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If you’re anything like me every time you hear the word woke used you wince. Conservatives don’t know what it is and just use it as a hobgoblin, Liberals created it but pretend they didn’t and the left is forced to reluctantly defend basic principles like “everyone should be treated equally”, and “people should have control over their own bodies” after Liberals made doing so noxious.
All of this is based on two thing: cold hard economic math, and the ideology of identity politics as original sin. We’ll look at both, but let’s see some of the results first:
But it’s not just the Youngs:
Now some of this is straight up economic competition. Women get most of the college degrees, they dominate in multiple professions including law, and despite the wage gap, they’re bringing home the bacon. When I was at an elite all-male school in the 80s some of us mentioned to Mr. Skinner, the resident socialist history Prof, that we thought having girls around would be marvelous.
“If we had girls, half of you wouldn’t be here.” And he pointed some fingers.
Chilling.
The bottom line is that there are men who would be more successful if women were restricted to various pink collar ghettos like they were in the 50s and 60s. There’s no denying it and pretending otherwise is stupid and dishonest. So some of “get back in the kitchen” is pure self-interest, whether or not most men will admit it.
But part of it is the original sin of identity politics. I was first introduced in a big way in the early 90s, when I went back to university. As it was explained to me, repeatedly, since I was white, I was racist, and since I was male I was sexist and apparently being heterosexual was somehow dubious. I was willing to accept the first two: I grew up in a somewhat patriarchal (it wasn’t Republican Rome) white society, and sure, I’d taken in some of the values. (As for heterosexuality, well, women are wonderful and no, I’m not changing that preference.)
So, OK, if you’re male you’re probably sexist and if white probably racist (though they would have said 100% for sure.)
OK. I’m bad. It’s not my fault, really, I was raised that way. How do I fix it.
And this is where the problem came in. Apparently no matter what you did, or said, or however much you were re-educated, if male you’d always be sexist and if white you’d always be racist.
“Wait, so you’re saying I’m a bad person, and that I can never be a not bad person?”
“Yes.”
“Uh, I don’t think I want to be part of your movement.”
Here’s the thing, folks, if your religion (and ideology is religion without the appeal to the supernatural) insists people are bad, it has to give them a way out. Even Catholics, obsessed with the original sin, allow that it is possible for humans to become good and wind up in Heaven. Evanglicals, with their “born again” shtick, offer forgiveness for anything.
First you make people feel bad, then you offer a way for them to feel good about themselves. Many will jump thru quite a few flaming hoops to “not be a bad person” and “be a good person.”
Identity politics didn’t offer that. You were bad. You would always be bad. There was no salvation, no good deeds, thoughts or words cold ever truly cleanse of you of your sexism or racism or whatever. (-Isms expanded over the years, till everything had an -ism.)
Identity politics did have its victories, for sure, as with Catholic guilt, people will strive even against the impossible. “Can I be a male feminist, please?” “I’m an ally, right, not one of the bad ones?”
But it also alienated a lot of people with its message of “you’re bad and you’ll always be bad.” The explosion of -isms, of various disadvantaged groups which, as epistemological given, could never really understand each other created a flock of interest groups, some small, some medium sized and all of them undercutting the mass solidarity required to pursue shared interests. (Like not letting the rich impoverish us all.)
Mass political movements are about solidarity, shared interests and an agreement not to make separate peace. I’m 57 and male, but I still care passionately about abortion rights, even though it’s an issue which is unlikely to ever effect me personally. I’ve defended trans people, even though I’m not trans, because I feel they should have the right to bodily autonomy and that they’re being picked on because they’re weak and an easy wedge to use against the larger LGBTQ movement. I’m happy for China that they lifted a billion people out of poverty, even though I’m not Chinese and it’s probably going to fuck me over personally as a Canadian. (That’s mostly the fault of US and Canadian politicians, not Chinese, so I don’t blame the Chinese.)
