Understanding Identity Politics

[Muda69]

https://dvorak.substack.com/p/understanding-identity-politics

Quote

The Democrat Party someplace and sometime ago found this non-issue of oppression within American society and decided to bank on it to create a voting bloc of the oppressed. In their mind’s view the idea was that everyone, if identified as a sub-group, could be convinced that there was a small group of oppressors oppressing them. This resulted in identity politics, a term often used but not understood.

Jordan Peterson was one of the first to explain its roots. Here is an excerpt from his entry in the Wikipedia:

Peterson states that postmodern philosophers and sociologists since the 1960s have built upon and extended certain core tenets of Marxism and communism while simultaneously appearing to disavow both ideologies. He says that it is difficult to understand contemporary Western society without considering the influence of a strain of postmodernism thought that migrated from France to the United States through the English department at Yale University. He states that certain academics in the humanities, "started to play a sleight of hand, and instead of pitting the proletariat, the working class, against the bourgeois, they started to pit the oppressed against the oppressor. That opened up the avenue to identifying any number of groups as oppressed and oppressor and to continue the same narrative under a different name.

Peterson spotted the roots of this situation which he broadly refers to as an element of cultural Marxism.

The Democrats have made hay to some extent by identifying a lot of these oppressed groups and in most cases informed them that they were all oppressed.

This happened with orchestrated publicity stunts. A good example was the transsexual toilet laws controversy. This pointed out “oppression” and caught a lot of people flat-footed to and embarrassed by their “lack of compassion.”

The political correctness, which became a methodology of free speech control has mutated into an instrument of thought control adopted and accepted by many Americans and everyone in the Democrat party. You say or do something outside the proscribed limitations, and you lose your job, your career, your livelihood. The set of rules that make up the politically correct infrastructure have turned organic, taking on a life of their own with new rules cropping up all the time.

The most onerous are the considerations for hate speech, which is protected speech under the first amendment, but prohibited by the god of political correctness. This is the case despite the fact that hate speech is ill-defined (like most politically correct anything) and not applicable. In essence hate speech can always apply to the oppressed and never the oppressors.

For example, you can hate whitey and hate men because they are always identified as oppressors, born to a supposed genetic royalty and thus given white privilege, even though there is no such thing as white privilege.

This idea was mocked by Eddie Murphy when he put on “white face” in one of his SNL skits and found that by being white everything was free.

In fact, white privilege is the necessary element – although an artificial construct – needed to make identity politics work. If you are going to define groups of “oppressed,” you need convenient oppressors. Why not a single homogeneous group? And the group cannot contain any of the supposed oppressed such as gay white men or women, so they have to be further segmented to straight males. But you need a code for this that is new (and post-modern) so we now use the awkward term CIS-gender white male. They are the oppressors of everyone. And hating them is OK and encouraged.

How this nonsense is supposed to translate into votes for Democrats is sketchy, to say the least. In fact, the opportunity may backfire for two reasons. First, it’s insulting to white people in general (men and women, straight or gay) who make up about 70-percent of the voting population. And it has the potential to annoy most of the supposed oppressed who do not see things this way and find it insulting to be defined as inferior and oppressed losers, the “poor things” who need all this help.

The backlash potential is huge. This whole direction, stemming from actual Marxist ideology, may be the biggest mistake ever made by the Democrats. And there seems to be nobody in the party equipped to deal with it because standing against any of it would, in itself, not be politically correct.

The media, which represents Democrat Party supporters, has played along like Marxist-branded “useful idiots” and forced the political correctness mechanism into the public sphere as a good thing, when it is not. The so-called mainstream media is probably the most responsible for the mess just as they are responsible for getting Trump elected by over-covering his campaign hoping to mock him.

All these trends will continue through every election and if there is even a hint that this strategy is working in any circumstance, the situation will worsen. There is no alternative strategy on the horizon.

--end

Agreed.  Spot on commentary from Mr. Dvorak.

 

[Alduflux]

3 hours ago, Muda69 said:

https://dvorak.substack.com/p/understanding-identity-politics

Agreed.  Spot on commentary from Mr. Dvorak.

 

I'm confused why you think this matters.

[Muda69]

16 hours ago, Alduflux said:

I'm confused why you think this matters.

Educate yourself:  https://www.noagendashow.net/

 

[swordfish]

21 hours ago, Muda69 said:

https://dvorak.substack.com/p/understanding-identity-politics

Agreed.  Spot on commentary from Mr. Dvorak.

 

In my nearly six decades on this Earth I was witnessing a unity never seen before in this country especially after 9/11.  I was for the first time feeling that equality was definitely within reach for everybody provided everybody put effort into it.  Then along came Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama beating a drum proclaiming we were nowhere near that point of equality and basically erasing years of progress.  And here we are today.  In the country with the most freedom anywhere in the World, in order for the left to remain relevant, the need for a perpetual "underclass" that always needs rescuing from oppression is their only key to success by promising to rescue someone who doesn't need it.  Everyone (myself included) is part of some contrived, oppressed, group of individuals that has been parsed out as "lonely and forgotten".   Forgetting we live in the USA where the opportunity exists for everyone and anyone to make it.

[Muda69]

1 minute ago, swordfish said:

In the country with the most freedom anywhere in the World, in order for the left to remain relevant, the need for a perpetual "underclass" that always needs rescuing from oppression is their only key to success by promising to rescue someone who doesn't need it.  Everyone (myself included) is part of some contrived, oppressed, group of individuals that has been parsed out as "lonely and forgotten".   Forgetting we live in the USA where the opportunity exists for everyone and anyone to make it.

Bingo.  Great statements!