Identity politics

[Bowlofbabelfish]

Not a TAAT, more a question that I want to ask but don’t want to derail another thread.

Identity politics. It’s a problem - a big one. It’s childish, immature and divides societies.

How has this predominance of identity politics arisen?

How can it be solved in a peaceful and positive way? I’m thinking of past incidences and all seem to involve some sort of unpleasant national disaster or war which brought people together. That’s not an ideal solution. So what is?

How can we move away from this identity politics type scenario (peacefully without damaging societal upheaval, war or natural disaster ) and coexist a bit better?

I'll repeat what I said on the other thread, just for starters...

The DH thinks that the financial collapse of 2008 was the beginning of the transition period during which the US is replaced by China as dominant power and the various convulsions - Trump, Brexit, the rise of identity, etc - are just symptoms of it.

He may well be right. But if he is, we need to be thinking about what we might look like afterwards. And a society based on individual identity doesn't look promising to me - it will just benefit all the privileged groups at the expense of everyone else because the privileged groups will be able to impose their identities and the marginalised groups won't. And this is a feminist issue because women will be further marginalised by the identities of males.

(NB: I don't see white, upper and middle class males who like to present feminine as in the least bit marginalised.)

It all starts with fighting prejudice in our own heads: moving away from "this person is X, and therefore does/thinks/should be Y." Instead we should recognise people, including ourselves, as individuals.

The problem is that prejudice is an innate part of our human mentality, a way of compensating for our inability to remember the individual details of more than 200 people in a world where we'll encounter far more than that in the course of a day. Prejudice is therefore really, really easy to fall into. The problem with identity politics and 'class based analysis' is that they provide 'justification' for intellectual laziness in the same way that racialist anatomical science provided a justification for racism. Worse, they feed into our worst instincts for tribalism and contempt for the other.

The only way to destroy these tendencies comes from within. You have to confront yourself when you find yourself making assumptions about people, or worse, justifying it.
"They are okay, but all other X's are totally Y".
"I don't hate Ys, but they are all mostly X, so I hate the Y class."
"How can I hate Ys? Wanting them to be X the way I want is only for their own good."

We have to fight these ideas in our own heads, and recognise that the people who feed on and speak these sort of attitudes are deliberately promoting hatred and prejudice for their own pleasure or power.

Marking my place, this looks to be a very interesting thread 👍

Epic crosspost.

I do agree with there being a shift in cultural tone after the crash. And I worry because those turmoil events (black swan events, they’re called I think?) plus increasing economic inequality tend to be harbingers of societal turmoil and even collapse.

I also think the internet and online news has played a huge part. When you look back before 24 hour news there was time to editorialise. To analyse, to fact check. To consider a position.

After 24 hour news it was more a stream of consciousness. What mattered was constant content and stimulus and any errata were bunged in along the way and ignored.

Then the web - more instant gratification. And the ability to connect with like minded people. Which can be great, but it can also be quite toxic and allow people who would never have met to normalise extreme behaviour ( look at the incels, the online hate groups, child abusers, racist groups etc.)

Then that seemed to seep into this fake news stuff. And that’s not trivial, because it puts opinion and feeling over objective truth. It encourages this world view that’s predominant among conspiracy theorists where they are really paranoid on one hand but gullible on the other. Chemtrails, 9/12, antivaxxers and all that. So this view of the world as populated by big evil entities. And yeah, there’s probably a kernel of truth in that view because let’s be honest, big business runs the world. No there aren’t lizard people but there are some big financial interests starting wars and fucking up trade, the environment and decimating worker rights for profit.

So then we translate this to our UK real world. Feelings and opinions are now more valid than hard truths. So we no platform any speakers we disagree with. We report academics and need ‘trigger warnings’ on course content.

Now our students can’t debate. They’ve never had to. They have no idea how to. All they know that works is to shout people down, but that's dangerous. What happens when you hit up against group that won’t back down? Your recourse is not debate, or argument, it’s violence. And that’s a dark path to go down.

So now we are here. Fake news. Stuff that is frankly batshit crazy is quite mainstream (antivax for example) science is denied (climate change) and all you have to do to get yourself your own way is to cast yourself as a victim and pick an oppressor. Meanwhile genuinely oppressed groups (people of colour for example) who fought for their rights with dignity, debate and reason, are still oppressed. The environment is still fucked. Workers rights are still being dismantled.

It’s real hell in a handcart stuff. It’s got trump elected, it’s got the alt right a platform, it’s getting the environment destroyed and it’s going to get women returned to the dark ages.

What can we DO about it?

Sorry for the very long post. I think I need a cup of tea.