Identity politics was political malpractice on an epic scale. “Don’t break solidarity” is the first and last rule of mass politics, especially any sort of real populism which seeks to make the weak strong by forming them into a mass capable of demanding their interests be met, or else.
This is the reverse of the rule of the powerful. “Keep the masses divided and fighting themselves, so they can’t fight us.”
Anyone who destroys solidarity is working for the masters, not for the people, whatever they personally believe.
We’ve spent 50 years destroying the political basis of New Deal prosperity. It’s dead, Jim, with about a thousand stab wounds. Identity politics pressed a lot of those daggers home.
Let’s hope we can find something better, a way that unites us and takes care of all of us (well, except for the oligarchs). The world’s looking mighty dark in the West these days, and if we don’t pull together, most of us are assuredly going to hang separately
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Bill H.
When you have successfully split people up into dozens of mutually hostile self interest groups, how do you bring them back together again? How do you ever even unite them in common causes? Is DEI a bell that can be unrung?
AJ
Where to begin…?
The experience of identity politics as it evolved depends on one’s birth lottery. The “original sin” you describe originated as survival based community building and empowerment for marginalized, persecuted minority populations. The roots of the word “woke” in African American communities connoted and carried with it the collective wisdom of generations of families learning how to survive under American white supremacy.
That the affirmations and traumas of marginalized communities were weaponized by capitalists, their lackies, and by some academics for personal advancement and profit was not entirely the fault of these communities. That is what you experienced on campus. However, that is not and never was the whole story, just the in media res entry point for a lot of people with demographics like your own.
I agree that in the end identity is an illusion and should be superseded at some point in development, but that’s a larger spiritual topic for another day. Developmentally, consciousness in bodies comes to an experience of non-duality by first beginning to recognize self in at least some others: family, then tribe, humanity, and last the perception of unity with all we can perceive. That’s a progression, and along the way, for many within oppressed groups, the experience of suffering is mitigated at least provisionally by the formation of a collective identity that can lead to collective action to mitigate suffering and systems of oppression. The fuel behind that is a soup of both love and trauma, which can manifest as messy and strident and unyielding, as you describe in your university experience.
But suffering, love, and trauma of some sorts are universal experiences. I encourage and try to model empathy and understanding for that trauma and fear behind the stridency on a human level, while raising consciousness about how that trauma was weaponized by capitalist elites to avoid the actual work of collective justice and mercy, channeling it instead toward the division of working class people. So I don’t “other” identity politics. My approach is different.
This is perhaps easier for me than for some as I have sides of me in both camps: to look at me, using the language of these things, I’m a cis-male light skinned man with a German surname. Scratch the surface and I am a gay half latino with a very brown grandfather whom ai adored. That latino side of the family was much more a positive part of my childhood experience than the euro, mostly Irish and English side (despite the German surname), which was mostly a group of alcoholics and dysfunctional manipulators.
somecomputerguy
I believe the concept we know as “Woke” was a natural evolution from the ‘Four G’s’; God (abortion), Guns, Green (the environment), and Gays.
This was the New Dems redefinition of leftism or liberalism to exclude economic issues.
That is why they latched on to the idea that demographics would be destiny for them; no need to worry about governing; brown people would just automatically vote for them without them actually having to do anything.
Identity is the way humans satisfy the fundamental human need to belong. I used to think that the central problematic of modernity, was that atomized individualized society had no inherent way satisfy it and capitalism exists in contradiction to it.
I think that is really well illustrated in the movie “Fight Club”; alienation causes fascism. That is what the tour of the protagonists apartment is about; he has lots of cool stuff, and no friends.
Feral Finster
You are not the first to note the connection between original sin and IdPol. Whatever, just an aside. For that matter, I don’t claim that all my thoughts are original to me.
Anyway, IdPol is entirely useful, otherwise it would be even harder to tell Team R apart from Team D (non-US readers may substitute the local political parties here).
