native English (American) thinks it is actually ambiguous. Mathematically, maybe but so what. This is a pretty common expression. In actual speech you would strongly emphasize the “All” or “All sex” and that’s how I and I expect most native English speakers hear it in their heads.
What a lot about nothing, I am ashamed for participating but just wtf? I figured it would just be politely ignored as coming from a non-native speaker, but apparently not.
+1 for your dismisal of this pointless quibble. ..and why am I even writing this ;-)
The Alt-Write, Grammar Nazis are out in force.
> The Alt-Write, Grammar
Why the comma after “Write”?
It could be an Oxford comma – if “alt-write” is seen as two distinct meaning units, so Grammar Nazi is the third. Or it could be a personal tic.
Neither Richard nor I claimed that the ambiguous syntax invalidated the article’s main points. I happen to think that logic is fun, and that’s why I commented.
You forget the difference between written and spoken language. (Ultimately, they diverge into separate languages and someone has to start writing down the spoken form.) This is most obvious when people try to use irony in comments.
Written down, the phrase is ambiguous in a way that undercuts its impact, even if it wouldn’t be when spoken. As someone pointed out above, it refers to a quote from speech, but a footnote to the effect of “yeah, I know” might have been wise.
More interestingly, it’s probably an example of “natural grammar,” which can be quite different from the grammarian’s grammar. EG, a double negative makes little sense but is heard as emphasis when spoken, because repetition is emphasis.
This comment is a perfect example of the author’s (and Adolf Reed’s) point: that the so-called “Left” is so bogged down in issues of language that it has completely lost sight of class politics. Essentially, the comment vividly displays the exact methodology the author lambasts in the piece — it hijacks the discussion about an economic issue, attempts to turn it into a mere distraction about semantics, and in the end contributes absolutely nothing of substance to the “discourse”.
+1000
Beautifully expressed! Thanks
Exactly. It’s a stupid comment–oops, am I allowed to say that, or will I offend the intellectually challenged???
It’s why Trump won. He was a Viking swinging an ax at nuanced hair-splitters. It was inelegant and ugly, but effective.
We will find out if the hair-splitters win again in their inner circle with the Democratic Minority Leader vote. I suspect they missed the point of the election and will vote Pelosi back in, thereby missing the chance for significant gains in the mid-term elections.
Shoots and scores!
“All” is used here as in the phrase “all that glitters is not gold.” It doesn’t mean “nothing that glitters is gold.”
Gentlemen, ladies, please. Richard is speaking of the grammar, not the sex. And I agree with him, I believe the sentence should read, and that David means, “Not all sex is rape.” That is, IMNSHO, a true statement.
“All sex is not rape.” means, um, the opposite, actually (same as “No instance of sex is rape.”), and I would say it is false. David may have learned a lot at Smith, but not English grammar.
We have the weird spectacle of people (unwittingly, I hope) directing ad hominen arguments at themselves.
Apparently you missed the point entirely.
It’s correctly written. The leftist-feminist quote was ‘All sex is rape.” The author is simply asserting that’s not true. Probably would have helped if you read the column since it was clearly contextualized.
One of the great triumphs of Those Who Continue To Be Our Rulers has been the infiltraition and cooptation of ‘the left’, hand in hand with the ‘dumbing down’ of the last 30+ years so few people really understand what is going on. Explained in more detail here if anyone interested in some truly ‘out of the box’ perspectives – It’s not ‘the left’ trying to take over the world and shut down free speech and all that other bad stuff – it’s ‘the right’!! http://tinyurl.com/h4h2kay .
Although I haven’t yet read the article you posted, my “feeling” as I read this was that the author inferred that the right was in the mix somehow, but it was primarily the fault of the left.
That the Global Left appears to be intellectually weak regarding identity politics and “political correctness” vs. class politics, there is no doubt. But to skim over Global Corporate leverage of this attitude seems wrong to me. The right has also embraced identity politics in order to keep the 90% fully divided in order to justify it’s continual economic rape of both human and physical ecology.
>The right has also embraced identity politics
So many people critiquing the Dems’ use of identity politics seem to miss this point.
Exactly. My guess is that this plays out somewhat like this:
Dems: This group _____ should be free to have _____ civil right.
Reps: NO. We are a society built on _____ tradition, no need to change that because it upends our patriarchal, Christian, Caucasian power structure.
Every “identity politics” charge starts here, with one group wanting a more equitable social order and the other group defending the existing power structure. Identity politics is adjusting the social order and rattling the power structure, which is why it is so effective.
I think it can be effectively argued that Trump voters in PA, WI, OH, MI chose to rattle the power structure and you could think of that as identity politics as well.
On the contrary, the (Neo-)Liberal establishment uses identity politics to co-opt and neutralise the left. It keeps them occupied without threatening the real power structure in the least.
When have they ever done any such thing? Vote for Hillary because she’s a woman isn’t even any kind of politics it’s more like marketing branding. It’s the real thing. Taste great, less filling. I’m loving it.
Hillary (Neoliberal establishment) has many supporters who think of themselves as ‘left’ or ‘liberal’. The Democratic Party leadership is neither ‘left’ nor ‘liberal’. It keeps the votes and the love of the ‘liberals’ by talking up harmless ‘liberal’ identity politics and soft peddling the Liberal power politics which they are really about.
They exploit the happy historical accident of the coincidence of names. The Liberal ideology was so called because it was slightly less right-wing than the Feudalism it displaced. In today’s terms however, it is not very liberal, and Neoliberalism is even less so.
“Where else are they going to go?”
LOL, you idiots, they’re going to go *anywhere else* that speaks to their issues
Left, right, up, down, Easy, West, it doesn’t matter and THEY WIN. Its the Corporation against us & we been losing forever. When is enough wealth ENOUGH WEALTH?
– actually, the ‘global corporate leverage of this attitude’ was what I was trying to point out. The ‘global left’ has allowed itself to become intellectually weak, the ‘pushback’ by ‘true lefties’ has been kind of pathetically weak since the NWO got seriously underway in the early 1980s, which needs some serious examination, much longer than we could talk about here (but I go at it in my book Democratic Revolution Handbook http://www.rudemacedon.ca/drh/000-home.html if you want some serious ‘out of the box’ thinking …)
If I was in charge of the DNC and wanted to commission a very cleverly written piece to exonerate the DLC and the New Democrats from the 30 odd years of corruption and self-aggrandizement they indulged in and laughed all the way to the Bank then I would definitely give this chap a call. I mean, where do we start? No attempt at learning the history of neoliberalism, no attempt at any serious research about how and why it fastened itself into the brains of people like Tony Coelho and Al From, nothing, zilch. If someone who did not know the history of the DLC read this piece, they would walk away thinking, ‘wow, it was all happenstance, it all just happened, no one deliberately set off this run away train’. Sometime in the 90s the ‘Left’ decided to just pursue identity politics. Amazing. I would ask the Author to start with the Powell memo and then make an investigation as to why the Democrats then and the DLC later decided to merely sit on their hands when all the forces the Powell memo unleashed proceeded to wreak their havoc in every established institution of the Left, principally the Universities which had always been the bastion of the Progressives. That might be a good starting point.
My response at MB…
Sigh…. the left was marginalized and relentlessly hunted down by the right [grab bag of corporatists, free marketers, neocons, evangelicals, and a whole cornucopia of wing nut ideologists (file under creative class gig writers)].
