The title is a play on the title of a great Burt Bacharach-Hal David composition here sung by Dionne Warwick.
Category: Leftism and Political Correctness
Is Leftist Politics Anti-Identity Politics?
S. J. writes,
Reading your posts lately, the following thought struck me. I wonder if it's struck you, and if you'd agree:Identity politics is a misleading name for the recent catastrophic turn in so-called progressive politics. For what it actually aims at primarily is the *destruction* of traditional modes of identity, which are, loosely speaking, summarised by the slogan "faith, flag and family". What it replaces those with is of secondary importance to that central mission.That's why the obvious contradictions, and vicious internecine rivalries, on the left seem not (with certain honourable exceptions) to lead to anything approaching the self-doubt and ideological re-evaluation that conservatives assume – logically from their own frame of reference – that they ought. For it simply doesn't matter to the contemporary leftist that his preferred categories are flimsy and self-contradictory. They're only a means to an end; a solvent to be applied to the older forms of identity and self-understanding.On which account, it would be far more truthful to reckon it "anti-identity politics".(I might also add that we should therefore avoid the trap of playing up too much the individualism that, rightly understood, is central to much conservative thought, to the point of downplaying those old and authentic attachments – and so allowing the left to pose, utterly falsely, as the champions of community and relational life.)With heartfelt thanks for the stimulation to thought, not to say sheer enjoyment, that your blog continues to provide.
My kind reader is suggesting that left-wing politics is destructive of traditional forms of identity and therefore best understood as anti-identity politics rather than as identity politics.
I see matters differently. There is an identity politics of the Left and an identity politics of the Right. This became obvious to me when, after objecting to the tribalism of blacks, Hispanics, and other racial/ethnic groups, and after calling for a transcending of tribalism, I was countered by certain alt-rightists/neo-reactionaries who reject any such transcending and think that what is needed is a white tribalism to oppose tribalisms 'of color.' See If I'm a Racist, then You're a Tribalist! (56 good comments).
As I see it, there is nothing inherently leftist or rightist about identity politics in the way political correctness is inherently leftist. (Anyone who is politically correct is by definition a leftist.) So what is it to be identity-political? I suggest that it is to take one's primary self-identification to be a tribal identification, an identification in terms of race, ethnicity, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, religion, disability, socio-economic class, or some combination of these.
In a separate post I hope to clarify and develop this suggestion.
Eminent Domain Abuse
Little Pink House, a movie.
The right to private property is another thing leftists don't understand, unless it is their private property.
Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959, tr. Ryan Bloom, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010, p. 177:
The Revolution is good. But why? One must have an idea of the civilization one wishes to create. The abolition of property is not an end. It is a means.
This is foolish. Private property is the foundation of individual liberty. The problem is not private property, but too few people owning property, property they have worked for, and thus value and care about. I include among private property the means for the defense of life, liberty, and property against assorted malefactors from unorganized criminals to rogue elements in the government.
Separation of Leftism and State
Contemporary liberals support separation of church and state, and so do I. But they have no problem with using the coercive power of the state to impose leftist ideology. Now leftism is not a religion, pace Dennis Prager (see article below), but it is very much like one, and if you can see what is wrong with allowing contentious theological doctrines to drive politics, then you ought to be able to see what is wrong with allowing the highly contentious ideological commitments of leftism to drive politics, most of which revolve around the leftist trinity (Prager) of race, gender, and class.
If "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion . . . ," as per the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U. S. Constitution, then it ought to make no law that establishes the quasi-religion of leftism.
Even more important than separation of church and state these days is separation of leftism and state.
This is a large topic; for today, just one example of what I am getting at.
It is a tenet of contemporary liberalism that opposition to same-sex 'marriage' is 'discriminatory' and that opponents of it are 'bigots.' Now this is both obtuse and slanderous for reasons we supplied in earlier entries. But liberals have a right to their opinions, even if it is to be wished that they would give some thought to the corresponding obligation to form correct opinions. Be that as it may, liberals have a right to their benighted views, and we ought to tolerate them. After all, we too are liberals in a much older, and a defensible, sense: we believe in toleration, open inquiry, free speech, individual liberty, etc. And we are liberal and self-critical enough to countenance the possibility that perhaps we are the benighted ones.
But toleration has limits.