NR
I agree with a lot of what’s in this post. I think certain segments of the capitalist class have weaponized identity politics against the economic left, and use it to make token gestures so they don’t have to really change anything that costs money (Amazon is inclusive and celebrates pride month! So we can just ignore the fact that their warehouse workers pee in bottles because they’re not allowed to take breaks). And I also think that some people have gone way too far with identity politics; I mostly blame social media for this, it’s really brought out the worst in how we communicate with each other.
But I think this post misses an important issue. It’s the reason why a lot of these subdivided groups exist in the first place, and it ties in to one of the big reasons why the left, at least in America, hasn’t gotten as much support from minority groups as they could have. A lot of the American left relied on the argument that restructuring the economy would benefit everyone and made no effort to understand intersectionality.
First let me explain what intersectionality is. The best way I’ve ever heard it explained was through an example. Say there’s a small town somewhere and the main employer there is a factory. Most of the jobs in the town are there, so if you can’t get a job there, you’re at a tremendous disadvantage and are going to have a hard time making a living. And the factory discriminates in its hiring–they only hire white men. Black people (for the sake of simplicity in this example we’ll assume they’re the only racial minority group in the area) and women protest this, making the case that their discriminatory hiring practices are hurting the community, and finally, after a long struggle, the factory owners relent. They announce that they won’t discriminate based on race or gender anymore; now they’ll hire black people and women. Great! The protesters declare victory and go home.
However, there’s a problem. There are two types of jobs at the factory–the front office and the factory floor. The factory only hires white people for the front office and they only hire men for the factory floor. So what this means is, if you are a black woman, they will never hire you. The factory owners can say, truthfully, that they don’t discriminate based on race or gender, and yet you as a black woman still cannot get hired there. The discrimination you face comes from the intersection of two different parts of your identity, not from any one part by itself.
Now this is a very simplistic example to illustrate the idea. In reality, there are many more pieces of people’s identities besides just race and gender. Race, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, religious affiliation, even things like physical appearance can go into it. But the point is that there are reasons–good reasons–why the left’s argument that restructuring the economy would benefit everyone didn’t resonate with a lot of minority groups. Socioeconomic status is only one part of a person’s identity, and while it is a very important part, improving everyone’s socioeconomic status is not going to help everyone equally because of intersectionality. And instead of trying to understand intersectionality and win over these minority groups, the left mostly just pushed the economic argument harder and accused liberals of using identity politics as a wedge to keep the capitalists in power (which, while true, didn’t make a positive case for the left).
It’s a shame, because it was a real missed opportunity. I count this as one of the biggest failures of the American left in the last couple of decades at least. And I say this as someone on the left who mostly can’t stand liberals.
Purple Library Guy
Inequality, and accepting it, sort of causes both identity politics and its backlash. As has been noted, identity politics kind of comes out of a surrender to inequality. If you accept high (and maybe growing) inequality as a given, or just avoid perceiving it in the first place, you can’t actually overall help disadvantaged people–a bunch of them have to be poor, a bunch of them have to be treated like crap. If you want some kind of fairness, all you have left is trying to make it so people aren’t treated badly BECAUSE OF PARTICULAR INDIVIDUAL FEATURES that individual people have. A lot of people will be miserable, but ideally you want the same proportion of whites males, dark trans and whoever else being miserable. It’s the atomized, individualist version of anti-(racism or whatever), and it both treats the problem as being about individuals experiencing individual racist-etc events, and the source as being individual, conscious or unconscious, racist-etc attitudes.
And I think one reason it tends to get very overdone is that, obviously, it doesn’t work real well. With high inequality goes low social mobility; even if you eliminate all the micro-aggressions and whatever, disadvantaged people are going to mostly stay poor. And the answer, just as with neoliberalism, is always “Well, we must just not be trying hard enough”. If only they can do identity politics hard enough, surely it will solve the systemic issues that liberals don’t even admit are there and that identity politics don’t address. But of course it never does.