Great idea for a thread.

I think both classical liberalism and traditional socialism have the ingredients for a response.

Classical liberalism has something along the lines of Rawls' "initial position", which is (paraphrasing and over-simplifying wildly) "Imagine yourself drawing up the rules for society. You know that people will be born into this society with differing degrees of innate talent and strength. You know that sometimes they'll be born to rich parents, and sometimes to poor parents. You know they'll be subject to plain, dumb luck - e.g. getting a chronic illness that leaves them unable to support their family. What rules do you put in place to ensure that everyone gets a reasonable chance of making a success of their lives, that people who've had the bad luck to be born poor, or born without a natural aptitude for the sort of mathematical ability that makes you big bucks in the finance industry, or who've contracted a serious illness, still have enough to live comfortable and dignified lives?" (Interestingly, a group of psychologists posed this problem to a group of registered Republican voters in the US, without telling them it was a "liberal" thought experiment - the voters designed a society that looked a bit like Sweden ).

The other tack is to go for traditional socialist "class analysis" and look, not at individuals (so avoiding the trap that identarians use, whereby Theresa May as PM and Sjhid Javid as home secretary become reasons to assume that women and members of ethnic minorities have no barriers to advancement, while underachieving white teenage boys in Sunderland become reasons to assume that white men have never had it so bad). It also includes a proper understanding of intersectionality* - understanding that groups of people suffer along different axes of intersection - so the problem for the white boys in Sunderland is that no matter how white they are, their social class shafts them (it's not that white males are suddenly being shafted when they weren't before, it's that social class boundaries still matter when they shouldn't).

*Intersectionality was never intended to be, and should not be coopted, to be used as a form of identarian top-trumps at an individual level. It was meant to be a tool within the concept of class analysis.

Also brexit. Should have put that in there too (not that it wasn’t long enough) Tribal politics, unable to see that people who don’t vote like you do aren’t tory scum/leftards- when these are mainstream politic parties, not communists or nazis.

It’s all so very worrying. We seem to have lost any ability to connect across boundaries, think critically etc.

I have lived in Sweden fermat - it’s not utopia but they get an awful lot right. An awful lot.

And I worry because those turmoil events (black swan events, they’re called I think?) plus increasing economic inequality tend to be harbingers of societal turmoil and even collapse.

Yes. This is DH's thinking. He sees identity politics as bourgeois fiddling while the proverbial Rome burns.

And I worry because those turmoil events (black swan events, they’re called I think?) plus increasing economic inequality tend to be harbingers of societal turmoil and even collapse.

I too think this rings a bell. If things go pear-shaped over the next decade or two I think future historians will see major upheavals like Brexit as the symptoms rather than the cause. (Is anyone else following Italian politics at the moment? If 5 Star and La Lega are serious about their "parallel currency" of government bond issues, they could bring the Euro down, which - and I gather this is a view shared by many politicians in the EU - will make Brexit look like a side show).

One of the "canaries in the coal mine" for the collapse of civilisations is the growth, and rate of growth, of income inequality - and we're seeing that at unprecedentedly high levels in the western industrial world.

I have actually said to DH that we will see civil war in Europe within ten years. And a possible major war elsewhere too.

Inequality, population increase, austerity and ID politics plus climate change = bad, bad things.

Intersectionality was never intended to be, and should not be coopted, to be used as a form of identarian top-trumps at an individual level. It was meant to be a tool within the concept of class analysis.

Yes - intersectionality is about the application of systems power by institutions disproportionately marginalising certain groups. It has nothing at all to do with subjective identities.

I watched recently. It was interesting.

I wanted to expand on something JB kept saying about the origins. ‘The personal is political’ and how this came from 2nd wave feminism. JB paints a picture of problems with this approach and how she hated it in practice but the concept was a good one which provided language to describe women’s experiences as a class and why they matter.

It strikes me that there is nothing at all with ‘the personal is political’ the problem is how it has translated in practice within the context of individualism. ‘The personal is political’ as part of class analysis serves the purpose of making women’s class issues into a shared struggle. In individualism this has become ‘the political is personal’ and it is this that is the problem currently. It has been turned on it’s head.

@fermatstheorem "Intersectionality was never intended to be, and should not be coopted, to be used as a form of identarian top-trumps at an individual level. It was meant to be a tool within the concept of class analysis."

Great post.

I touched on this in another thread. Part of the problem is that ideas like intersectionality, white privilege, white fragility, etc is that they are just academic theories, you can't prove them but you can certainly debate them.

These theories are increasingly more mainstream and commonly accepted on the Left and becoming accepted as gospel.