What we ought not tolerate is the sort of coercion of the individual by the state that we find in the case of the Washington State florist who refused to sell floral arrangements to be used at a same-sex 'marriage' ceremony. This woman has no animus against gays, and had sold flowers to the homosexual couple. But she was not about to violate her own conscience by providing flowers for a same-sex event. As a result she was sued by the Washington State attorney general, and then by the ACLU.
Now do you see what is wrong with that?
The state says to the individual:
You have a right to your religious and philosophical beliefs, but only so long as you keep them to yourself and don't allow them to be expressed in your relations with your fellow citizens. You may believe what you want in the privacy of your own mind, but you may not translate your beliefs into social or political action. But we are free to translate our leftist 'theology' into rules and regulations that diminish your liberty.
What then becomes of the "free exercise of religion" spoken of in the First Amendment? It is out the window. The totalitarian state has taken one more step in its assault on the liberty of the individual.
The totalitarian state of the contemporary liberal says to the individual: you have no right to live your beliefs unless we allow you to; but we have every right to impose our leftist beliefs on you and force you to live as we see fit.
Here are some home truths that cannot be repeated too often:
We are not the property of the state.
Our rights and liberties do not come from the state, but are logically antecedent to it, inscribed as they are in the very nature of things.
We do not have to justify our keeping of what is ours; the state has to justify its taking.
Related:
Central Planning?
You say you're for it? Would you still be for it if I could show you that it is virtually certain that you will end up among the centrally planned and not among the central planners?
Why Would Anybody Need a Knife?
More vicious and willful stupidity from 'liberals' (emphasis added):
In light of that crime spike London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, has laid down the law. “No excuses,” he declared the other day on Twitter. “There is never a reason to carry a knife. Anyone who does will be caught, and they will feel the full force of the law.”
Britain imposes strict gun control. It also imposes absurdly strict knife control. The government forbids carrying a knife in public “without good reason, unless it has a folding blade with a cutting edge 3 inches long or less.”
Take note: Lock-back knives — the kind in which the blade locks in the open position, to prevent accidental folding while the knife is being held, and thus lacerated fingers — are verboten no matter the blade length. Lock-backs “can include multi-tool knives — tools that also contain other devices such as a screwdriver or can opener.” And a “good reason” for carrying a knife includes using the knife for work, or perhaps “historical reenactment or religious purposes.” Not, say, self-defense, or just because a knife sometimes comes in handy.
The Maoist Left in the U. S.
Here:
Just a few years ago in France, Islamic radicals sympathetic to ISIS stormed the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a French satire magazine, and murdered the employees. Thankfully, in this country, the leftwing mob has not made the leap to taking the lives of those they disagree with. For now, at least, they are content just to ruin lives and businesses.
What we are seeing is an American Culture Revolution, unleashed by a narrow-minded group of leftists who have more in common with Mao than Washington. They have become dominant in the American media and have systematically purged conservative voices from the air and print. Conservative thought is more and more relegated to a ghetto and should any prominent conservative try to leave the ghetto, the leftwing mob will take action to destroy them. Liberals like Chris Cuomo can have a show on CNN attacking a variety of conjured conservative straw men under the veneer of objective news, while a conservative like Kevin Williamson cannot even write columns in The Atlantic.
The result will increasingly be that fringe ideas grab hold of people's imagination. The left has continually reduced the window of what topics are acceptable to those they agree with. Those ideas, in turn, change constantly depending on what group wakes up feeling oppressed on a particular day. They have exiled credible conservative voices, claiming that the most mainstream and innocuous are as racist and bigoted as the alt-right fringe. And if there is no difference between the two, more and more will gravitate to the truly extreme through emotional appeal. The left's insistence on determining who is reasonable on the right will only help bolster the most unreasonable voices on both sides.
Kevin Williamson is a NeverTrumper, which is never good, and Nick Gillespie lays into him effectively here, for failing to appreciate the libertarian accomplishments of Trump.
A sound conservatism incorporates some libertarian ideas even if the Libertarian Party is a 'losertarian' joke and the libertarian worldview taken in toto is a disaster. Open borders? Legalize drugs? Ron Johnson and the boys certainly do smoke a lot of dope.