The flip side of the coin is that higher inequality raises the stakes of racism, sexism and so forth. If there’s a really big difference in prosperity, happiness and health between the upper middle class, lower middle class and the seriously poor, then the stakes of not being in the disadvantaged group and making sure someone else is are high. If there is very little difference, it’s not a big deal. If your success doesn’t imply my misery, I have less selfish reason to come up with unfair ways to nobble you. So it’s a lot easier to overcome racism, sexism, various other forms of nasty discrimination if that “half of you wouldn’t be here” logic Mr. Welsh mentions has little bite.
Bottom line, then, if you want to reduce bigotry and discrimination, and you want to reduce the suffering of the groups being bigoted against, what you need is less inequality. Whether it’s seizing the means of production or just strong redistribution with an effective social safety net, one way or another you need to be making it so everyone can do OK, not just the few.
And we see this in economically left wing movements and political projects. Sure, they always to some degree inherit the prejudices of the social milieu they happen in. But they generally reduce them, and make conscious efforts to overcome them. In Cuba, they were anti-racist from the start, and as far as I can make out pretty anti-sexist from early on, but for a long time they still had it in for gays; this seems to be a not-uncommon pattern. But Castro eventually admitted he was wrong about that, and the new generation in Cuba doesn’t really have any exceptions to the “equality” gig. In Venezuela, again the whole project had anti-racism as a founding principle, and feminism is important; feminists still have victories to win, but in general the more committed to Bolivarianism a Venezuelan is, the more they’ll accept feminism as being a good important thing. And different genders, orientations and so forth also have it much better within the Bolivarian camp than in traditional Venezuela. Union movements across time have the same pattern although less so–they tend to be less racist, less sexist, less bigoted generally than their surroundings, although to varying degrees and in varying combinations. Maybe the strength is proportional to solidarity thing dictates this.
Feral Finster
NR makes a good point.
To give one example, unionizing would deliver more concrete material benefits to brown and black and yellow and tabby and white working class people and cats than all the diversity committees ever instituted, all the preferred pronouns signatures ever attached to a corporate email, all the allyship statements and token hires ever made.
Unionizing also would have the effect of reducing rich people’s control and taking money out of their pockets. This is precisely why the rulers would prefer that humans spend their time on burning issues such as “how many LGBTQXYZPDQ+ can dance on the head of a pin?” and other symbolic concerns that leave power and how the pie gets sliced unaffected.
AJ
NR: your point is well presented, and true.
Coming at the same point from the macro, rather than the micro. level, I would observe that the very split between 1) the view of social hierarchies and bigotries as primary (racism, etc.) versus 2) the view of material conditions and class consciousness as primary (marxist critiques) is patently false as a matter of history. It is simply not possible to disentangle as historical phenomena the progress of capitalism from colonialist racism and its associated hierarchies of in-group versus the exploited sub or non-human commodified workers or chattel. Slavery itself is the logical expression of capitalism.
These points of view exist as two sides of the same coin, and one could even argue that the narrowly focused marxist critique that deemphasizes social hierarchies and bigotries is the “original sin,” in that it largely predated and even silenced, often very vocally shouting over, those who pointed out the other side of the coin.
And that is what these two frames of reference are: two inextricably bound sides of the same coin. One side says “It’s heads!” because that’s what it sees from its angle. The other declares “It’s tails!” for the same reason. But the coin is both head and tail when we allow ourselves to see the whole thing. The original sin is not one or the other, but rather the lack of empathy and humanity to see the whole together. That division has been actively stoked and promoted by those who benefit from it most. When MLK started talking about both sides of the coin as inseparable, he was murdered.
Joan
Thank you for mentioning the pink ghettos. I think men of the Andrew Tate persuasion are pushing for women to be restricted from working so that they’re forced into straight marriage servitude just to economically survive. It sounds dramatic but I’ve already seen arguments in favor of bringing back the dowry to “arrange a secure placement for” (read “sell”) stay-at-home wives/mothers and it freaks me out. All adults need to be able to work with dignity and make enough to survive. (I can’t believe I’m having to make this point.)
