I have a growing antipathy for identity politics, which I feel has ruined our ability to construct a collective universalist political identity, and driven poor white people straight into the hands of populists, through it's hypocrisy and lack of compassion for the white poor.
As Amy Chua writes in The Guardian, a centre left British newspaper:
American leftist ideals had been universalist. That is to say, they, like a universalist religion (one that treats all of humanity as it's congregation, as opposed to a restricted group of believers, or single ethnicity), such as Christianity or Buddhism, the American constitution treated the whole planet's inhabitants as equally under the umbrella of natural rights, instead of focusing on the concerns of a single group. This might be because the founding fathers of the republic, unlike say Lenin, were universalists of the liberal school of philosophy, and didn't found their republic based on, say, an ideology that saw all of the rich as less human or worthy of consideration than the poor. So what changed? Now, the demand is not for inclusion within the fold of ‘universal humankind’...
You cannot build an inclusive society by leaving some people out. In my previous thread, someone commented that they were surprised by how civil the discussion had been. Basically, I allowed members to feel comfortable posting their experiences, by not judging them, and showing compassion for everyone, just as the Buddha would have advocated. I feel that is because I respected and showed compassion to everyone universally, it allowed people to react thoughtfully, instead of having to defend themselves against very vindictive assumptions about their life. Basic civility allowed people to feel safe to talk from the heart, and basic civility is what is missing from identity politics, by saying "you can never know", and "my concerns are more important than yours".
Does anyone wonder why some of Earth's most respected cultural teachers from the Buddha to Jesus advocated universal compassion? It's not just right; it's in fact practical; you put the interests of your tribe before another, and you can expect others to respond in kind; as Gandhi said, an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.
I think a lot of Trump's supporters probably don't like the guy - the oldest and richest president in history - a foul-mouthed person who disrespects women to his friends behind closed doors - but they feel that the Republican right is now their only defender in a cultural war where identity suddenly matters.
As a minority, I feel the media has done more to damage my happiness than actual discrimination. This everyone-against-everyone atmosphere has left everyone with constant anxiety. It's like we constantly exist in a identity-obsessed discourse, where a few years ago we could dream of bigger things, like how human civilization might look in a thousand years, how we might colonise Mars. I can't go on a popular blog to read science fiction news without constantly being assaulted by a barrage of identity-based opinion pieces and articles full of vindictiveness. Where has maturity and respect gone? Gizmodo is probably the worst, where you daily come across stories framed in terms of identity, then big newspapers and political magazines, but even reading some low key video games site you come across it.
I always wanted more asian representation in Hollywood; however, I never wanted that representation to come at the price of universalism, framed in terms of winners and losers, but rather as a consequence of our universal humanity. But instead blog after blog, and news site after news site, frame the casting of asians in terms like "prying white people off the levers of power", a sentence that evokes the imagery of a coup d'etat, or "you are denying people their body every time you don't cast an asian", evoking the imagery of rape, or whatever. Excessive hyperbole framing everything as the next step in a constant war, just like some Maoist propaganda.
There might be some truth to the idea that this attitude was born from Marxism, an ideology that placed ends before means, advocated violence as a means to power, worshipped power as a means to justice, and thus thought that placing the working poor into power by any means necessary was all that mattered, not the method, or who got trampled. It can seem like the language of Marx has merely been shifted from the universal poor, to ethnicity, gender, and increasingly narrow tribal self-interest.
The regressive elements of our left wanted to reject Martin Luther King Jr style universalism in favour of single-issue identity politics, and now they have exhausted the goodwill of the one tribe that wasn't allowed to indulge it's atavistic tribal identity. Now, rather than thinking about the future of the human race, our scientific potential as a species, I find all our concerns are mired in obsession about skin and gender.
If democracy is to survive, then the left and right must rediscover universalism.
As Amy Chua writes in The Guardian, a centre left British newspaper:
"In his most famous speech, Dr Martin Luther King Jr proclaimed: “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men – yes, black men as well as white men – would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
King’s ideals – the ideals of the American Left that captured the imagination and hearts of the public and led to real change – transcended group divides and called for an America in which skin color didn’t matter.
