In my Sisyphean quest to let neither conservatives nor progressives seize the word “liberal” and distort its meaning into their own, a new ally has emerged. Sadly, the ally is an unduly passionate dolt, but one takes one’s allies where one finds them.
Whatever happened to the grand unifying issues that used to drive the march of progess [sic]? What happened to the universal us, which emphasised [sic] what we had in common? Can’t we all just get along?
Eleanor Penny makes the notion of a “universal us,” of everyone “getting along,” sound kind of childish and silly in a Rodney King sort of way.
But those who want to single out “identity politics” soon run into a problem: all politics is grounded in identity. All politics requires that we build coalitions around a shared picture of reality, a shared image of the future, deeply rooted in our image of ourselves, and what justice or progress might look like. Racial or ethnic background will shape how you experience the criminal justice system. Your gender shapes how you experience work, or how you experience violence. If you’re disabled, you’re more likely to be at the frontline of austerity. These aren’t indulgent departures from real politics – they are rooted in concrete realities of who has power, who has resources, who is exposed to violence and who is sheltered from it. They are cultural frameworks for understanding, organising and indeed changing the world.
First, the “problem” to which she refers isn’t our problem, but the problem born of the myopia of progressive delusion. See things through an identity politics lens and everything is identity politics. Putting the word “all” in italics isn’t an argument and doesn’t make it so. It would be fair to dismiss Penny as a simplistic believer in her own view of life, pushing her word salad rhetoric for the millionth time as if repetition of meaningless jargon will somehow carry the day this time.
Of course, the bad dudes are bad.
This is nothing new. Nationalism is a form of identity politics, crafting a sense of a collective, and then using that image to determine policy priorities: who gets welfare payments, who gets employment priority, who gets bombed. White supremacy is a form of identity politics, too; one which has dominated global politics and class relations for hundreds of years.
But then she finally gets to the crux of the matter.
The collective pearl-clutching over about the embattled state of “western liberal democracy” is a kind of identity politics. It concocts an idea of a shared of universal “progress”, which must be defended at all costs from, well, progressives.
By calling it “pearl-clutching” in order to ridicule “western liberal democracy,” she lets us know that she ain’t buying.
The phrase pearl clutching, which means being shocked by something once-salacious that should now be seen as commonplace, like sex, is ubiquitous on blog posts, especially in media geared towards women. For instance, a recent post on Jezebel called Girl Land author Caitlin Flanagan a “professional pearl clutcher.” Less than two hours later, another Jezebel writer called a sexy Calvin Klein ad “sure to inspire pearl-clutch-y local news stories across the nation.” The feminist website Feministe used the phrase in a blog post about privilege and oppression; another feminist website, Tiger Beatdown, used it to deride a Wall Street Journal writer who was panicking about the subject matter of YA novels. But the phrase isn’t just used in the lady blogosophere: A Washington Post columnist wrote dismissively last week about the “pearl-clutching that hippies’ parents did in the 1960s.” Basically, a writer who discusses pearl-clutching is saying, “I’m too blasé and worldly to be shocked by this.”
How this cry of “pearl-clutching” relates to her complaint is unclear, but that’s pretty much all she’s got to say about why liberalism is identity politics, like nationalism and white supremacy. Because it is.
But her inability to mount a cogent argument, or any argument, in support of her claim is secondary to the only thing of value to be found in this vapid polemic. Liberals are not progressives, and progressives are most assuredly not liberals. Someone else can argue whether nationalism, as a concept, is identity politics, and it seems fairly clear that white supremacy is, even if there are either extremely few, or huge numbers, of white supremacists according to whose definition you use.
But liberals? The folks who want to see due process for everyone, the opportunity for every person to find success and happiness without regard to identity, the people who believe in equality for all, rather than special pleading for the peculiarly fragile who wear their victimhood like a badge of honor. Liberals are the antithesis of identity politics. Where you demand people put your identity first and foremost, liberals refuse to acknowledge it. You are a human being, and are to be given all the rights and privileges enjoyed by every other human being, without suffering any detriment on account of your characteristics.