“Lonely men move right.” A girlfriend told me this. Leftist and liberal ladies definitely aren’t interested in right-wing men. If all those men want to compete for the conservative women out there then go have fun.
I was once told to my face that I wasn’t a feminist. I just laughed because no one gets to decide whether I’m a feminist except me. I’m a queer woman, and definitely a feminist. Get out of here with your nonsense lol.
Ahmed Fares
Ian,
Did you attend Ernest Manning High School? Because if so, we shared the same class.
Ian Welsh
Ahmed,
no. A school called St. George’s. Last gasp of Edwardian education in Canada. Completely changed now.
Ahmed Fares
A good explanation of the voting gap by Peter St. Onge. Link after the quote:
[quote]
Meanwhile, across countries women tend to vote left, and men tend to vote right. In the US, for example, there’s about a 15 point gap between men and women.
Interestingly, it’s only single women: Married women actually vote Republican by 5 points — the same as men. While single women vote Democrat by 48 points.
In other words, the Democrat party is, to a first approximation, single women.
Not all have cats, but many do.
Why do Single Women Vote Left?
So why do single women vote so left?
Folk explanations include they see government as daddy, or they’re low-income and want handouts. Abortion is cited in the US, but it’s not a major issue in most countries where single women also vote left. It could just be that single women tend to be the least informed on public policy, so maybe they’re easier for media to manipulate.
But an interesting theory comes from a 2002 book called Darwinian Politics by Paul Rubin, a professor at Emory.
He posits that humans have two political instincts: to resist dominance by outside groups, and to resist in-group domination. As in, are the barbarians invading vs are the millionaires hogging all the cute girls.
He finds that conservatives tend to focus on out-group domination, so they favor policies that make us stronger: low taxes for economic growth, anti-drug laws, work requirements for welfare, strong armies.
While the left tends to focus on in-group domination, so they favor forced equality, big governments that can cut down the mighty, and fetishize niche-groups to unite the weak in a grand coalition against the strong.
[end quote
https://archive.is/20250606070612/https://www.profstonge.com/p/why-weak-men-and-single-women-vote
]
bruce wilder
I remember commenting (on the liberal academic blog, Crooked Timber) in a thread discussing the then-brand-new Black Lives Matter, that a “Black Lives Matter, all lives matter” chant would be a persuasive, strategic choice. I got tremendous, angry pushback from other commenters (not principals as far as I recall).
It was at that point that I first fully realized that part of the barely hidden agenda for some left/liberals is alienating and provoking the rubes. I think that agenda of provocation and alienation is, if possible, even more at the core of “trans” advocacy.
The moralism that posits that the “good people” can be sorted out from the “bad”people on political issues spills over broadly. It is more like the doctrine of the elect than original sin to me, but ymmv.
But, more prosaically, I think it is about social class not religion, per se. Class, as Marx taught, generates ideology.
ibaien
it should go without saying that if these trends in the west continue – women becoming more liberal and affluent (and disinterested in dating men who are misaligned), they will eventually and regrettably find out that since men still hold a monopoly on violence, they will seize the means of (re)production. not a good outcome for anyone. gotta hope that all those men can be bought off with AI girlfriends and fully functional silicone torsos :((((
mago
Thought to forego comment given the repetitious nature of what I say.
However, regarding the three basic forms of identity: inherited, ascribed and assumed, I can only say that as a straight white male born into a western working class world and having been discriminated against by class and even appearance such as sporting long hair, which some call biker and some call hippie and some call criminal, none of which are true, that reifying cultural concepts and conditioned perceptions is buying into illusions and perpetuating the same.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Dan Kelly
‘But the point is that there are reasons–good reasons–why the left’s argument that restructuring the economy would benefit everyone didn’t resonate with a lot of minority groups.’
