Why we cannot abandon I.D Politics - Yep, another thread about it, because it's critical.
Since there are still threads about social justice vs economic justice , I'll just add my final two cents.
So, on the evening of the election, conservatives , those who pander to the worst of their politics and even some well-meaning Liberals, came out with critiques of "identity politics" . Which was all very strange, since Trump's victory was unimpressive. You might come away thinking - after hearing these people ( some of whom have based their careers on critiquing political correctness and identity politics) - that there was some kind of populist uprising in favor of Trump.
Except there was no such populist uprising.
Trump is a Minority President, his win made possible by just under 80,000 votes across three states. All sorts of theories abound about the motivations driving voters whose numbers could barely fit a large stadium. And our candidate decisively won the popular vote - yes this matters. In a parallel universe, where we didn't have an Electoral College with electoral votes unevenly dispersed, the result might have been different. And it's because the loss was so thin, we're in danger of learning all the wrong lessons from this election.
This danger is the real possibility that we end up striking at the heart of Liberalism. Any attempts to temper our message with conservative criticisms about identity politics should be rejected outright. The strength of Liberalism lies in its core tenets of freedom and justice, and when any particular group suffers disproportionately under State Power, addressing those concerns strengthens Democracy for All through the changing of laws and the striking down of discriminatory practices.
Liberalism is the driving force behind every fair society where the right to self-determination is sacred. We are the vanguards of democracy,we should be proud to be so and we should understand the motivations of those who would try to destroy the soul of Liberal principles:
"Let’s begin by making clear that identity politics isn’t really the name of a new phenomenon. Relative to an Old Left expectation that economic classes are the fundamental lines of political division, the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s associated with the civil rights movement, with American Indian politics, and with women’s and gay liberation seemed anomalous. But there was never any reason to believe the Old Left’s story in the first place, least of all in the United States where a large proportion of the country had almost always been governed by a political coalition defined by white identity politics.
There is something particularly absurd in the post-election morality plays that say “whites [or white Christians, or white Christian men] have now learned how to do identity politics and how to vote like an aggrieved ethnic group, because that’s what other groups have been doing all these years.” White identity politics is a constitutive fact of American politics, and if an election in which the Republican got the normal share of the white vote counts as white identity politics in action, well, that suggests a deep problem, but it doesn’t suggest a new problem.
White identity politics has moreover been a constitutive fact of the illiberal expansion of state power. The effect of some of the oldest instances of this are still with us, as is seen in the recent struggle over placing the Dakota Access Pipeline on lands that were reserved to the Sioux nation in an 1851 treaty that was subsequently violated but never voided. The effects of the decades-long white welfare state and the redistributive subsidizing of white wealth accumulation through housing policy are very much still with us in the wealth gap between whites and blacks, to say nothing of the enduring effects of racially discriminatory housing and urban policy on the shape of American cities. But the most currently politically salient effect of white identity politics as a source of state power is the combination of policing, imprisonment, crime policy, and drug policy."
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"But a revitalized liberalism must be a vital liberalism, one with energy and enthusiasm. The defense of liberal principles—freedom of speech and religion, the rule of law and due process, commerce and markets, and so on—has to happen at least in part in the political arena. In that arena, in liberal politics, we’ll always depend on the passionate and self-conscious mobilization of those who are the victims of state power and domination.
Lilla insists that liberalism is founded on principles that all could share, and that liberal politics should “speak to the nation as a nation of citizens who are in this together and must help one another,” then appeals to FDR, one of the architects of the white welfare state and the imprisoner of Japanese-Americans, to drive the point home.
As political scientist Ira Katznelson has documented, Roosevelt’s ability to bring the New Deal into existence depended on active complicity with southern white identity politics—an easy and tempting thing to do for those who are too convinced that their political goals represent neutral and universal political truth.
Political fights aren’t won with universal principled arguments alone, and pretending that they are is often a mask for the identity politics of the staatvolk. As citizens of a liberal state trying to preserve it, we need to be able to hear each other talking about particularized injustices, and to cheer each other on when we seek to overturn them. Members of disadvantaged minorities standing up for themselves aren’t to blame for the turn to populist authoritarianism; and their energy and commitment is a resource that free societies can’t do without in resisting it."
https://niskanencenter.org/blog/defense-liberty-cant-without-identity-politics/
Nuff said.