Just from historical perspective, the right wing had more money to forward its agenda and an OCD like affliction [biblical] to drive simple memes relentlessly via its increasing private ownership of education and media. Thereby creating an institutional network over time to gain dominate market share in crafting the social narrative. Bloodly hell anyone remember Bush Jr Christian crusade after politicizing religion to get elected and the ramifications – neocon – R2P thingy….
Its not hard… once neoliberalism became dominate in the 70s [wages and productivity diverged] the proceeds have gone to the top and everyone else got credit IOUs based mostly on asset inflation via the Casino or RE [home and IP].
Disheveled Marsupial…. the left has not been at the policy table for 50 years…. its completely a right wing affair [dominate economics]… and now that the hoi polloi are getting the same treatment that the recipients of colonialism received… now are having a sad…. boo hoo….
Disheveled Marsupial…. now everything is being blamed on the bloody Frankfurt school…. ooooh… look cultural Marxists…. groan~~~~
Yes, it’s interesting that the academic “left” (aka liberals), who so prize language to accurately, and to the finest degree distinguish ‘this’ from ‘that’, have avoided addressing the difference between ‘left’ and ‘liberal’ and are content to leave the two terms interchangable.
The reason for that is that when academic leftists attempted a more in depth critique, of one sort or another, of the actually existing historical liberal welfare state, the liberals threw the “New Deal-under-siege” attack at them and attempted to shut them down.
There is very little left perspective in public. All this whining about identity politics is not left either. It is reactionary. I can think of plenty of old labor left academics who have done a much better job of wrapping their minds around why sex, gender, and race matter with respect to all matters economic than this incessant childish whine. The “let me make you feel more comfortable” denialism of Uncle Tom Reed.
Right now, I would say that these reactionaries don’t want to hear from the academic left any more than New Deal liberals did. Not going to stop them from blaming them for all their problems though.
Maybe people should shoulder their own failures for a change. As for the Trumpertantrums, I am totally not having them.
Since the writer led off talking about an academic setting, it would be useful to flesh out a bit more how trends in academic theoretical discussion in the 70s and 80s reflected and reinforced what was going on politically. He refers to postructuralism, which was certainly involved, but doesn’t give enough emphasis to how deliberately poststructuralists — and here I’m lumping together writers like Lyotard, Foucault, and Deleuze and Guattari — were all reacting to the failure of French Maoism and Trotskyism to, as far as they were concerned, provide a satisfactory alternative to Soviet Marxism. As groups espousing those position flailed about in the 70s, the drive to maintain hope in revolutionary prospects in the midst of macroeconomic stabilization and union reconciliation to capitalism frequently brought out the worst sectarian tendencies. While writers like Andre Gorz bid adieu to the proletariat as an agent of change and tried to tread water as social democratic reformists, the poststructuralists disjoined the critique of power from class analysis.
Foucault in particular advanced a greatly expanded wariness regarding the use of power. It was not just that left politics could only lead to ossified Soviet Marxism or the dogmatic petty despotism of the left splinters. Institutions in general mapped out social practices and attendant identities to impose on the individual. His position tended to promote a distrust not only of “grand narratives” but of organizational bonds as such. As far as I can tell, the idea of people joining together to form an institution that would enhance their social power as well as allow them to become personally empowered/enhanced was something of a categorial impossibility.
When imported to US academia, traditionally much more disengaged from organized politics than their European counterparts, these tendencies flourished. Aside from being socially cut off from increasingly anodyne political organizations, poststructuralists in the US often had backgrounds with little orientation to history or social science research addressing class relations. To them the experience of a much more immediate and palpable form of oppression through the use of language offered an immediate critical target. This dovetailed perfectly with the legalistic use of state power to end discrimination against various groups, A European disillusionment with class politics helped to fortify an American evasion or ignorance of it.
I must admit I know virtually nothing about postmoderism, other than that what I’ve seen of it appears to be very, very stupid. But I have heard Chomsky mention how it was born out of disillusionment with Maoism (Norman Finkelstein recounted how he was literally bed ridden for a week after Mao fell).
I’m just not understanding how “well, turns out that whole ‘science of Marxism-Leninism’ thing was a load of crap” leads to “there is no objective reality and you shouldn’t even try to figure things out”. Much less “if we tweak language this will some accomplish…um….anything”.
There is no global left. We have only global state capitalists and global social democrats – a pseudo left. The countries where Marxist class analysis was supposedly adopted were not industrial countries where “alienation” had brought the “proletariat” to an inevitable communal mentality. The largest of these countries killed millions in order to industrialize rapidly – pretending the goal was to get to that state. The terms left and right may not be adequate for those of us who want an egalitarian society but also see many of the obstacles to egalitarianism as human failings that are independent of and not caused by ruling elites – although they frequently serve the interests of those elites.
Bigotry. Identity centered thinking. Neither serves egalitarianism. But people cling to them. “I gotta look out for myself first.” And so called left thinkers constantly pontificate about “benefits” and “privileges” that some class, sex, and race confer. Hmmm. The logic is that many of us struggling daily to keep our jobs and pay the bills must give up something in order to be fair, in order to build a better society. Given this thinking it is no surprise that so many have retreated into the illusion of safety offered by identity based thinking.
Hopefully those of us who yearn for an egalitarian movement can develop and articulate an alternate view of reality.
“Simultaneously, capitalism did what it does best. It packaged and repackaged, branded and rebranded every emerging identity, cloaked in its own sub-cultural nomenclature, selling itself back to new emerging identities. Soon class was completely forgotten as the global Left dedicated itself instead to policing the commons as a kind of safe zone for a multitude of difference that capitalism turned into a cultural supermarket.”
…
“Meanwhile the global Left looked on from its Ivory Tower of identity politics and was pleased. Capitalism was spreading the wealth to oppressed brothers and sisters, and if there were some losers in the West then that was only natural as others rose in prominence. Indeed, it went further. So satisfied was it with human progress, and so satisfied with its own role in producing it, that it turned the power of language that it held most dear back upon those that opposed the new order. Those losers in Western labour markets that dared complain or fight back against the free movement of capital and labour were labelled and marginalised as “racist”, “xenophobic” and “sexist”. ”
Great post. Thanks.
That is not it at all. The real reason is the right wing played white identity politics starting with the southern strategy, and those running into the waiting arms of Trump today, took the poisoned bait. Enter Bill Clinton.
People need to start taking responsibility for their own actions, and stop blaming the academics and the leftists and the wimmins and the N-ers.
And THAT is why “race” has a primary place in American political discourse, however maladaptive a response today’s D-Party partisans may present.
Conservatives put over their neoliberal agenda BECAUSE RACISM.
But why does the Dem estab embrace the conservative neoliberal agenda? The Dem estab are smart people, can think on multiple levels, are not limited in scope, are not racist. So, why then does the Dem estab accept and promote the conservative GOP neoliberal economic agenda?
Because the Dem estab isn’t very smart. I doubt more than half of them could define neoliberalism much less describe how it has destroyed the country. They are mostly motivated by the identity politics aspects.
Because the Dem estab isn’t very smart.
No, but they make up for it with arrogance.
Follow the money, the people making the bombs have alot more dough than the people the bombs are raining down on, until the bombs start landing on their own houses the Dems/Repubs don’t care in the slightest. THAT is the disgusting part, that the window into their souls shows pure blackness. In the 70’s we saw a picture of a naked Vietnamese girl fleeing American napalm and we knew exactly how to react…today we just smirk and cash the check from the bomb makers.