I don’t believe what remains of ‘the left’ ever in fact made a succinct compelling argument that restructuring the economy would benefit everyone.
If they did we wouldn’t have to keep revisiting this.
KT Chong
In a 1926 interview with journalist John B. Kennedy for Collier’s magazine, the legendary scientist and inventor Nikola Tesla said he believed that women’s intelligence and potential had long been suppressed by social convention — but that modern technological and social change would eventually allow women to rise to full equality, even to dominance, in intellectual and social life.
Here is the key passage paraphrased from the article “When Woman Is Boss: An Interview with Nikola Tesla”:
“This struggle of the human female toward equality with the male — and her gradual usurpation of leadership — will end in a new sex order, with the female as superior. … Through countless generations the male has asserted his superiority by physical force, but this condition is being changed as civilization advances. Woman’s brain is growing in strength and size and she will gain mastery in all fields of intellectual activity.”
Tesla went on to predict that:
“The acquisition of new fields of endeavor by women, their gradual usurpation of leadership, will in the end result in a race of beings whose mental and spiritual qualities will be as different from ours as ours are from those of the men of the past.”
He saw this shift as inevitable once society stopped repressing women’s intellect and once technology reduced the importance of brute strength.
But he could be wrong. Tesla famously died a virgin, so he had no firsthand experience with women.
bruce wilder
AJ: I agree that in the end identity is an illusion and should be superseded at some point in development, but that’s a larger spiritual topic for another day. Developmentally, consciousness in bodies comes to an experience of non-duality by first beginning to recognize self in at least some others: family, then tribe, humanity, and last the perception of unity with all we can perceive. That’s a progression, and along the way, for many within oppressed groups, the experience of suffering is mitigated at least provisionally by the formation of a collective identity that can lead to collective action to mitigate suffering and systems of oppression.
😂
NR: In reality, there are many more pieces of people’s identities besides just race and gender. Race, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, religious affiliation, even things like physical appearance can go into it. But the point is that there are reasons–good reasons–why the left’s argument that restructuring the economy would benefit everyone didn’t resonate with a lot of minority groups. Socioeconomic status is only one part of a person’s identity, and while it is a very important part, improving everyone’s socioeconomic status is not going to help everyone equally because of intersectionality. And instead of trying to understand intersectionality and win over these minority groups, the left mostly just pushed the economic argument harder and accused liberals of using identity politics as a wedge to keep the capitalists in power (which, while true, didn’t make a positive case for the left)
😂
This absurdly abstract and instructional way of talking about human society as if social relations can be analyzed into demographic categories and “community” is a brand management label — this is the problem. This could only happen in a society almost completely atomized and stripped of associations that might give rise to common, cultural experiences. Or a society so overloaded with credentialed would-be experts that that society is trying to channel politics through ten thousand NGOs networking and partnering on an inclusive vision . . . of billionaire-approved “abundance”?
someofparts
ibaien – are you even housebroken?
somecomputerguy
Identity is a need not an illusion. Constructing an identity is an insanely powerful way to build solidarity. Every military unit in the world uses it. Every sports team.
The only example I can think of on the left is the Industrial Workers of the World. Their propaganda material is amazing.
NR
Okay Bruce, explain to us why people’s identities have no effect on their place in society.
This ought to be good.
Dan Kelly
‘Tesla famously died a virgin, so he had no firsthand experience with women.’
I wonder if he ever masturbated?
Guess it doesn’t really matter now.
bruce wilder
@NR
Assigning me a strawman argument? I am not likely to accept the assignment, am I?