Also, the way they're applied is becoming further and further removed from their original intention. As you rightly point out, it wasn't meant to be oppression olympics.

Like with "mansplaining", the original meaning was the "patronising way men explain things to women". Now "mansplaining" is thrown out far too casually any time a man expresses an opinion be it in real life or online. His gender is used to discredit or silence his opinion, when really opinions should be engaged with and evaluated on their content, not the group identity of the person giving that opinion

Part of the problem/issue is that everyone has a voice/platform due to social media. Platforms like Twitter only amplify the extreme voices on both sides, which further fuels the extreme voices.

It strikes me that there is nothing at all with ‘the personal is political’ the problem is how it has translated in practice within the context of individualism. ‘The personal is political’ as part of class analysis serves the purpose of making women’s class issues into a shared struggle. In individualism this has become ‘the political is personal’ and it is this that is the problem currently. It has been turned on it’s head.

Very good point. Thus woman has become a political category one can identify into - leaving it completely divorced from the root of oppression, which is male control of female reproductive capacity.

Yy re woman.

And the end result being that ‘woman’ is no longer a class but a collection of random individuals.

Identity politics is a cover and a distraction. Keep the proles busy arguing between themselves while the ruling class and big business in gross all the money and power for themselves.
It’s called divide and rule and it works fabulously.

After watching that debate; I would not like to lose ‘the personal is political’, what I would like to lose is the individualism that corrupts it.

Bowlofbabelfish Thanks for your post and thread. I've been having very similar thoughts and conversations this week.

My glib idea is that we would all benefit from temporarily switching the internet off and for people to all read 5 books (given they have at the least gone through editorial process providing they aren't vanity published)!

A blog or post is increasingly given the same 'legitimate' weight as a researched article, paper or book. I think Michael Gove's comment during the referendum about us all 'having had enough of experts' is both perceptive and terrifying.

I think that the speed at which people see and react to something on social media without considering or understanding its context or background is having a massively detrimental effect. Also as most social media requires a binary response eg 'like' /'don't like' then there is little scope for nuanced discussion of ideas. As 'like' and 'don't like' are simplistically emotional responses then its unsurprising that there's little space for critical thinking, not least because this usually expands to include value judgements of 'good / bad'.

Tribalism whether in broad terms or within a single subject / post often seems to prompt people to join a side and then shout or attack the other side. The larger or louder a mob, the more power they often seem to have. In any other circumstance, this would not be the case.

Political decision making is (in my opinion) damaged by the influence that SM has on it. Not least because it disenfranchises chunks of the population.

We all need thinking time and the opportunity to reflect.
We all need to listen, talk and to be able to explore ideas.
We all need to be kinder.
I may need to go and read some books about the Luddites!

I agree with points made on previous threads that identity politics bullshit is being weaponised against and forced on the WC/UC primarily by the leftie middle classes.

It’s called divide and rule and it works fabulously.

Definitely. I keep pointing this out in millennial vs baby boomer threads. It’s not your parents generation that’s the problem, it’s a small slice of society asset stripping and totally shafting everyone else. But it’s a convenient distraction.

offred you make a valid point. I’m from a solidly WC background (northern pit town) . And I do consider myself old school left wing (the sort of work hard, treat others well, strive for an equal society, have a safety net type.) but right now I find the mainstream left is slipping to a position I don’t like, don’t find represents me and is actively working against me.

For the first time in my life I am rejecting the left as an vote option due to this and I find that has really made me think about a lot of things. Perhaps that’s not a bad thing - we should question ourselves more?

It’s not your parents generation that’s the problem, it’s a small slice of society asset stripping and totally shafting everyone else

I'm also going to re-read Ben Elton's first book 'Stark', I think it was published in 1990 (ish?) and from what I remember of it, suspect it has even more relevance now.

Labour has been a mess since Blair made it into an establishment party and introduced this crap about ‘winning elections’ which so many still believe. It was very easy to do since people having political careers tend to have high levels of narcissism and it is easy to give up principles.

I have always been more left than labour. Labour under Blair was more right wing (but less authoritarian) than thatcher politically. Labour are now very similar to attlee’s labour. They still are not as left as me. I’m not expecting them to move further to the left.

I haven’t left the party.

I am watching what happens with the expansion of the equalities portfolio from simple economic equality (essentially men’s rights) to include; women, LGBT, disability etc.

They are making the usual mistakes, at the moment this could be understandable as it is a new responsibility.

I will wait and see.

Politically labour have moved back to attlee labour position anyway, but the party is still absolutely in the control of the establishment Blair created... divorced from the WC/UC.