Lunacy in excelsis at the ‘Universities’
This from a reader:
You might be interested to know that a Canadian university recently had a job ad that might be even worse than the one you mentioned from the University of California at San Diego:
. . . candidates shall demonstrate a capacity for collegial service and a commitment to upholding the values of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion as it pertains to service, teaching, and research activities.
So not only will the successful applicant spit out Far Left idiocies in class but, in addition, he'll make sure that his philosophical research demonstrates his commitment to Far Left idiocies. It's okay to argue that God doesn't exist, or that no one knows that the external world exists, or that Bruce Jenner is a woman. It's not okay to argue that Equity, Diversity and Inclusion are questionable ideals. It's not even okay to hold on to a few shreds of dignity by just ignoring the topic. No. The successful applicant will demonstrate his commitment to these idiotic "values" in published work.
They didn't explain how to do that if you only do research on vagueness or compatibilism, say. I'm guessing it would be enough, for now, to choose the right kinds of examples. Maybe if you wanted to illustrate some point about vagueness you could say this: "Satumbo is counting the pink hairs around Bruce's pierced nipple, in Arabic…" Or if you were writing about compatibilism: "Suppose that Sally is trying to decide whether ze will come out as genderqueer on Facebook. Suppose ze has a higher-order desire not to desire to come out…" I don't know. Just guessing. Maybe in the future it won't be okay to write about these topics at all, since they make it hard to demonstrate one's Far Left commitments.
What Have You Done for Diversity Lately?
Are you thinking of applying for a faculty position at the University of California at San Diego? As part of your application you will be required to submit a statement detailing your work on behalf of diversity and inclusion.
A bit more evidence that the universities of the land have become leftist seminaries.
It is a curious development. The private universities in the United States founded by religious orders have almost all been stripped of their religious character. It survives only as window dressing. But the move has not been in the direction of ideological neutrality, but toward a substitution of leftist indoctrination for religious indoctrination.
The public universities too have become seed beds of leftism, at least in the non-STEM disciplines.
The sad upshot is that indoctrination dominates inquiry in all the institutions of so-called 'higher' education in the land. There are a few holdouts, of course, and again I am speaking of the non-STEM fields, or most of them: climate science has become highly ideologized.
So I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that university is dead. It is dead in its idea, in its classical understanding.
Part of what killed it is the levelling consequent upon the foolish notion that everyone can profit from university studies. But that is a large separate topic.
Hat tip: Rod Dreher
Ignorant Liberals
NPR writer doesn't understand what Easter celebrates.
Articles of mine urging the defunding of NPR. Should the NRA receive tax monies? Of course not. Then why should organs of leftist propaganda – – and in the case of Planned Parenthood, propaganda and butchery — get them?
But there are too many pussy-wussies among the GOP ever to stop these outrages.
As I have said before, we need the separation of Leftism and State.
UPDATE (4/3):
Mark Steyn weighs in:
You don't publicly flaunt what NPR and Todd wrote because you're an atheist or agnostic; you do it because you're entirely severed from your civilizational inheritance. The old joke is that Nietzsche respected God enough to kill Him. To respect Him enough to kill Him, you have to know something about Him – as nineteenth-century atheists certainly did. Today we have know-nothings, cut off not so much from scripture but from all that derives therefrom . . . .
Trump, Adultery, Morality, and the Alinskyite Left
There is no wisdom on the Left and no common sense. Dennis Prager is a prominent purveyor of common sense. So if you don't know what it is you can learn it from him. Here is a sample:
It should be clear that this whole preoccupation with Trump’s past sex life has nothing to do with morality and everything to do with humiliating Trump — and, thereby, hopefully weakening the Trump presidency — the raison d'etre of the media since he was elected. Here’s one proof: The media rightly celebrate, as we all do, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as one of the moral greats of the 20th century despite reports of his having committed adultery on numerous occasions. [I would add that he also plagiarized portions of his Boston University dissertation.]
Likewise, the media and the Left idolized Sen. Ted Kennedy, regularly referring to him as the “Lion of the Senate.” Yet Kennedy was notorious for his lechery — far more so than Trump. Typical Ted Kennedy behavior, as described in New York magazine, was when he and then-fellow Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd “participated in the famous ‘waitress sandwich’ at La Brasserie in 1985, while their dates were in the bathroom.”