Conservative is: private property, capitalism, limited taxes and transfer payments plus national security and religion.
Liberalism is not in opposition to any of that. Identity politics arose at the same time the Ds were purging the reds (socialists and communists) from their party. Liberalism/progressivism is an ameliorating position of conservatism (progressive support of labor unions to work within a private property/corporatist structure not to eliminate the system and replace it with public/employee ownership) Not too far, too fast, maybe toss out a few more crumbs.
There is a foundation for identity politics on the liberal-left (see what I did there?) – it rests in the sense of moral superiority of just this liberal-left, which superiority is then patronisingly spread all over the social world – until it meets those who deny the moral superiority claim, whereupon it becomes murderous (in, of course, the name of humanity and humanitarianism).
That question can be answered by examining who are the owners of capital and what is their ultimate objective in life. Owners of capital destroyed the left in America and then the opportunist Democrats sold out their constituency for a place in the clubhouse. They Decided to go with the money. Their “smartness” consists in covering their betrayal of the working class by adopting identity politics along with the Republicans, they just use it in a more cynical way. Which is worse, an actual racist, or someone who directly or indirectly promotes and perpetuates racist policies? Ruthless owners compared to so called enlightened owners- each pulling for the same goal, individual self aggrandizement at the expense of the commons. George Carlin said it best-
“Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land, they own and control the corporations that’ve long since bought and paid for, the senate, the congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pocket, and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all of the news and the information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them.”
When the Democrats start using their intelligence to promote worker self directed coops, public banking, and guaranteed living income and jobs, then they truly deserve the support of the working class. Until then, lesser of two evil and identity politics is the only thing that holds them together. A Fascist regime that provides guaranteed food, shelter, and clothing for its adherents will be difficult to dislodge once established. A nightmare, but very possible.
And the Third Way Democrats chosee to one-up the Republicans and go-all in for racist identity politics.
Poor whites get just as screwed as poor blacks or poor Hispanics.
Working people of modest means get screwed the most.
I get roughly $1,000 in “Shared Responsibility ” taxes for Obamacare while “poverty” gets subsidized insurance. Where’s the racism again?
We live in a society where no one gets what they want. The Left sees the standard of living fall and is powerless to stop it. The Right see the culture war lost 25 years ago and can’t even offer a public protest, let alone move things in a conservative direction. Instead we get the agenda of the political Left to sell out at every opportunity. Plus we get the agenda of the political Right of endless war and endless security state. Eventually the political Left and Right merge and support the exact same things. Now when will the real Left and Right recognize their true enemy and join forces against it? This is why the 1% continue to prevail over the 99%. If the 1% wasn’t so incompetant this would continue forever. They know how to divide, conquer and rule the 99%, however they don’t know how to run a society in a sustainable way.
But I will say one thing for the Right over the Left: they have taken the initiative and are now the sole force for change. Granted, supporting a carnival barker for president is an act of desperation. Nevertheless he was the only option for change and the Right took it. Perhaps the Left offering little to nothing in the way of change reflects its lack of desperation. After all, the Left won the culture war and continues to push its agenda to extremes(even though such extremes will guarantee a back lash that will send people running back to their closets to hide). The Left still has the MSM media on its side when it comes to cultural issues. Thus the Left is satisfied with the status quo, with gorging themselves on the crumbs which fall from the 1% table. Consequently, you not only have a political Left that has sold out, you also have the rest of the Left content to accept that sell out so long as they get their symbolic victories over their ancient enemy – the Right.
Until the Left recognize its true enemy, the fight will only come from the Right. During that process more people will filter from the Left to the Right as the latter will offer the only hope for change.
I think left and right as political shorthand is too limited. Perhaps the NC commentariat could define up and down versions of each of these political philosophies (ie. left and right) and start to take control of the framing. Hence we would have up-left, down-left, up-right, and down-right. I would suggest that up and down could relate to environmental viewpoints.
Just a thought that I haven’t given much thought, but it would be funny (to me at least) to be able to quantify one’s political stance in terms of radians.
Left and Right are two wings on the same bird and the bird is a turkey. Where is the hard perpendicular?
Excellent comment, EoinW! You just summed up years of content and commentary on this site.
Obviously as the “Left” continues to defend the status quo as you describe it stops being “Left” in any meaningful way anymore.
+1
This seems to assume that change is an intrinsic good, so that change produced by the right will necessarily be improvement. Unfortunately, change for the worse is probably more likely than change for the better under this regime. Equally unfortunately, we may have reached the point where that is the only thing that will make people reconsider what constitutes a just society and how to achieve it. In any case, this is where we are now.
The economic left sees its standard of living fall. The social right sees its cultural verities fall.
The Koch brothers are economically to the very right. They are socially to the left, perhaps even more socially liberal than many of your liberal friends. No joke. There’s a point here, if I can figure out what it is.
Gary Johnson claims the libertarian mantra is what I used to think was the liberal mantra: economically conservative, socially liberal.
One of Koch brothers, David Koch, was the 1980 Libertarian Party’s VP candidate.
“He [Trump] was the only option for change and the Right took it.”
You forget Bernie. The Left tried, and Bernie bowed out, not wanting to be another “Nader” spoiler. Now, for 2020, the Left thinks it’s the “their turn.”
The problem is, the Left tends to blow it too (e.g. McGovern in 1972), in part because their “language” also exudes power and tends to alienate other, more moderate, parts of the coalition with arcane (and rather elitist) arguments from Derrida et. al.
> not wanting to be another “Nader” spoiler.
And a good thing, too.
Trump isn’t Right or Left. Trump is a can of gasoline and a match. His voters weren’t voting for a Left or Right agenda. They were voting for a battering ram. That is why he got a pass on racist, misogynist, fascist statements that would have killed any other candidate.
Trump is starting out with some rallies in the near-future. The Republicans in Congress think they are going to play patty-cake on policy to push the Koch Brothers agenda. We are going to see a populist who promised jobs duke it out publicly with small government austerity deficit cutters. It will be interesting to see what happens when he calls out Republican Congressmen standing in the way of his agenda by name.
My understanding is your point exactly. The left in America has been so weakened, or made invisible, that liberals purposefully obfuscate the difference promoting the idea that left= liberals. The left strives for a different economic system while liberals strive for a gentler, kinder capitalism. In their way, both offer a critique of capitalism so are easily confused on a shallow level. This is what makes liberals, in reality, more dangerous that some rabid racist conservative Republican. At the critical moment of battle, when the minimalist of effort could sway the balance of a conflict, they betray workers and side with capital.
Working people have had enough betrayal, and if burning down the entire rotten edifice is what it takes, so be it. We are not quite there yet, but that sentiment is in the air. And as usual, the hubris of the elite clouds their thinking in that they can control such a situation.
Agree rd. Good analogy, in terms of why Trump was elected anyway. Whether he will actually come through or not I am beginning to wonder. His cabinet picks are not instilling a lot of confidence. However, it is early days so lets wait and see what happens. And too, Trump has a history of immediately firing people who don’t do what he says.
“After all, the Left won the culture war and continues to push its agenda….” On the surface, anyway. Beneath the surface, western culture is a creature of the corporatist forces which run the economy for their own benefit. Hyper-consumerism, hyper-idividualism, atomisation, alienation & deracination are the cultural skeleton upon which the pseudo-left has fleshed out its vision of “culture”.