I quoted those passages from NR and AJ to draw attention to the elaborate abstraction that they involve, abstraction from what historically people generally took without much examination to be the sources of a sense of personal identity embedded in a specific society: the common experience and rituals that followed from association in social communities: a village or ethnic neighborhood, a clan, a family, a religion, a nationality, a secret society, fraternity, civic bodies or guilds, a club or team, all of which were actual, social institutions embodied in social activity. By contrast, there is nothing social actually existing at the intersecting nodes of abstract demographic categories that themselves do not have an organic social existence. The demographic categories we make up for the U.S. are mishmashes, like “Latinx” or “Asian Pacific Islanders” that make no real sense as a basis for building a personal identity. Koreans, Thai and Tahitians do not have a culture in common — it is absurd to lump them together and then instruct them on their experience of oppression in a U.S. context and call that a political “identity”. A gay Asian Pacific Islander club for “representation” at Pride? It just gets more and more absurd and superficial the deeper the prescriptive intersectional analysis. Obviously, absurd as it is, there is some kind of felt need there, some hunger.
I think human beings mostly do have a need for social affiliation in their lives in order to thrive and I observe that social affiliation has declined precipitously over the last 70 or 80 years in the U.S. (and I suppose without knowing details in other western and East Asian societies). This very “Judith Butler” way of thinking and talking about who we are or can be as individuals-in-society seems to me to be possible only because of the precipitous decline in social affiliation. It is a political issue for me because I see leftish “identity politics” as fundamentally hostile to populism. (Where populism is organizing mass politics among the dependent and precarious majority to negotiate against the bosses the distribution of income and risk on universal principles.)
The hostility to populism in id pol is deep-seated, imo. The OP refers to an aspect of that. I would submit as an hypothesis that the deep-seated hostility to populism is by design and reflects class antagonisms. That is, repeating the shibboleths of id pol provides opportunities to antagonize and to despise the grievances of precarious or dependent groups. It is no doubt mutual antagonism, as evangelical “Christian nationalists” adopt caricatures of id pol dicta as foils for agitation, for example. Evangelicals, it may be noted, are organized partly around furnishing social affiliation and affirmative identity — addressing the same social affiliation drought and social identity “shortage”. Shallow roots make a fragile garden there — ymmv.
I would submit that the sources of funding on either side are pursuing an agenda where the division and antagonism are the desired end-goals. Fomenting even low-temperature civil war might be preferred by TPTB to emergence of an effective populist impulse that might restrain the billionaires.
NR
Bruce:
What common experience did white and non-white Americans share in the country’s past? What social affiliation did they have 70 or 80 years ago that they lack now? 80 years ago, black Americans were going to segregated schools and being discriminated against for housing. Even if we fast-forward 30 or 40 years or more, black Americans were (and sometimes still are) still dealing with things like redlining, discrimination in hiring, disparity in criminal sentencing (black offenders get harsher sentences than white ones for the same non-violent drug offenses), and more.
This idyllic past that you describe, where everyone had a common experience and social association with each other before identity politics supposedly tore us apart, never existed. Now I certainly do think that liberals have misused identity politics and have probably caused more division through doing so, but I’m also not going to pretend that division wasn’t already there. If you really want a populist impulse that might restrain the billionaires, it’s probably going to require support from minority groups and communities, and you aren’t going to get that without trying to understand their experiences and their point of view.
Jan Wiklund
The “original sn” approach is suggestive, I think. But it is more than that – it is about two different approaches altogether to political change.
One percrives politic action as trying to reform social relations or organizations to get better results – hopefully for the majority. The other perceives it as “bearing witness against sin” to quote a book-title by Michael Young. The latter seems to dominate among the woke gang, not least among those who believe in secret conspiracies, but also of course among the fascists. The former always dominated the labour movement as well as middle-class new dealism.
It implies a great deal which perception one favours. The “bearing witness against sin” version divides society in smaller and smaller sects, and the reforming structures version reallyt has an opportunity to comprise majorities.
someofparts
https://x.com/battleforeurope/status/1978184816412483894?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1978466313728295337%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es3_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nakedcapitalism.com%2F2025%2F10%2Flinks-10-16-2025.html
apologies for not knowing how to do hyperlinks here
‘woke left’ … largely a creation of the US deep state against the old socialist/communist left
Speaking of which – look who shows up right here, right on cue – fresh voices explaining in fine modern side-speak how insufficient – sinful even – economic justice turns out to be.
ilpalazzo
@someofparts
More comprehensive read on the matter is here:
https://monthlyreview.org/articles/imperialist-propaganda-and-the-ideology-of-the-western-left-intelligentsia/
There is more from this guy Gabriel Rockhill (interesting and presentable fellow IMO) on MR and the tube.
bruce wilder
NR: What common experience did white and non-white Americans share in the country’s past? What social affiliation did they have 70 or 80 years ago that they lack now?