Leading liberal philosophical movements of that era were similarly group blind and universalist in character.
Thus, although the Left was always concerned with the oppression of minorities and the rights of disadvantaged groups, the dominant ideals in this period tended to be group blind, often cosmopolitan, with many calling for transcending not just ethnic, racial, and gender barriers but national boundaries as well.
King’s ideals – the ideals of the American Left that captured the imagination and hearts of the public and led to real change – transcended group divides and called for an America in which skin color didn’t matter.
Leading liberal philosophical movements of that era were similarly group blind and universalist in character.
Thus, although the Left was always concerned with the oppression of minorities and the rights of disadvantaged groups, the dominant ideals in this period tended to be group blind, often cosmopolitan, with many calling for transcending not just ethnic, racial, and gender barriers but national boundaries as well.
... identity politics, with its group-based rhetoric, did not initially become the mainstream position of the Democratic Party.
At the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston, Barack Obama famously declared, “There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.”
A decade and a half later, we are very far from Obama’s America.
For today’s Left, blindness to group identity is the ultimate sin, because it masks the reality of group hierarchies and oppression in America.
A shift in tone, rhetoric, and logic has moved identity politics away from inclusion – which had always been the Left’s watchword – toward exclusion and division. As a result, many on the left have turned against universalist rhetoric (for example, All Lives Matter), viewing it as an attempt to erase the specificity of the experience and oppression of historically marginalized minorities.
The new exclusivity is partly epistemological, claiming that out-group members cannot share in the knowledge possessed by in-group members (“You can’t understand X because you are white”; “You can’t understand Y because you’re not a woman”; “You can’t speak about Z because you’re not queer”). The idea of “cultural appropriation” insists, among other things, “These are our group’s symbols, traditions, patrimony, and out-group members have no right to them.”
For much of the Left today, anyone who speaks in favor of group blindness is on the other side, indifferent to or even guilty of oppression. For some, especially on college campuses, anyone who doesn’t swallow the anti-oppression orthodoxy hook, line, and sinker – anyone who doesn’t acknowledge “white supremacy” in America – is a racist.
When liberal icon Bernie Sanders told supporters, “It’s not good enough for somebody to say, ‘Hey, I’m a Latina, vote for me,’ ” Quentin James, a leader of Hillary Clinton’s outreach efforts to people of color, retorted that Sanders’s “comments regarding identity politics suggest he may be a white supremacist, too”.
During a Black Lives Matter protest at the DNC held in Philadelphia in July 2016, a protest leader announced that “this is a black and brown resistance march”, asking white allies to “appropriately take [their] place in the back of this march”.
The war on “cultural appropriation” is rooted in the belief that groups have exclusive rights to their own histories, symbols, and traditions. Thus, many on the left today would consider it an offensive act of privilege for, say, a straight white man to write a novel featuring a gay Latina as the main character.
One Trump voter claimed that “maybe I’m just so sick of being called a bigot that my anger at the authoritarian left has pushed me to support this seriously flawed man.”
Or consider this blog post in the American Conservative, worth quoting at length because of the light it sheds:
At its core, the problem is simple but fundamental. While black Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, Jewish Americans, and many others are allowed – indeed, encouraged – to feel solidarity and take pride in their racial or ethnic identity, white Americans have for the last several decades been told they must never, ever do so.
For decades now, nonwhites in the United States have been encouraged to indulge their tribal instincts in just this way, but, at least publicly, American whites have not.
Just after the 2016 election, a former Never Trumper explained his change of heart in the Atlantic: “My college-age daughter constantly hears talk of white privilege and racial identity, of separate dorms for separate races (somewhere in heaven Martin Luther King Jr is hanging his head and crying) … I hate identity politics, [but] when everything is about identity politics, is the left really surprised that on Tuesday millions of white Americans … voted as ‘white’? If you want identity politics, identity politics is what you will get.”
At the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston, Barack Obama famously declared, “There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.”
A decade and a half later, we are very far from Obama’s America.
For today’s Left, blindness to group identity is the ultimate sin, because it masks the reality of group hierarchies and oppression in America.