PC is a parody of the 20th Century reform movements. In the 60’s the Black churches and the labor unions fought Jim Crow laws and explicit institutional discrimination. In the 70’s the feminists worked against legal disabilities written into law. Since the Depression, the unions fought corporate management create a livable relationship between management and labor. Real struggles, real problems, real people.
[Tinfoil hat on)]
At the same time the reformist subset was losing themselves in style points, being ‘nice’, and passive aggressive intimidation, the corporate community was promoting the anti-government screech for the masses. That is, at the same time the people lost sight of government as their counterweight to capital, the left elite was becoming the vile joke Limbaugh and the other talk radio blowhards said they were. This may be coincidental timing, or their may be someone behind the French connection and Hamilton Fish touring college campuses in the 80’s promoting subjectivism. It’s true the question of ‘how they feel’ seems to loom large in discussions where social justice used to be.
[Tinfoil hat off]
There are many words but no communication between the laboring masses and the specialist readers. Fainting couch feminists have nothing to say to wives and mothers, the slippery redefinitions out of non-white studies turn off people who work for a living, and the promotion of smaller and more neurotic minorities are just more friction in a society growing steeper uphill.
“She was studying Liberal Arts at US Ivy League Smith College at the time (which Aussies may recall was being run by our Jill Kerr Conway back then). So I moved in with my dancing beauty and we lived happily on her old man’s purse for a year.”
I hate to be overly pedantic, but Smith College is one of the historically female colleges known as the Seven Sisters: Barnard College, Bryn Mawr College, Mount Holyoke College, Radcliffe College, Smith College, Vassar College, and Wellesley College. While Barnard is connected to Columbia, and Radcliffe to Harvard, none of the other Sisters has ever been considered any part of the Ancient Eight (Ivy League) schools: Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Yale.
I find it highly doubtful that someone, unaware of this elementary fact, actually lived off a beautiful bisexual black ballerina’s (wonderful alliteration!) “old man’s purse,” for a full year in Northampton, MA. He may well have dated briefly someone like this, but it strains credulity that– after a full year in this environment– he would never have learned of the distinction between the Seven Sisters and the Ivy League.
The truth of the matter is not so important. The black ballerina riff had two functions. First it helped push an ethos for the author of openness and acceptance of various races and sexual orientations. This is a highly charged subject and so accusations of racism, etc, are never far away for someone pushing class over identity.
Second it served as a nice hook to get dawgs like me to read through the whole thing; which was a very good article. Kind of like the opening paragraph of a Penthouse Forum entry, I was hoping that the author would eventually elaborate on what happened when she pirouetted over him…
What’s interesting is that in an article pushing class over identity. he never tried to set his class ethos in order to convince working class people or the bourgeoisie why they should listen to him.
Having lived in Australia in 2002-2004, more than a decade after this story took place, it was a remarkably egalitarian society. I adopted a local pub, and you had people ranging from a broken down retired poet who could only afford to buy a single beer there 2x a month and refused to let us pay for him, a data entry clerk making just a bit above minimum wage (which was far more generous than US minimum wages), a former drug addict turned social worker, someone teaching at the local conservatory (as in not all that well remunerated), a guy in his 60s now doing manual labor who was famous for hosting the radio show that had brought innovative rock to Australia, the head of innovation for the New South Wales government (included doing its first major Linux installation), a former professional musician turned high end computer consultant (also written up in the press as being an art collector), the borderline alcoholic son of a very rich guy in Perth, a very successful (as in high billing) marketing consultant, and the CEO of the 150th biggest company in Oz.
You would never see people this diverse in income and professional backgrounds mix in the US. No one gave it a second though in Oz. That is why the author didn’t feel the need to mention the issue.
I think your pub anecdote is a testament to pub culture, although I’d like to believe Australia is very egalitarian. It reminds me of numerous pubs in New York City in the mid 90’s. Pubs (aka Public houses) have a “leave your baggage at the door” mentality where the alcohol is the social lubricant to very colorful and memorable discussions and interactions. Now, if you want to talk about pompous clubs and trendy establishments, I’d been to those as well. Felt more like being at a dog show where everyone tried to size up everyone else. No one was themselves, just a fake facade trying to impress. The difference between pubs and the club scene is similar to the difference between social democracy and neoliberalism.
I’d like to believe Australia is very egalitarian
As an Australian, I’d like to believe this too, but unfortunately things have changed significantly over the last decade.
Yes, they sure have.
Re pubs: the big change there came in the early 90’s when it seemed every pub in the country (I think Western Australia was the exception) was invaded by the scourge of the POKER MACHINE. God I hate those things.
As a Yank who moved here 10 years ago I can report that the egalitarian spirit that Yves reports is still alive and well (though I can understand how natives would say “it isn’t what it used to be”).
If you’re considered a “tall poppy” and think you’re somehow “better” than your fellow man you are cut down to size. Applies all the way to the Prime Minister when he rides the train.
When I applied for citizenship the test had a question that asked “what is a “fair go”?
This (and mandatory voting) means the needs of actual people at least get discussed before being trampled. It’s a start.
My local became less really local and then closed. That happened all over the US and England, among other places. I miss the variety of backgrounds and the openness to new experiences. Modern places are less welcoming and more expensive.
You need to look for the hole in the wall places, the dive bars in your area. Those are probably the last vestiges of where locals may still hang out. I agree that the local is a dying breed, perhaps the millennial’s in the crowd can tell us what their generation’s pubs are.
To Integer,
I’m sorry to hear about Australia, guess it’s a global phenomenon.
Yes, it sounds like Cheers.
Actually when I lived in Seattle a couple decades ago I frequented a dive bar where the regular patrons ranged from barely old enough to drink legally to in their 70s. There were asians, blacks, whites, lesbians, gays, straights, bad crossdressers and even a neonazi skinhead or two. There were a lot of waiters, cabbies, drywallers, etc but also rock stars, lawyers, real estate agents, poets, a few independently wealthy alcoholics and the governor of WA state would occasionally drop by. It was a great place and we all got along pretty well. We didn’t really care about anyone’s identity and didn’t coddle anyone based on that – the bartenders would throw you out if you got out of line no matter what you looked like and I do remember that at one point the badass women who hung out there vetoed the bad crossdresser from using their bathroom, not because he was a crossdresser but because they found him pretty creepy.
Granted places like this were the exception rather than the rule even at the time and now the whole neighborhood has become gentrified so this mix probably no longer exists.
This is basically a propos of nothing but your comment made me miss my bar. Can’t we all just get along? ;)
But it may have happened here on stage because it sounds just like a William Saroyan play about such a hangout. Can’t remember the title. Setting in the 30s? And I always wanted to stumble into that little bar. But the closest I have ever gotten to that dream was stumbling into Naked Capitalism. A most delightful place.
I suspect he used the term as a shorthand for ‘up-market college’ in the same way that British refer to Redbricks or Oxbridge. For those not interested in the intricacies of which college are which, ‘Ivy League’ is just a convenient short hand.
I have never, ever known Brits to claim an “Oxbridge education” if they haven’t attended either Oxford or Cambridge. Similarly, over several decades of knowing quite well many alumnae from Wellesley, Smith, etc. I have never once heard them speak of their colleges as “Ivy League.”