You are echoing what has become the dominant mind-numbing cliche of left-liberalism: racial disparity. And, you are wielding it to not-understand what I wrote about the abstract dissociation of identity inherent in analyzing personal political identity into statistical-demographic categories as opposed to an older understanding of personal and political identity rooted in lived associations and traditions and shared rituals.
80 years ago, adults mostly derived their political identities from actual, lived social associations: that is, they belonged to social organizations requiring regular attendance and participation. Not artificial demographic categories prescriptively assigned by a statistician. They belonged to churches, to labor unions and professional associations, to fraternities, to bowling leagues and bridge clubs. They were Masons and Shriners, Kiwanis and Odd Fellows and VFW and Elks. If they were Irish Catholic, it was because they attended church every Sunday and the parish fish fry every Lent and baptized their children and sent those children at least to Saturday catechism if not Catholic schools, and drank beer at an Irish bar or the Knights of Columbus hall. And, they probably looked upon the Polish Catholics or Italian Catholics in the next pew as exotic, never mind Jews or Presbyterian heathen or the blacks.
What we have in America today of belonging, attending and self-organizing and communicating is a faded remnant of that intensely local and parochial society. Very far from the political substrate of associations Tocqueville encountered. The theoretical abstraction of id pol is, imo, called into the vacuum left behind by the implosion of social affiliation and its real social institutions. The pathology of id pol is that its only real function is to enable top-down manipulation and gaslighting, where people do not have the psychological grounding of an actual social life but are consigned to alienated doom-scrolling.
jrs
The sin framing is I guess very Puritan, very American.
But it’s not really that white males are inherently *sinful*, although that is definitely how identity politics is perceived by white males and so has political effects. As it is that they will never fully be able to understand being a woman or a minority. They will not have that perspective. But a woman for instance will never understand being a man .. well kind of true as obviously they aren’t a man, but since the dominant culture is patriarchal they kind of do understand the perspective, it’s the water everyone swims in.
Jim
Good analysis, with one exception. “Trans” is indeed a wedge issue, because
LGB is fundamentally different from the TQ and the rest of the alphabet soup. There’s a reason the LGB Alliance exists, to defend the hard-won rights of gays and lesbians. LGB are sexual orientations, not some synthetic sexual “identity” made up by confused people who deny the reality of biological sex, their own above all. There is nothing “authentic” about demanding the “right” to puberty blockers, wrong-sex hormones, males in women’s restrooms, locker rooms, sports, rape crisis shelters, prisons. There is big money behind turning kids and young adults into lifetime medical dependants, their bodies wrecked by this insanity. “I Am Jazz” is a screaming warning sign, not a role model. The UK Supreme Court got it right when it ruled that men are not women. The sooner that happens in the US (and Canada recovers from the madness of C-16) the better. The rights of girls and women are lost when males can claim a “woman identity.” It’s impossible to protect same-sex attraction without clearly understanding the reality of SEX. “Trans” is both homophobic and misogynist. We are all required to play along with this delusion, a clear difference from campaigning for the rights of gays and lesbians to live free of discrimination.
Going further: how do you expect to win over the majority of working people when you tell them men are women, which they know to be fantasy? If you are so “off” on something as fundamental as this, how can you be trusted on anything else? There’s a reason Trump’s “Kamala is for they/them” ads were so devastating. The “Left,” or what passes for it, has handed this issue to the Right on a silver platter. Wake the F up!