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Chris
09-17-2017, 10:01 AM
'The Once And Future Liberal' is a blistering critique of identity politics and a fractured left (http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-lilla-liberal-20170915-story.html) is just that.

In it, liberal Alexander Nazaryan traces the roots of identity politics to the Reagan Revolution, but doesn't explain this very well. I trace it as a post-modern neo-Marxism that shifted class oppresion to identity group oppression. But let's see what he has to say.


...“The Once and Future Liberal” is an expansion on an op-ed piece that Lilla, a professor of humanities at Columbia University, wrote for the New York Times 10 days after Trump’s unlikely victory in the November election. Titled “The End of Identity Liberalism,” the piece argued that “the fixation on diversity in our schools and in the press has produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined group.”

...This book expands on Lilla’s op-ed piece, though not by much: “The Once and Future Liberal” is only 160 pages long, buttressing the original argument with historical context. Lilla divides modern American politics into two “dispensations,” as he calls them: Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s big government and Ronald Reagan’s little government. His canny central insight is that we have never recovered from the ruinous atomization of the Reagan Revolution, which depicted any government at all as “an alien spaceship descending on the happy residents of Middlesuburb, U.S.A., sucking up into itself all the resources, corrupting the children, and enslaving the population.” He notes, for example, that it was Bill Clinton who declared that “the era of big government is over” in 1996. Yes, I know he was “triangulating.” But he was abdicating too.

But if Democratic politicians have largely abandoned New Deal policies, it is because their liberal base had by the 1980s lost interest in the kind of economic populism that had once been the party’s central creed. In the hands of the post-Vietnam left, Lilla argues, the individualism of the right became identity politics, an obsession with race, ethnicity and gender that blinded Democrats to unifying realities: “Reaganism for lefties.”

The noble convictions of the civil rights movement, Stonewall and feminism, Lilla says, have devolved into an obsession with selfhood, in the ways we are different, not the same. He singles out Black Lives Matter as “a textbook example of how not to build solidarity”: The movement highlights the wrongs suffered by African Americans by a society that has never transcended Jim Crow. At the same time, it insists that whites could never fully understand that plight and could thus be only partial allies in the struggle for equality.

...Yes, Donald Trump is president. But if his disastrous presidency proves anything, it is that Republicanism is the biggest lie. Lilla plainly believes that the Reaganite vision of limited government is going the way of the CD player. Spend two minutes watching a waxen House Speaker Paul D. Ryan try to explain the benefit of tax cuts, and that point will be thoroughly confirmed. But what comes next, after Trump and his minions are embalmed in ignominy? Will the Democrats come up with a more compelling message, or will they squabble about whether a white candidate’s use of a Mary J. Blige song is cultural appropriation? The future is unwritten, but it can also be remarkably unkind.

Chris
09-21-2017, 02:50 PM
From a rightwing perspective: Conservative Americans Experience Progressive Identity Politics as Hatred (http://www.nationalreview.com/article/451551/identity-politics-democrats-preach-hate-toward-conservatives)


In the days following Donald Trump’s surprise election win, progressive Columbia University humanities professor Mark Lilla published a thought-provoking, viral essay that took direct aim at identity politics:



In recent years American liberalism has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing.


...as I read the attacks on Lilla, I was struck by the extent to which his critics were either ignorant of or indifferent to the way in which conservatives and many moderate white Americans experience identity politics. They do not know the face that identity politics presents to Americans outside the progressive bubble.

To Lilla’s critics, minority identity politics is a defensive response to white identity politics (sometimes outright white supremacy) that is necessary for achieving a measure of justice and fairness in society. Sure, there are excesses, but they’re mainly confined to the fringes of the academy, where outrages are exaggerated by the likes of Fox News. Here’s the New Yorker’s David Remnick making that case in his interview with Lilla:



And one of the things right-wing media does is take some examples of exaggerated identity politics, in your terms—cartoonish moments—and blow them up on Fox or Breitbart or the rest, and make it seem as if every student at Columbia or Oberlin or the University of Chicago is inflamed with this. Am I wrong?


When I read words like that, I think they just don’t know. Or maybe they know — but don’t care — the extent to which a hostile, illiberal brand of identity politics has seeped into every nook and cranny of American culture. It’s not the case that conservative Americans sit ensconced in their immense privilege, raging at an irrelevant fringe hyped up by Fox News. Rather they experience identity politics at their jobs, hear their children and grandchildren describe experiencing it at school, and find it so omnipresent on television and online that they can’t seem to find any space (aside from conservative media) where someone isn’t mocking their values or accusing them of being complicit in historical atrocities.