John F. Kennedy remains the most revered of Democratic presidents in the modern era. Yet we now know he routinely had affairs in the White House in his wife’s absence and had the Secret Service provide him advance notice of her return.
And, by the way, if sexual infidelity invalidates the character and, therefore, the worthiness of a politician, why doesn’t it invalidate the character and worthiness of an editor at The New York Times or The Washington Post? Why aren’t their sex lives investigated? They have, after all, more influence than almost any politician.
A Double Standard or an Alinskyite Tactic?
One mistake I have corrected in my own political thinking — thanks in part to Malcolm Pollack and 'Jacques' — is the tendency to confuse the double standard with a hard-Left Alinskyite tactic the name of which, if it has one, I don't know.
Suppose you and I are politically opposed but agree on certain values or standards. We are, for example, both strongly committed to free speech and open inquiry. But your behavior suggests a tacit commitment to "Free speech for me but not for thee." This is an example of a double standard. The moniker is infelicitous in that there are not two standards but one; what makes the standard 'double' is that it is inconsistently applied. While sincerely professing a commitment to free speech you tend to take it more seriously in your own case and less seriously in the cases of those with opposing views. You really do accept the value of free speech; it is just that you have a hard time in the heat of conflict applying it fairly and consistently to all parties.
But there is something far worse than the double standard.
The most vicious and mendacious type of leftist will feign an interest in our conservative standards and then use them against us. In many cases they don't even feign the interest.
The sex business referenced above is a good example. Leftists do not value chastity, sexual purity, traditional marriage (as opposed to same-sex 'marriage'), marital fidelity. Talk of lust as a deadly sin is a joke to them. They have a pronounced libertine wobble and are entirely too 'sophisticated' for the above. They celebrate 'alternative sexual lifestyles.' Bestiality is not a grave sin but something to joke about (Al Franken).
Since they do not share our standards when it comes to sexual behavior, it is a mistake to accuse them of a double standard when they pillory Trump while giving Teddy a pass. The truth is, they see politics as war and will do anything to win including using our standards against us while mocking those very standards.
The same with free speech. The Alinskyite hard Left doesn't give a damn about free speech except insofar as they can use it it to destroy free speech. These tactics are at least as old as V. I. Lenin, and people need to be aware of them.
Our political opponents on the Left are not fellow citizens but domestic enemies and the sooner we admit this fact the better.
As for Teddy Boy's waitress sandwich, you can read about it here.
Liberals Really are Stupid People
Stupid and destructive. For example, when they take children as moral authorities.
Progressives as the New Confederates
Historian Hanson provides a fascinating contextualization of recent leftist antics.
‘Liberals’ Against Free Speech
The Czech Canary in the Cultural Coal Mine
A reader who grew up under Czech communism, but who now lives in the US:
Hi Rod,
A thought about comments like this one:
“Creating an equivalence between a poster in an American high school promoting understanding, with imagery that can be misunderstood, and Hungarian terrorism, is a huge disrespect to Hungarian terrorism. There is no equivalence”
and many other similar ones …
What your readers do not understand is that horrors of communism did not start with people planning to murder and torture. They started with “posters in … schools promoting understanding, justice, equality”, with starry-eyed people wanting to address societal ills. It was this social reengineering that eventually and inevitably led to murder and torture.
Keep your eyes wide open. People like the Czech reader are canaries in the coal mine.
On the other hand, I keep having a slightly unnerving experience here, both in Hungary and the Czech Republic. People cannot understand the insanity coming from America, the UK, and the EU on LGBT and gender theory. It is literally incomprehensible to them. Just this morning I was talking to a seminary professor of moral theology who said that his thesis on alternative sexualities was laughed at; his colleagues could not believe that anyone would take this stuff seriously. This professor is no advocate for alternative sexualities, but he had lived and taught in the West, and he knows they are going to have to be dealing with this stuff here sooner or later.
I keep telling the people I talk to about this that they should not simply laugh this stuff off as incomprehensible. Several agreed with me that 40 years of communism served as a vaccination against susceptibility to ideological extremism, and that this might be why even atheists (most Czechs are atheists) find the gender theory types to be crackpots. But then, if you had told a lot of Americans in 1998 what would be mainstream in our country on this front in 2018, they would have laughed like the Czechs and the Hungarians laughed. But now look.