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Thread: The Intellectual Roots of Today’s Identity Politics

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    The Intellectual Roots of Today’s Identity Politics

    The Intellectual Roots of Today’s Identity Politics should include American in it's title for American identity politics is peculiar here. In Europe it's tied to national populist. Here it's tied to race, sex, orientation, and other rather abstract groups.

    Identity politics here is imbued with neo-Marxist postmodernism.

    It is a review of Mike Gonzalez’s The Plot to Change America: How Identity Politics Is Dividing the Land of the Free.

    ...The story begins in 1928, when Mussolini’s regime sentenced a young Antonio Gramsci, then the leader of the Communist Party in Italy, to 20 years in prison, hoping to “stop his mind from ever working again,” in the prosecutor’s own words. Imprisonment instead afforded him a quiet retreat to refashion Marxism for the future, birthing a brand of it that endures at the core of American society to this day in the form of identity politics.

    Gramsci concocted his ideological chef d’oeuvre, his Prison Notebooks, out of frustration. European Marxists had looked forward to the armageddon of 1918, hoping the capitalist-nationalist $#@!tail that had fueled World War I would give way to socialist uprisings across the continent. And yet a whole decade after Russia pulled out of the war, the Bolsheviks still lacked imitators west of the Urals. The ability of bourgeois democracy to perpetuate itself through democratic means could only be explained, in Gramsci’s view, by the enduring sway of religion, tradition, family, and nation among the working class. Replacing economics with culture as the locus of oppression was Gramsci’s profound twist to Marxist thought, which had until then identified the power imbalances derived from capital ownership as the ultimate engine of historical change. For Gramsci, workers had compounded their own oppression by espousing the mores of their capitalist overlords.

    ...[Herbert Marcuse, Frankfurt School's intellectual chief,] singular contribution was to adapt Gramscian thought to the American experiment through the invention of identity politics. Having shifted the Marxist focus from economics to culture and shifted the locus of victimhood from the culturally mainstream worker to the minorities struggling on the edges of society, all the movement lacked was an organizing principle — one that was shortly enunciated in Communist student activist Rudi Dutschke’s call for a “long march through the institutions.”...

    ...Gonzalez argues, if not for its stealth inspiration in Marxist ideology, then identity politics ought to be rejected for the full-frontal assault on the Constitution it represents. Making this argument is not without risks, for it may in turn redirect the bile of social-justice warriors from modern capitalism to the Founding — if they haven’t already made that turn of their own accord. Indeed, there’s plenty of evidence that the Founding is increasingly a target: The publication of Gonzalez’s book comes barely two months after Nikole-Hannah Jones was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her commentary introducing the New York Times’ 1619 Project, a historically fallacious collection of essays that overplays the role of slavery in America’s Founding. If there ever was a sign that Rutsche’s “long march through the institutions” has successfully swept academia and journalism, the 1619 Project is it, and the threat this transformation poses to American constitutional principles is the core warning in Gonzalez’s book....
    Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler

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    It is cultural Marxism.
    ΜOΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ


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    Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler

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    Andrew Klavan asks why BLM loves Marx when they hate racists.



    BLM in their embrace of racist Marx demonstrates it's not about blacks, not about race, but about class.
    Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler

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    This explains the distinction between MLK's politics and that of Malcom X's dwn to BLM's.

    America’s two warring views of race

    ...Hernandez contrasts the natural law tradition, which upholds the integrity of the individual, with the “dialectical separationist approach, or the collectivist approach.” Hernandez also calls it “the dialectic of antagonism,” aptly personified by Malcolm X. In this view, “race is a basic reality, a sort of practical absolute, the heart of individual identity, what we can call racialist essentialism. The very substance of what it means to be human cannot be understood apart from the concept of race at the heart of identity,” he says.

    This view sees “the crimes of ethnocentrism, colonialism, imperialism, and racism” as creating an “oppressive and irreformable system” in the United States and the West generally. Ironically, this leads black liberationist collectivists to read U.S. history the same way that “rabid racists read history.”

    This has “a precursor in the Marxist understanding of human nature … The very nature of man is collectivized in Marx,” he says. “In Marx, class was what moved history, but in this dialectical system … it is race that is a catalyst.”

    As in Marxism, this understanding of race and race relations in America emphasizes “collective identity, collective innocence, and collective guilt. The racial group takes priority. … The only way to end this tension is the acquisition of power” by the group – something Orlando Patterson calls it “sovereign freedom.” To proponents of this collectivist dialectic, “the individual can become an impediment to our progress.”

    This view aligns with the policy platform of Black Lives Matter and its allied organizations.

    By extension, one can extrapolate that this view deemphasizes investment in improving one’s own, God-given potential in favor of a zero-sum struggle for collective power. The world, and countless families, are literally poorer for it.

    ...
    Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler

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    Quote Originally Posted by Chris View Post
    The Intellectual Roots of Today’s Identity Politics should include American in it's title for American identity politics is peculiar here. In Europe it's tied to national populist. Here it's tied to race, sex, orientation, and other rather abstract groups.

    Identity politics here is imbued with neo-Marxist postmodernism.

    It is a review of Mike Gonzalez’s The Plot to Change America: How Identity Politics Is Dividing the Land of the Free.
    Please read more before you post https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...rs-endorsement

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    Quote Originally Posted by jet57 View Post
    Thanks, that says exactly what the OP is describing:

    In 1977 I co-authored the Combahee River Collective Statement – a document that emphasized the overlapping forms of economic and social oppression faced by black women. The Combahee Statement coined the term “identity politics”, and it was instrumental in pushing the international left and other political movements to understand inequality as a structural and intersectional phenomenon which affects oppressed groups differently.
    Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler

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    Quote Originally Posted by Chris View Post
    Thanks, that says exactly what the OP is describing:
    Your OP is slanted and doesn't tell the whole story.

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