...None of this justifies white identity politics. And nothing I write should be construed to deny the reality that racism still exists in American life and inflicts real harm on American citizens. But treating people who are not racists and not bigots as if they’re evil — and then sometimes even attempting to suppress their liberties — is often the very essence of modern identity politics, and it is exactly as divisive and destructive as Lilla says.

Mister D
09-21-2017, 03:00 PM
'The Once And Future Liberal' is a blistering critique of identity politics and a fractured left (http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-lilla-liberal-20170915-story.html) is just that.

In it, liberal Alexander Nazaryan traces the roots of identity politics to the Reagan Revolution, but doesn't explain this very well. I trace it as a post-modern neo-Marxism that shifted class oppresion to identity group oppression. But let's see what he has to say.
I think you're right in that but then identitarians are not practicing any form of identity politics. I am sympathetic to identitarianism and see it more as a response to globalization and homogenization, the collapse of borders and the threatened loss of identity.

Chris
09-21-2017, 03:12 PM
I think you're right in that but then identitarians are not practicing any form of identity politics. I am sympathetic to identitarianism and see it more as a response to globalization and homogenization, the collapse of borders and the threatened loss of identity.

Agree, identity politics and identitarianism are two different things. Identity politics is just about race, gender, sexual orientation, and the like. It's against perceived oppression and seeks abstract rights and abstract justice.

Identitarianism--and I only just learned this doing some quick research on Lana Lokteff in Mark's thread--identitarianism is European and there has to do with nationalism and presenving national identity and anti-immigration. That makes sense. Lana Lokteff is, I think, Swedish and identitarian and this is a major movement in Sweden now.

Chris
09-21-2017, 03:14 PM
"The Identitarian movement is a movement that advocates the preservation of national identity and a return to 'traditional western values'. It started in France in 2002 as a conservative youth movement deriving from the French Nouvelle Droite (New Right) Génération Identitaire. Initially the youth wing of the anti-immigration, conservative Bloc Identitaire, it has taken on its own identity and is largely classified as a separate entity altogether with the intent of spreading across Europe."

@ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identitarian_movement

Which wiki talks of it cropping up here in the US recently.

Mister D
09-21-2017, 03:18 PM
Agree, identity politics and identitarianism are two different things. Identity politics is just about race, gender, sexual orientation, and the like. It's against perceived oppression and seeks abstract rights and abstract justice.

Identitarianism--and I only just learned this doing some quick research on Lana Lokteff in Mark's thread--identitarianism is European and there has to do with nationalism and presenving national identity and anti-immigration. That makes sense. Lana Lokteff is, I think, Swedish and identitarian and this is a major movement in Sweden now.

Yes, the term was coined to describe a European movement (linked to the Nouvelle Droite as I understand it) but it has spawned a similar movement in the US. The problem in the US is that there is only a materialist and consumerist culture to defend so race plays a less subdued role than it does in day France or Germany.

Mister D
09-21-2017, 03:21 PM
"The Identitarian movement is a movement that advocates the preservation of national identity and a return to 'traditional western values'. It started in France in 2002 as a conservative youth movement deriving from the French Nouvelle Droite (New Right) Génération Identitaire. Initially the youth wing of the anti-immigration, conservative Bloc Identitaire, it has taken on its own identity and is largely classified as a separate entity altogether with the intent of spreading across Europe."

@ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identitarian_movement

Which wiki talks of it cropping up here in the US recently.
That's it. Generation Identity. I was trying to remember their founder's name. I just looked it up. I may have to read his book. I mean it's a must for someone like me. I need to keep up with the times. :)

Mechanic
09-21-2017, 04:00 PM
Saint Ray Goon originated the "blame someone else for your faults" politics. It was his mantra and belief that he had no faults and neither did any other republican. Just so you know about Saint Ray Goon.

Chris
09-21-2017, 04:20 PM
That's it. Generation Identity. I was trying to remember their founder's name. I just looked it up. I may have to read his book. I mean it's a must for someone like me. I need to keep up with the times. :)

Interesting, after looking around, it's mainly a youth movement in Europe. Almost the opposite of here.

Chris
09-21-2017, 04:22 PM
Saint Ray Goon originated the "blame someone else for your faults" politics. It was his mantra and belief that he had no faults and neither did any other republican. Just so you know about Saint Ray Goon.

Never heard of him but certainly Reps have faults, Trump to name one.