A shift in tone, rhetoric, and logic has moved identity politics away from inclusion – which had always been the Left’s watchword – toward exclusion and division. As a result, many on the left have turned against universalist rhetoric (for example, All Lives Matter), viewing it as an attempt to erase the specificity of the experience and oppression of historically marginalized minorities.
The new exclusivity is partly epistemological, claiming that out-group members cannot share in the knowledge possessed by in-group members (“You can’t understand X because you are white”; “You can’t understand Y because you’re not a woman”; “You can’t speak about Z because you’re not queer”). The idea of “cultural appropriation” insists, among other things, “These are our group’s symbols, traditions, patrimony, and out-group members have no right to them.”
For much of the Left today, anyone who speaks in favor of group blindness is on the other side, indifferent to or even guilty of oppression. For some, especially on college campuses, anyone who doesn’t swallow the anti-oppression orthodoxy hook, line, and sinker – anyone who doesn’t acknowledge “white supremacy” in America – is a racist.
When liberal icon Bernie Sanders told supporters, “It’s not good enough for somebody to say, ‘Hey, I’m a Latina, vote for me,’ ” Quentin James, a leader of Hillary Clinton’s outreach efforts to people of color, retorted that Sanders’s “comments regarding identity politics suggest he may be a white supremacist, too”.
During a Black Lives Matter protest at the DNC held in Philadelphia in July 2016, a protest leader announced that “this is a black and brown resistance march”, asking white allies to “appropriately take [their] place in the back of this march”.
The war on “cultural appropriation” is rooted in the belief that groups have exclusive rights to their own histories, symbols, and traditions. Thus, many on the left today would consider it an offensive act of privilege for, say, a straight white man to write a novel featuring a gay Latina as the main character.
One Trump voter claimed that “maybe I’m just so sick of being called a bigot that my anger at the authoritarian left has pushed me to support this seriously flawed man.”
Or consider this blog post in the American Conservative, worth quoting at length because of the light it sheds:
I’m a white guy. I’m a well-educated intellectual who enjoys small arthouse movies, coffeehouses and classic blues. If you didn’t know any better, you’d probably mistake me for a lefty urban hipster.
And yet. I find some of the alt-right stuff exerts a pull even on me. Even though I’m smart and informed enough to see through it. It’s seductive because I am not a person with any power or privilege, and yet I am constantly bombarded with messages telling me that I’m a cancer, I’m a problem, everything is my fault.
I am very lower middle class. I’ve never owned a new car, and do my own home repairs as much as I can to save money. I cut my own grass, wash my own dishes, buy my clothes from Walmart. I have no clue how I will ever be able to retire. But oh, brother, to hear the media tell it, I am just drowning in unearned power and privilege, and America will be a much brighter, more loving, more peaceful nation when I finally just keel over and die.
Trust me: After all that, some of the alt-right stuff feels like a warm, soothing bath. A “safe space,” if you will. I recoil from the uglier stuff, but some of it— the “hey, white guys are actually okay, you know! Be proud of yourself, white man!” stuff is really VERY seductive, and it is only with some intellectual effort that I can resist the pull … If it’s a struggle for someone like me to resist the pull, I imagine it’s probably impossible for someone with less education or cultural exposure.
And yet. I find some of the alt-right stuff exerts a pull even on me. Even though I’m smart and informed enough to see through it. It’s seductive because I am not a person with any power or privilege, and yet I am constantly bombarded with messages telling me that I’m a cancer, I’m a problem, everything is my fault.
I am very lower middle class. I’ve never owned a new car, and do my own home repairs as much as I can to save money. I cut my own grass, wash my own dishes, buy my clothes from Walmart. I have no clue how I will ever be able to retire. But oh, brother, to hear the media tell it, I am just drowning in unearned power and privilege, and America will be a much brighter, more loving, more peaceful nation when I finally just keel over and die.
Trust me: After all that, some of the alt-right stuff feels like a warm, soothing bath. A “safe space,” if you will. I recoil from the uglier stuff, but some of it— the “hey, white guys are actually okay, you know! Be proud of yourself, white man!” stuff is really VERY seductive, and it is only with some intellectual effort that I can resist the pull … If it’s a struggle for someone like me to resist the pull, I imagine it’s probably impossible for someone with less education or cultural exposure.