I do get your point, however. Perhaps Mr. Llewellyn-Smith was deliberately writing for a non-U.S. audience, and chose to use “Ivy League” as synonymous with “prestigious.” I have seen graduates of Stanford, for example, described as “Ivy Leaguers” in the foreign press.
As a graduate of OBU, I’ve heard it several times (but usually, it must be said, tongue in cheek).
Oxford Brookes is a fine school, indeed!! Yet, I stand by my point– that the terms “Oxbridge” and “Ivy League,” at least as understood by the Anglo-American elites, are both terms with very definite, precise meanings. The former doesn’t include Oxford Brookes, and the latter doesn’t include Smith.
Here in the States it is freely acknowledged that many fine small liberal arts colleges– like Reed, Oberlin, Smith, Carleton, etc.– are just as academically rigorous as any of the eight Ivy schools. Just as Rome has grown far beyond the original seven hills, so too the number of “prestigious” colleges in the Anglo-American world are far more than can be contained in the narrow confines of the Ivies and Oxbridge.
The most important point is that all of this “prestige” crap is pretentious nonsense. Far and away the most intelligent, resourceful person that I know failed to graduate from Shea High school in Pawtucket, RI, and sporadically attended a couple of classes at CCRI, without ever receiving credit for them. Credentialism is a cancer in the heart of our republic over here and your realm over there!
Lisa gives a good tour
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hElhGMkRtyM
I think the gradual process whereby the left, or more specifically, the middle class left, have been consumed by an intellectually vacant went hand in hand with what I found the bizarre abandonment of interest by the left in economics and in public intellectualism. The manner in which the left simply surrendered the intellectual arguments over issues like taxes and privatisation and trade still puzzles me. I suspect it was related to a cleavage between middle class left wingers and working class activists. They simple stopped talking the same language, so there was nobody to shout ‘stop’ when the right simply colonised the most important areas of public policy and shut down all discussion.*
A related issue is I think a strong authoritarianist strain which runs through some identity politics. Its common to have liberals discuss how intolerant the religious or right wingers are of intellectual discussion, but even try to question some of of the shibboleths of gender/race discussions and you can immediately find yourself labelled a misogynist/homophobe/racist. Just see some of the things you can get banned from the Guardian CIF for saying.
That authoritarianism is why I don’t consider myself a liberal anymore.
I don’t know how it’s been shaking out on the national level, but locally, in my city, liberal authoritarianism has become a pretty good cover for graft.
This site, along with the MSM, has flown way off the handle since the election loss. Democrat-bashing is the new pastime.
Our nation’s problems can be remedied with one dramatic change:
Caps on executive gains in terms of multiples… in both public and private companies of a big enough size. For example, the CEO at most can make 50 times the average salary. Something to that effect. And any net income gains at the end of the year that are going to be dispersed as dividends, must proportionally reach the internal laborers as well. Presto, a robust economy.
All employees must share in gains. You don’t like it? Tough. The owner will still be rich.
Historically, executives topped out at 20-30 times average salary. Now it’s normal for the number to reach 500-2,000. It’s absurd. As if a CEO is manufacturing products, marketing, and selling them all by himself/herself. As if Tim Cook assembles iPhones and iMacs by hand and sells them. As if Leslie Moonves writes, directs, acts in, and markets each show.
Put the redistributive mechanism in the private sphere as well as in government. Then America will be great again.
“This site, along with the MSM, has flown way off the handle since the election loss.”
I presume you forgot to add “in my opinion” to the end of this sentence.
“Our nation’s problems can be remedied with one dramatic change”
Ha!
Bringing C level pay packages at major corporations in line with the real contributions of the recipients would be great. How would we do it? With laws or regulations or executive orders banning the federal government from doing business with any firm that failed to comply with some basic guidelines?
It’s an academic point right now in any event. The Trump administration – working together with the Ryan House – is not going to make legislation or sign executive orders to do anything remotely like this. Which is one of the many reasons why bashing Democrats has taken off here I suspect. This election was theirs to lose, and they did everything in their power to toss it.
You do realize that the wealthy are both part of and connected to the legislative branch of every single country on this planet right?
As long as that remains so (as it has since the dawn of humans) then good luck trying to cap any sort of hording behavior of the wealthy.
But they deserve it.
As someone who grew up in and participated in those discussions:
1) It was “women’s studies” back then. “Gender studies” is actually a major improvement in how the issues are examined.
2) We’d already long since lost by then, and we were looking to make our own lives better. Creating a space where we could have good sex and a minimum of violence was better. Reagan’s election, and his re-election, destroyed the Left.
3) We live in a both/and world.
Dude that ballerina sounds hot! Whoa. High fives.
Wow. 20 Ivy League feminists at a dinner table debating sex with a blond Aussie ski instructor. I bet you had to be a cunning linguist to please them all! Haahahahahahah
whoa. These are weighty issues — class, race, power, economicss. Well, three out of 4 anyway! Rim-shot
Most guys can understand lesbians. But they can’t understand how the French fried the brains of two generatiosn of liberulls. Oh man I hoped there’d be a joke there but it’s not even close! Hahah
Wow. These are weighty issues for all of us to consider. Let’s hope we’re right! I mean, not wrong! Sorry. Rim-shot. I meant left. Whoa it’s confusing.
Everybody needs a 10-bagger. That’s for sure. People don’t need change they can believe in, they need real money!
This is against my better judgement, C-man, but you might appreciate this Smith College joke that I first heard back in the seventies:
Hmmm… as in the epic poem; take to the sea U.
What’s missing from this post is helpful advice to young men about navigating these philosophical minefields.
If you’re a young man in college and there’s a hot ballerina of color, or a white one, or really any one — how do you get her willingly into the bed? Or bettter yet, get her to drag you in. If there’s 20 angry feminists arguing with you, is there a plan you can implement to divide and conquer them one by one? If the first 3 or 4 give you a good recommendation, the other 16 or 17 should be pretty easy.
The potential for success here is worth some planning. Young men would appreciate the advice, even though these things can be very personal. No doubt it helped alot to be a long-haired blonde Aussie ski instructor. That’s a huge head start, but it doesn’t mean it’s hopeless for a normal American guy.
Should you speak in French? Or would that be trying to hard? What if you have a southern accent and are basically a redneck who somehow got into college? Maybe that would be a good time to speak French, just to cover up your accent until after the fact when it’s too late. If you are somehow able to get the ballerina in bed and do a good job, it won’t matter. Speak French until at least the morning. If you can’t speak French, should you talk politics? Or is that just going to enrage any ballerina or feminist no matter what you say?
Frankly most guys really aren’t going to care that much about the abstract politics, but the idea of nailing a hot ballerina or a bi-sexual lesbian will certainly be of interest. They’ll want to know how they can do that themselves! If the politics helps, all the better. You can always do the politics by yourself anyway, or with other guys. This is the kind of advice young men are looking for.
Deconstruction algorithm initiated:
Result: invalid entry.
Yep.
I feel like this piece could use the yellow waders as well. Instead of simply repeating myself every time these things come up, I proffer an annotation of a important paragraph, to give a sense of what bothers me here.
The post-structural turn was just as much about Derrida at Johns Hopkins as it was about Foucault trying to demonstrate the subtle and not-so-subtle effects of power in the explicit context of the May ’68 events in France. The economy ground to a halt, and at one point de Gaulle was so afraid of a violent revolution that he briefly left the country, leaving the government helpless to do much of anything, until de Gaulle returned shortly thereafter.
