Even the Guardian, of all places, has
published a piece about how identity politics are dividing the US. This should give a lot of people on both sides of the aisle pause.
For today’s Left, blindness to group identity is the ultimate sin, because it masks the reality of group hierarchies and oppression in America.
It’s just a fact that whites, and specifically white male Protestants, dominated America for most of its history, often violently, and that this legacy persists. The stubborn persistence of racial inequality in the wake of Barack Obama’s supposedly “post-racial” presidency has left many young progressives disillusioned with the narratives of racial progress that were popular among liberals just a few years ago.
When a grand jury failed to indict a white cop who was videotaped choking a black man to death, black writer Brit Bennett captured this growing mistrust in an essay entitled, “I Don’t Know What to Do with Good White People”:
We all want to believe in progress, in history that marches forward in a neat line, in transcended differences and growing acceptance, in how good the good white people have become … I don’t think Darren Wilson or Daniel Pantaleo set out to kill black men. I’m sure the cops who arrested my father meant well. But what good are your good intentions if they kill us?
For the Left, identity politics has long been a means to “confront rather than obscure the uglier aspects of American history and society”.
But in recent years, whether because of growing strength or growing frustration with the lack of progress, the Left has upped the ante. 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 left has lost sight of the ideals of universalism.
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”.
Leftist criticism of the SocJus is stifled.
Not everyone on the Left is happy with the direction that identity politics has taken. Many are dismayed by the focus on cultural appropriation. As a progressive Mexican American law student put it, “If we allowed ourselves to be hurt by a costume, how could we manage the trauma of an eviction notice?”
He added: “Liberals have cried wolf too many times. If everything is racist and sexist, nothing is. When Trump, the real wolf, came along, no one listened.”
There are voices critical of identity politics within the left. The fact that this piece is being published in the Guardian, a left-wing newspaper, should be good to give those people the idea that they're not alone, that others have noticed what they've noticed, too, and that the SocJus is NOT the Only Way for a progressive movement.
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.” “The Democratic party,” said Bill Maher, “made the white working man feel like your problems aren’t real because you’re ‘mansplaining’ and check your privilege. You know, if your life sucks, your problems are real.” When blacks blame today’s whites for slavery or ask for reparations, many white Americans feel as though they are being attacked for the sins of other generations.
This is also part of the problem. You can't blame someone for everything that goes or ever went wrong and expect them to bow down and apologize all the time.
A Trump supporter in the American Conservative wrote: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 THAT is the main appeal of the white identity politics of the alt-right, whether they decline themselves as ethno-nationalism, Trumpism, or any other form. The left is far too busy yelling at white people that they're evil, privileged, everything that's wrong in America to understand that they're playing right into the hands of the alt-right. The SocJus has fed Trump, and is still feeding the alt-right.
Every time a moron gets outraged at "cultural appropriation", every time someone writes about how "Kill All Men" or "Die Cis Scum" is "liberating" and "revolutionary", every time you suggest that science or liberal democracy are "white supremacy", every time idiots crack jokes at male suicide while feeling smug in their self-righteousness, every time someone proposes segregation as a solution to America's social issues, the alt-right gains strength and followers.
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.”
Yeah.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DGNZnfKYnU