{"id":5157,"date":"2017-10-10T05:33:18","date_gmt":"2017-10-10T05:33:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2017\/10\/10\/an-identitarian-is-an-identitarian-left-or-alt-right\/"},"modified":"2017-10-10T05:33:18","modified_gmt":"2017-10-10T05:33:18","slug":"an-identitarian-is-an-identitarian-left-or-alt-right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2017\/10\/10\/an-identitarian-is-an-identitarian-left-or-alt-right\/","title":{"rendered":"An Identitarian is an Identitarian, Left or Alt-Right"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 11pt;\">And a pox on both houses, say I. What strikes me is what they have in common. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2017\/10\/06\/opinion\/ta-nehisi-coates-whiteness-power.html\">Here<\/a> is something from the NYT that makes sense (emphasis added):<\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 11pt;\">In the most memorable sentence in \u201cThe First White President,\u201d Mr. Coates declares, \u201cWhereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies.\u201d I have spent the past six months poring over the literature of European and American white nationalism, in the process interviewing noxious identitarians like the alt-right founder Richard Spencer. The most shocking aspect of Mr. Coates\u2019s wording here is the extent to which it mirrors ideas of race \u2014 specifically the specialness of whiteness \u2014 that white supremacist thinkers cherish. <\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 11pt;\">This, more than anything, is what is so unsettling about Mr. Coates\u2019s recent writing and the tenor of the leftist \u201cwoke\u201d discourse he epitomizes. Though it is not at all morally equivalent, it is nonetheless in sync with the toxic premises of white supremacism. <strong>Both sides eagerly reduce people to abstract color categories, all the while feeding off of and legitimizing each other, while those of us searching for gray areas and common ground get devoured twice.<\/strong> <strong>Both sides mystify racial identity, interpreting it as something fixed, determinative and almost supernatural.<\/strong> For Mr. Coates, whiteness is a \u201ctalisman,\u201d an \u201camulet\u201d of \u201celdritch energies\u201d that explains all injustice; for the abysmal early-20th-century Italian fascist and racist icon Julius Evola, it was a \u201cmeta-biological force,\u201d a collective mind-spirit that justifies all inequality. In either case, whites are preordained to walk that special path. It is a dangerous vision of life we should refuse no matter who is doing the conjuring<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 11pt;\">I am not so sure the febrile, destructive&#0160; bullshit of millionaire celebrity Coates is&#0160; morally superior to white supremacism, but the bolded passage gets at the truth of the matter.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 11pt;\">By the way, the bums at the NYT have made it difficult to copy from their articles, but <a href=\"https:\/\/www.quora.com\/How-do-I-cut-and-paste-from-the-new-online-format-of-the-New-York-Times\">here<\/a> are two work-arounds.&#0160; I just now employed the first and it is not too much of a pain.<\/span><\/p>\n<fieldset class=\"zemanta-related\">\n<legend class=\"zemanta-related-title\">Related articles<\/legend>\n<div class=\"zemanta-article-ul zemanta-article-ul-image\" style=\"margin: 0; padding: 0; overflow: hidden;\">\n<div class=\"zemanta-article-ul-li-image zemanta-article-ul-li\" style=\"padding: 0; background: none; list-style: none; display: block; float: left; vertical-align: top; text-align: left; width: 84px; font-size: 11px; margin: 2px 10px 10px 2px;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/iwantanewleft.typepad.com\/i-want-a-new-left\/2017\/09\/the-left-root-causes-and-white-supremacists.html\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" style=\"box-shadow: 0px 0px 4px #999; padding: 2px; display: block; border-radius: 2px; text-decoration: none;\" target=\"_blank\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.zemanta.com\/noimg_100_80_80.jpg\" style=\"padding: 0; margin: 0; border: 0; display: block; width: 80px; max-width: 100%;\" \/><\/a><a href=\"http:\/\/iwantanewleft.typepad.com\/i-want-a-new-left\/2017\/09\/the-left-root-causes-and-white-supremacists.html\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" style=\"display: block; overflow: hidden; text-decoration: none; line-height: 12pt; height: 80px; padding: 5px 2px 0 2px;\" target=\"_blank\">The Left, Root Causes, and White Supremacists<\/a><\/div>\n<div class=\"zemanta-article-ul-li-image zemanta-article-ul-li\" style=\"padding: 0; background: none; list-style: none; display: block; float: left; vertical-align: top; text-align: left; width: 84px; font-size: 11px; margin: 2px 10px 10px 2px;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/maverickphilosopher.typepad.com\/maverick_philosopher\/2017\/09\/is-every-racist-a-white-supremacist.html\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" style=\"box-shadow: 0px 0px 4px #999; padding: 2px; display: block; border-radius: 2px; text-decoration: none;\" target=\"_blank\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.zemanta.com\/noimg_47_80_80.jpg\" style=\"padding: 0; margin: 0; border: 0; display: block; width: 80px; max-width: 100%;\" \/><\/a><a href=\"http:\/\/maverickphilosopher.typepad.com\/maverick_philosopher\/2017\/09\/is-every-racist-a-white-supremacist.html\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" style=\"display: block; overflow: hidden; text-decoration: none; line-height: 12pt; height: 80px; padding: 5px 2px 0 2px;\" target=\"_blank\">Is Every Racist a White Supremacist?<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/fieldset>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>And a pox on both houses, say I. What strikes me is what they have in common. Here is something from the NYT that makes sense (emphasis added): In the most memorable sentence in \u201cThe First White President,\u201d Mr. Coates declares, \u201cWhereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2017\/10\/10\/an-identitarian-is-an-identitarian-left-or-alt-right\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;An Identitarian is an Identitarian, Left or Alt-Right&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[600,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alternative-right","category-race"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5157"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5157\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}