Foucault was not entirely sympathetic to the Left, at least the unions, but he was trying to articulate a politics that was just as much about liberation from capitalism as classic Marxism. To that end, discourse analysis was the means to discovering those subtle articulations of power in human relations, not an end in itself as it was for, say, Barthes.
A claim is being made here regarding the “global left” that clearly comes from a parochial, North American perspective. Indian academics, for one, never abandoned political economy for identity politics, especially since in India identity politics, religion, regionalism, castes, etc. were always a concern and remain so. It seems rather odd to me that the other major current in academia from the ’90s on, namely postcolonialism, is entirely left out of this story, especially when critiques of militarism and political economy were at the heart of it.
The saddest point of the events of ’68 is that looking back society has never been so equal as at that point in time. That was more or less the time of peak working class living standard relative to the wealthy classes. It is no accident, at least in my book, that these mostly bourgeois student activists have a tard at the end of their name in French: soixante-huitards.
In the Sixites the “Left” had control of the economic levers or power — and by Left I mean those interested in smaller differences between the classes. There is no doubt the Cold War helped the working classes as the wealthy knew it was in their interest to make capitalism a showcase of rough egalitarianism. But during the 60’s the RIght held cultural sway. It was Berkeley pushing Free Speech and Lenny Bruce trying to break boundaries while the right tried to keep the Overton Window as tight and squeaky clean as possible.
But now the “Right” in the sense of those who want to increase the difference between rich and poor hold economic power while the Left police culture and speech. The provocateurs come from the right nowadays as they run roughshod over the PC police and try to smash open the racial, gender. and sexual orientation speech restrictions put in place as the left now control the Overton Window.
When workers joined students in France in 1968 they were a weekend away from owning the whole show, that would have been grand (if not necessarily successful). Again they splintered (“I’m a Trotskyite and those damned Marxist-Leninists have it all wrong!”), maybe some political Einstein can come up with a Unified Field Theory. Peace, bread, and land…or something like that
The Left and Liberal are two different things entirely.
In the UK we have three parties:
Labour – the left
Liberal – middle/ liberal
Conservative – the right
Mapping this across to the US:
Labour – X
Liberal – Democrat
Conservative – Republican
The US has been conned from the start and has never had a real party of the Left.
At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th Century US ideas changed and the view of those at the top was that it would be dangerous for the masses to get any real power, a liberal Democratic party would suffice to listen to the wants of the masses and interpret them in a sensible way in accordance with the interests of the wealthy.
We don’t want the masses to vote for a clean slate redistribution of land and wealth for heaven’s sake.
In the UK the Liberals were descendents of the Whigs, an elitist Left (like the US Democrats).
Once everyone got the vote, a real Left Labour party appeared and the Whigs/Liberals faded into insignificance.
It is much easier to see today’s trends when you see liberals as an elitist Left.
They have just got so elitist they have lost touch with the working class.
The working class used to be their pet project, now it is other minorities like LGBT and immigration.
Liberals need a pet project to feel self-righteous and good about themselves but they come from the elite and don’t want any real distribution of wealth and privilege as they and their children benefit from it themselves.
Liberals are the more caring side of the elite, but they care mainly about themselves rather than wanting a really fair society.
They call themselves progressive, but they like progressing very slowly and never want to reach their destination where there is real equality.
The US needs its version of the UK Labour party – a real Left – people who like Bernie Sanders way of thinking should start one up, Bernie might even join up.
In the UK our three parties all went neo-liberal, we had three liberal parties!
No one really likes liberals and they take to hiding in the other two parties, you need to be careful.
Jeremy Corbyn is taking the Labour party back where it belongs slowly.
left – traditional left
liberal – elitist left
Imagine inequality plotted on two axes.
Inequality between genders, races and cultures is what liberals have been concentrating on.
This is the x-axis and the focus of identity politics and the liberal left.
On the y-axis we have inequality from top to bottom.
2014 – “85 richest people as wealthy as poorest half of the world”
2016– “Richest 62 people as wealthy as half of world’s population”
Doing the maths and assuming a straight line …….
5.4 years until one person is as wealthy as poorest half of the world.
This is what the traditional left normally concentrate on, but as they have switched to identity politics this inequality has gone through the roof. They were over-run by liberals.
Some more attention to the y-axis please.
The neoliberal view.
As long as everyone, from all genders, races and cultures, is visiting the same food bank this is equality.
left – traditional left – y-axis inequality
liberal – elitist left – x -axis inequality (this doesn’t affect my background of wealth and privilege)
You can see why liberals love identity politics.
https://www.politicalcompass.org/counterpoint-20161110
The main page has a test you can take but that is a nice little post mortem.
labor is being co-opted by the right: the Republican Workers Party… I think this rhymes with Fascist. But then, in a world soon to be literally scrambling for high ground and rebuilding housing for 50 million people the time honored “worker” might actually have a renaissance.
Very well said! For me personally, the moment I started working with Teamsters, Laborers, etc., was the moment I went beyond the pale for many of my more affluent relations. Sending a check to the Sierra Club is about as radical as they ever get!
Progressive Rock is well know for its appeal to intelligent, white males, and that’s not just because of songs like, “Nights in White Satin,” or “Whiter Shade of Pale.” It is because audiences at Pink Floyd, Yes and Genesis concerts or purchasers of Tubular Bells, tended to be white males. Is there anything wrong with Progressive Rock? No, but I wouldn’t play a Yes album at a Compton house party. If you’re going to play a Progressive Rock marathon, you’re going to hear brilliant and dazzling songs, but for some reason, your audience will lack certain “identifiable” parts of the populace.
Deconstruction makes for outlandish statements, and plenty have been made by Post-Structuralists, but using their most deconstructive statements to announce the end of racial justice politics is a straw-man argument. Think about this, Steve Inskeep, at NPR, was on the radio just this morning pushing the “identity-politics-makes-democrats-losers” argument at Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar. Do you see the logic? When you’re pushing the same argument as the biggest airhead on NPR, it might be time for just a little introspection.
Identity politics does make democrats lose. The message needs to be economic. It can have the caveat that various sub groups will be paid special attention to, but if identity is the only thing talked about then get used to right wing governments.
If identity politics is a winning issue, where are the wins?
Empowerment is very much about capital, but the Left has never had the cajones to stare down and take apart the Right’s view of ‘capital’ as some kind of magical elixir that mysteriously produces ‘wealth’.
I ponder my own experiences, which many here probably share:
First: slogging through college(s), showing up to do a defined list of tasks (a ‘job’, if you will) to be remunerated with some kind of payment/salary. That was actual ‘work’ in order to get my hands on very small amounts of ‘capital’ (i.e., ‘money’).
Second: a few times, I just read up on science or looked at the stock pages and did a little research, and then wrote checks that purchased stock shares in companies that seemed to be exploring some intriguing technologies. In my case, I got lucky a few times, and presto! That simple act of writing a few checks made me look like a smarty. Also, paid a few bills. But the simple act of writing checks cost me n-o-t-h-i-n-g in terms of time, energy, education, physical or mental exertion.
Third: I have also had the experience of working (start ups) in situations where — literally!!! — I made less in a day in salary than I’d have made if I’d simply taken a couple thousand dollars and bought stock in the place I was working.
To summarize:
— I’ve had capital that I worked long and hard to obtain.