For decades now, nonwhites in the United States have been encouraged to indulge their tribal instincts in just this way, but, at least publicly, American whites have not.
Just after the 2016 election, a former Never Trumper explained his change of heart in the Atlantic: “My college-age daughter constantly hears talk of white privilege and racial identity, of separate dorms for separate races (somewhere in heaven Martin Luther King Jr is hanging his head and crying) … I hate identity politics, [but] when everything is about identity politics, is the left really surprised that on Tuesday millions of white Americans … voted as ‘white’? If you want identity politics, identity politics is what you will get.”
Does anyone wonder why some of Earth's most respected cultural teachers from the Buddha to Jesus advocated universal compassion? It's not just right; it's in fact practical; you put the interests of your tribe before another, and you can expect others to respond in kind; as Gandhi said, an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.
When groups feel threatened, they retreat into tribalism. When groups feel mistreated and disrespected, they close ranks and become more insular, more defensive, more punitive, more us-versus-them.
In America today, every group feels this way to some extent. Whites and blacks, Latinos and Asians, men and women, Christians, Jews, and Muslims, straight people and gay people, liberals and conservatives – all feel their groups are being attacked, bullied, persecuted, discriminated against.
Of course, one group’s claims to feeling threatened and voiceless are often met by another group’s derision because it discounts their own feelings of persecution – but such is political tribalism.
... it leaves the United States in a perilous new situation: almost no one is standing up for an America without identity politics, for an American identity that transcends and unites all the country’s many subgroups.
In America today, every group feels this way to some extent. Whites and blacks, Latinos and Asians, men and women, Christians, Jews, and Muslims, straight people and gay people, liberals and conservatives – all feel their groups are being attacked, bullied, persecuted, discriminated against.
Of course, one group’s claims to feeling threatened and voiceless are often met by another group’s derision because it discounts their own feelings of persecution – but such is political tribalism.
... it leaves the United States in a perilous new situation: almost no one is standing up for an America without identity politics, for an American identity that transcends and unites all the country’s many subgroups.
I think a lot of Trump's supporters probably don't like the guy - the oldest and richest president in history - a foul-mouthed person who disrespects women to his friends behind closed doors - but they feel that the Republican right is now their only defender in a cultural war where identity suddenly matters.
As a minority, I feel the media has done more to damage my happiness than actual discrimination. This everyone-against-everyone atmosphere has left everyone with constant anxiety. It's like we constantly exist in a identity-obsessed discourse, where a few years ago we could dream of bigger things, like how human civilization might look in a thousand years, how we might colonise Mars. I can't go on a popular blog to read science fiction news without constantly being assaulted by a barrage of identity-based opinion pieces and articles full of vindictiveness. Where has maturity and respect gone? Gizmodo is probably the worst, where you daily come across stories framed in terms of identity, then big newspapers and political magazines, but even reading some low key video games site you come across it.
I always wanted more asian representation in Hollywood; however, I never wanted that representation to come at the price of universalism, framed in terms of winners and losers, but rather as a consequence of our universal humanity. But instead blog after blog, and news site after news site, frame the casting of asians in terms like "prying white people off the levers of power", a sentence that evokes the imagery of a coup d'etat, or "you are denying people their body every time you don't cast an asian", evoking the imagery of rape, or whatever. Excessive hyperbole framing everything as the next step in a constant war, just like some Maoist propaganda.
There might be some truth to the idea that this attitude was born from Marxism, an ideology that placed ends before means, advocated violence as a means to power, worshipped power as a means to justice, and thus thought that placing the working poor into power by any means necessary was all that mattered, not the method, or who got trampled. It can seem like the language of Marx has merely been shifted from the universal poor, to ethnicity, gender, and increasingly narrow tribal self-interest.
The regressive elements of our left wanted to reject Martin Luther King Jr style universalism in favour of single-issue identity politics, and now they have exhausted the goodwill of the one tribe that wasn't allowed to indulge it's atavistic tribal identity. Now, rather than thinking about the future of the human race, our scientific potential as a species, I find all our concerns are mired in obsession about skin and gender.
If democracy is to survive, then the left and right must rediscover universalism.
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