= new reply since forum marked as read
I cannot agree more that now is NOT the time to abandon "identity politics."
Indeed, it is my firm conviction that we lost in part because we abandoned "identity politics" during the general election in favor of seeking out issues (mostly AN issue) with more universal appeal. You will pardon me if I now abandon the term "identity politics" and replace it the general statement of principle that our "politics" should be publicly and unashamedly fighting for the oppressed and against their oppressors AND having the courage to say that both exist.
Unfortunately, this fight is hampered by the refusal in some quarters to acknowledge the oppressed, or, for that matter, the oppressors. It is hampered also by the fallacious belief in some quarters that political victory can only be achieved with the aid of the oppressors.
Because the acrimony here on DU (and for you "DU isn't the real world"-ers, even in the "real world" contest for DNC chair) appear tied to the definitions of "oppressed" and "oppressors," there might be the place to start. Hopefully, we can all agree that the descendants of slaves and those who look like them are members of the "oppressed" without having to go through a long discussion of 400+ years of American (in particular Southern Plantation) slavery and its pernicious effects. Hopefully, we can agree that Spanish-speaking immigrants and non-citizen residents (both documented and undocumented) are also among the "oppressed." Hopefully, we can agree that women are among the "oppressed." Particularly in this day and age, one would hope that we can agree that adherents to the tenets of Islam are among the "oppressed." We should also all be able to agree that those who are unable to provide their families with the necessities of life AND hope for a better future are among the "oppressed." Finally, we should all be able to agree that people whose sexual identity and/or sexual orientation do not align with the dominant religious ideology are "oppressed." Obviously this list is not exhaustive, but I offer it to demonstrate the breadth of those who would be our natural constituency under an "oppressed vs. oppressors" (f/k/a "identity politics"
political ideology.
Of course, if we ran on such an ideology, there would also be people who would vote with us who are not oppressed, but place the needs of the oppressed over their own desire for further privileges.
Who, then, are the oppressors? Basically, they are everyone else. They are the .1%, the holders of the overwhelming majority of the nation's capital. An infinitely small group made even smaller by subtracting out those among them place the needs of the oppressed over their own. They are the people whose dominant social objective is to harm the weak. Hopefully another small group. They are the people who place their own further privilege above the needs of the oppressed. Again, to consciously say "I choose for the oppressed to suffer so that I may have more than my already-satisfying life gives me" requires a level of psychopathology that this group also has to be somewhat limited. Finally, there is a group that exists amid the REALITY, whether they believe it so or not, that their vote does not personally harm them, but believe that it does. They are people who actually have little to gain or lose from voting against the interests of our natural constituency, but have been convinced that they do. That is a large group.
Those are the battle lines in the political ideology of "oppressed vs oppressor." Those of us who truly believe in that ideology (i.e., who truly believe in "identity politics" , and I count myself and those other DU members who have espoused "identity politics" among them, believe that there are more people on our side of those battle lines than their are on "theirs" If we are correct, we should be able to go to the oppressed with policies that favor them WITH NO REGARD WHATSOEVER FOR THE OPPRESSORS and say, "We are here for you and no one else," and, because we are the many, drive the kind of turnout that leaves the oppressors' concerns unimportant. We will not say "All lives matter," or "Blue lives matter," We will say "YOUR lives matter." We will not say "Low taxes matter," or "Limiting the size of government matters," or "small businesses matter" We will say "YOUR lives matter."
To those who bemoan the loss of the American ideal of a unified people, the ideal President Obama described with such grace and eloquence, it died on November 8, 2016.
Unless we have a plan for convincing last large group of oppressors I described above that they aren't hurt by equality, by social justice, and by economic justice, and can do that in the next two years when we haven't been able to do it in the last 25 years (and god knows I would love to hear it instead of the watching incessant turf war for the soul of this party),
It is now us, or it is them.