— I’ve had capital that took me a little research, about one minute to write a check, and brought me a handsome amount of ‘capital’. (Magic!)
— I’ve worked in situations in which I created MORE capital for others than I created for myself. And the value of that capital expanded exponentially.
If the Left had a spine and some guts, it would offer a better analysis about what ‘capital’ is, the myriad forms it can take, and why any of this matters.
Currently, the Left cannot explain to a whole lot of people why their hard work ended up in other people’s bank accounts. If they had to actually explain that process by which people’s hard work turned into fortunes for others, they’d have a few epiphanies about how wealth is actually created, and whether some forms of wealth creation are more sustainable than other forms.
IMVHO, I never saw Hillary Clinton as able to address this elemental question of the nature of wealth creation. The Left has not traditionally given a shrewd analysis of this core problem, so the Right has been able to control this issue. Which is tragic, because the Right is trapped in the hedge fund mentality, in the tight grip of realtors and mortgage brokers; they obsess on assets, and asset classes, and resource extraction. When your mind is trapped by that kind of thinking, you obsess on the tax code, and on how to use it to generate wealth for yourself. Enter Trump.
One small correction: Smith is not an Ivy League school, it is one of the “Seven Sisters:
Ivy League:
Brown
Columbia
Cornell
Dartmouth
Harvard
Penn
Princeton
Yale
Seven Sisters:
Barnard
Bryn Mawr
Mount Holyoke
Radcliffe
Smith
Vassar
Wellesley
A much more nuanced discussion of the primacy of identity politics on the Left in Britain and the US is
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/11/29/prospects-for-an-alt-left/
“Prospects for an Alt-Left,” November 29, 2016, by Elliot Murphy, who teaches in the Division of Psychology and Language Sciences at University College, London.
And let’s not forget that identity politics arose in the first place because of genuine discrimination, which still exists today. In forsaking identity politics in favor of one of class, we should not forget the original reasons for the rise of the phenomena, however poorly employed by some of its practitioners, and however mined by capitalism to give the semblance of tolerance and equality while obscuring the reality of intolerance and inequality.
Trivially, I would think the last thing to do is adopt the “alt-” moniker, thereby cementing the impression in the mind of the public that the two are in some sense similar.
The blogger Lord Keynes at Social Democracy for the 21st Century at blogspot suggests Realist Left instead of alt-left. I think how people are using the term “identity politics” at the moment isn’t “actual anti-racism in policy and recruitment” but “pandering to various demographics to get their loyalty and votes so that the party machine doesn’t have to try and gain votes by doing economic stuff that frightens donors, lobbyists and the media”. Clinton improved the female vote for Democratic president by 1 percentage point, and the black and Latino shares of the Republican were unchanged from Romney in 2012. Thus, identity politics is not working when the economy needs attention, even against the most offensive opponent.
So… to repress class conflicts, the kleptocracy splintered them into opposition between racists and POC, bigots and LGBTQ, patriarchal oppressors and women, etc., etc. The US state-authorized parties used it for divide and rule. The left fell for it and neutered itself. Good. Fuck the left.
Outside the Western bloc the left got supplanted with a more sensible opposition: between humans and the overreaching state. That alternative view subsumes US-style identity politics in antidiscrimination and cultural rights. It subsumes traditional class struggle in labor, migrant, and economic rights. It reforms and improves discredited US constitutional rights, and integrates it all into the concepts of peace and development. It’s up and running with binding law and authoritative institutions.
So good riddance to the old left and the new left. Human rights have already replaced them in the 80-plus per cent of the world represented by UNCTAD and the G-77. That’s why the USA fights tooth and nail to keep them out of your reach.
To All Commenters:
thanks for the discussion. Many good, thoughtful ideas/perspectives.
Mine? Living in California (a minority white populace, broad economic engine, high living expenses (and huge homeless population) and a leader in alternative energy: Trump is what happens when you don’t allow the “people” to vote for their preferred candidates (Bernie) and don’t listen to a select few voters in key electoral states (WI,MI,PA).
The electorate is angry (true liberals at the Dems, voters in select electoral states at “everything”). If democracy is messy, then that’s what we’ve got; a mess. Unfortunately, it’s coming at the absolutely wrong time (Climate Change, lethal policing, financial elite impunity).
Hold this same election with different (multiple) candidates and the outcome is likely different. In the end, we all need to work and demand a more fair and Just society. (Or California is likely to secede.)
“Meanwhile the global Left looked on from its Ivory Tower of identity politics and was pleased. Capitalism was spreading the wealth to oppressed brothers and sisters, and if there were some losers in the West then that was only natural as others rose in prominence.”
I can only imagine the glee of the wealthy feminists at Smith while they witnessed the white, lunch pailed, working class American male thrown out of work and into the gutter of irrelevance and despair. The perfect comeuppance for a demographic believed to be the arch-nemesis of women and minorities. Nothing seems quite so fashionable at the moment as hating white male Republicans that live outside of proper-thinking coastal enclaves of prosperity. Unfortunately I fail to see how this attitude helps the country. Seems like more divide and conquer from our overlords on high.
You might find this interesting: link
…just more whining from the Weekly Standard. While men may have been disproportionately displaced in jobs that require physical strength, many women (nurses?) likely lost their homes during the Great Financial Scam and its fallout.
The enemy is a rigged political, financial, and judicial system.
Identity Politics gestated for a while before the 90s. Beginning with a backlash against Affirmative Action in the 70s, the Left began to turn Liberal. East Coast intellectuals who were anxious they would be precluded from entering the best schools may have been the catalyst (article from Jacobin I think). But certainly the fall of the USSR was the thing that forced capitalism’s hand. At that point capitalism had no choice but to step up and prove that it could really bring a better life to the world. A Minsky event of biblical proportions soon followed (it only took about 10 years!) and now all is devastation and nobody has clue. But the 1990 effort could have been in earnest. Capitalists mean well but they are always in denial about the inequality they create which finally started a chain reaction in “identity politics” as reactions to the stress of economic competition bounced around in every society like a pinball machine. A tedious and insufferable game which seems to have culminated in Hillary the Relentless. I won’t say capitalism is idiotic. But something is.
Left fatal mistake
Don’t make shit up dawg, people
Hate liars, flip the bird.
Thank you
for
Haiku
“Perhaps the NC commentariat could define up and down versions of each of these political philosophies (ie. left and right) and start to take control of the framing.”
Well, I’ll have a first go, since I was around at the time.
Left and Right only really make sense in the context of the distribution of power and wealth, and only when there is a difference between them about that distribution. This was historically the case for more than 150 years after the French Revolution. By the mid-1960s, there was a sense that the Left was winning, and would continue to win. Progressive taxation, zero unemployment, little real poverty by today’s standards, free education and healthcare …. and many influential political figures (Tony Crosland for example) saw the major task of the future as deciding where the fruits of economic growth could be most justly applied.
Three things happened that made the Left completely unprepared for the counter-attack in the 1970s.
First, simple complacency. When Thatcher appeared, most people thought she’d escaped from a Monty Python sketch. The idea that she might actually take power and use it was incredible.
Secondly, the endless factionalism and struggles for power within the Left, usually over arcane points of ideology, mixed with vicious personal rivalries. The Left loves defeats, and picks over them obsessively, looking for someone else to blame.
Third, the influence of 1968 and the turning away from the real world, towards LSD and the New Age, and the search for dark and hidden truths and structures of power in the world. Fueled by careless and superficial readings of bad translations of Foucault and Derrida, leftists discovered an entire new intellectual continent into which they could extend their wars and feuds, which was much more congenial, since it involved eviscerating each other, rather than seriously taking on the forces of capitalism and the state.
And that’s the very short version. We’ve been living with the consequences ever since. The Left has been essentially powerless, and powerlessness, of course, corrupts. There’s always someone weaker than you, which is why identity politics is essentially a conservative, disciplining force, with a vested interest in the problems it has chosen to identify continuing, or it would have no reason to exist.
So until class-based politics and struggles over power and money re-start (if they ever do) I respectfully suggest that “Left” and “Right” be retired as terms that no longer have any meaning.
“powerlessness, of course, corrupts. There’s always someone weaker than you, which is why identity politics is essentially a conservative, disciplining force, with a vested interest in the problems it has chosen to identify”
Yes. As long as the doyens of identity politics don’t have any real fear of being homeless they can happily indulge in internecine warfare. It’s a lot more fun than working to get $20/hour for a bunch of snaggle-toothed guys who kind of don’t like you.
Very interesting. Thank you.
I read: “Traditional dialectical history was being supplanted by a new suite of studies based around truth as “discourse”. Driven by the French post-modern thinkers of the 70s and 80s, the US academy was adopting and adapting the ideas Foucault, Derrida and Barthe to a variety of civil rights movements that spawned gender and racial studies.”
Of course, I have been a college professor since the late 1970s. On the other hand, I am a physicist. The notion that truth is discourse is, in my opinion, daft, and says much about the nature of the modern liberal arts, at least as understood by many undergraduates. I have actually heard of the folks referenced in the above, and to my knowledge their influence in science, engineering, technology, and mathematics–the academic fields that are in this century actually central*–is negligible.
*Yes, I am in favor of a small number of students becoming professional historians, dramatists, and composers, but the number of these is limited.
Identity politics is a disaster ongoing for the Democratic Party, for reasons they seem to have overlooked. First, the additional identity group is white. We already see this in the South, where 90% of the white population in many states votes Republican. When that spreads to the rest of the country, there will be a permanent Republican majority until the Republicans create a new major disaster. Second, some Democratic commentators appear to have assumed that if your forebearers spoke Spanish, you can not be white. This belief is properly grouped with the belief that if your forebearers spoke Gaelic or Italian, you were from one of the colored races of Europe (a phrase that has faded into antiquity, but some of my friends specialize in American history of the relevant period), and were therefore not White. Identity politics is a losing strategy, as will ir apepars be noticed by the losers only after it is too late.
An extremely important point, but overblown in a way that may reflect the author’s background and is certainly rhetorical.
So soon we forget the Battle of Seattle. The Left has been opposed to globalization, deregulation, etc., all along. Partly he’s talking about an academic pseudo-left, partly confusing the left with the Democrats and other “center-left,” captured parties.
That doesn’t invalidate his point. If you want to see it in full-blown, unadorned action, try Democrat sites like Salon and Raw Story. A factor he doesn’t do justice to is the extreme self-righteousness that accompanies it, supported, I suppose, by the very real injustices perpetrated against minorities – and women, not a minority.
The whole thing is essentially a category error, so it would be nice to see a followup that doesn’t perpetuate the error. But it’s valuable for stating the problem, which can be hard to present, especially in the face of gales of self-righteousness.
Well said. An excellent attack on ‘identity politics.’
I mean, Barack Obama was our first black president, but most blacks didn’t do very well. George W. Bush was our first retard president, and most people with cognitive handicaps didn’t do very well.
But we can boil it all down to something even simpler and more primal: divide and conquer.
They just elected a president.
It’s as if the author has never heard of Bernie Sanders . He seems to conflate The Left with The Centrists..
Here is a belated comment. (It will be even more belated because I am banished to the outer darkness of perpetual “moderation.”) Nevertheless.
The distinction between left and liberal is all well and good. Same for the difference between class analysis and identity politics.
Nevertheless, the thing is you can’t have a socialist movement, which is what we need, without a viable socialist party. Working within the current Democrat Party (as Lambert likes to tag it) will only take you so far — and no farther. Working withn the Democrat Party, as Bernie tries to do, is at best only an interim strategy.
Yes, we need to give priority to class analysis. But without a robust democratic socialist party (and how will we ever get one?), and a therefore robust democratic socialist labor movement, class analysis by itself will not amount to much.
I think Al From’s explanation is a bit more accurate.
Well said! Here’s a good critique of identity politics from 2006: “The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality” by Walter Benn Michaels.
I really love the idea of a ‘global left’; such a beautifully vacuous construct, built to serve as a massive, amorphous straw man which ‘progressive liberals’ can rail against, to ease their consciences… “If only the ‘Global Left’ had listened to me I wouldn’t have had to vote for Hillary!”
I wonder if dear David assumes that his own discourse on the ‘politico-sexual meltdown’ of a liberal arts campus in the US has much resonance, say, with the amorphous progressive groups of indigenous/other groups and movements in Bolivia acting in uneasy alliance with Evo Morales? Or the slum-dwellers federations in Cape Town, or Mumbai? Somehow I find it hard to imagine that their struggles are a hotbed of debate on whether penetration equates to rape…
Even the conceit that ‘identity politics dominates left-wing policy-making in Western nations’ is a hubristic punch to the solar plexus that literally leaves the reader gasping. Left-wing policy making? Where dat den? Who ‘Left’? Wha’? I think it would do David an awful lot of good to go and look up the word ‘positionality’ and then understand that his academic background is plainly positionality from which he completely failed to escape.
The ‘Left’ (and I think he really means the minority of US/European leftie academics here) did a number of things following the collapse of the socialist bloc; some small number did turn inwards and let themselves drown in post-structuralism. Some of them gave up and believed Capitalism had won, and that the best that could be done was to present a caring, sharing alternative to laissez-faire capitalism.
But outside academia resistance grew, fragmented and rejected the old, hierarchical, vanguardist, hegemonic forms of left organization that David plainly finds it so hard to leave behind. He could do worse than have a look at the documentation of the various iterations of the World Social Forum to understand this, where the slogan of Another World Is Possible is as much about resisting the clichéd, exclusionary, top-down, organizing principles of old, white, western-centric Leftism. If he can be bothered.
One of the more interesting phenomena of the last few years (which doesn’t get mentioned here) by-the -by, is how various conservative/alt-right organizations have co-opted the organizing principles and methods of the 60s-70s left, developing an uneasy mixture of astro-turf, genuine reactionary organizations and PR-based ‘think-tanks’ (think IEA in the UK) in the western liberal democracies dedicated to rolling-back the strides in social progress made since 1900 in a primordial, undirected scream at everything redolent of modernity.
Globally this has echoes in a number of different tendencies, from the subordination of the wave of democratization of the 1980s-1990s to dictatorships, family franchises and corporation-sponsored oil satrapies and phthorocracies under the benevolent gaze of corporatized globalization, the fight-back against the concept of anthropogenic global warming, the use of conservative religious nostrums re-subordinate women, etcetera.
All the while, David’s left sat on its’ arse and did nothing, played-out, and anyway it isn’t their roll to develop the leftism of the future. There are thoughtful, forward-looking progressive movements throughout the US, Europe and globally, but they require stepping off the campus to engage with, and an abandonment of stupid ideas like ‘The Global Left’…