Progressives can’t argue the point, both because they tend to be particularly poor at persuading anyone not inclined to adopt their delusion, and because they have no argument approaching rationality. But they do have a few things, a hardcore viciousness toward those who won’t succumb to their ideology, academics willing to indoctrinate impressionable youth, whether because they believe or they fear the march of the woke with torches on their classroom, a media determined to advocate rather than report and well-executed ownership of a political party.
The problem for liberals is that the word has been debased by both sides, morphed into meaninglessness and, as Orwell warned, non-existence, as both conservatives and progressives have used it to conflate liberals with progressives.
Penny, despite her inability to explain a point in comprehensible words, is absolutely right about one thing: liberals are not at all progressives, and to progressives are just as evil as nationalists and white supremacists (which basically covers everyone who isn’t progressive from the progressive point of view). Damn straight. And progressive efforts to shame liberals by putting them into the same category as nationalists and white supremacists isn’t going to work, because liberals will no more support racism and sexism from one side than the other.
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I’m not a progressive, but trying to argue on their behalf, I’d say they share your thesis: “You are a human being, and are to be given all the rights and privileges enjoyed by every other human being, without suffering any detriment on account of your characteristics.”
But a lot of people were and to a lesser extent are deprived of these rights and privileges because of their characteristics, and we should work to set those wrongs right.
That’s a nicely benign mischaraterization of progressive ideology. Perhaps if you were progressive, you would have an appreciation of critical race theory and recognize that your assertion reflects nothing of their views, but only your basic ignorance of progressive ideology.
[BTW, everyone here uses a legit email. You get one free pass, which you’ve now used up.]
– I wouldn’t have expected you to argue that I mischaracterize a group solely because I don’t identify with them.
– If you think most mainstream progressives are steeped in critical race theory, perhaps your own view of progressivism is skewed by an interest in academic law?
That wasn’t what I argued. You mischaracterized the ideology because you mischaracterized the ideology. It’s not my fault that you have no clue what you’re talking about, but chose to defend an ideology about which you know nothing.
There’s a certain annoying smugness of dumb shits who show up here, filled with the importance of their opinion but completely unaware of the fact that they’re ignorant.
You’re that dumb shit. As is so often the case, you’re the only one who doesn’t realize it.
[If you require a legitimate email address then perhaps you should update your comment policy, since an email address is an identifier that precludes truly anonymous comments?]
Am I doing it wrong here? Oh well. You got three passes already, but now you know my rules.
That’s not at all the progressive thesis, at least not among the identity progressives . They see human beings not as individuals who all have rights, but as members of groups who fight over rights with other groups. You don’t get rights by extending them to everyone, you get rights by seizing them from other groups.
The entire premise is faulty. In her first example, she essentially argues that the experience with the justice system is the same for Sheriff Clarke as it is for Kalief Browder. Since, you know, your identity shapes how you experience the justice system.
They have a slur in progressive circles for people with the philosophy you are describing. It’s “liberal.”
Liberals lie, as evidenced by your reasoning. Conservatives wish to conserve our LIBERAL democracy grounded in liberty and freedom. Liberals want to tell others what to do. Tell me, who really are the Fascists?
I’m not sure you know what any of the words you are using actually mean.
There’s a certain comfort in your comment, which reminds us why liberals are no more at home with the blithering idiots of the right than the left.
I consider myself a liberal, and a conservative, using the “old” definitions of the words. Republican or Democrat? Those parties represent the oligarchs who run them, and the bigger oligarchs who own them. The progressives and their counterparts on the right are useful idiots who mindlessly carry out the agenda of their rulers, unknowingly working together via the “ratchet effect” to make things worse for all of us, and better for a tiny elite. There is no party representing liberals nor conservatives.
There is far more overlap in outcome between moderate conservatives and liberals than liberals and progressives. This makes progressives nuts, as they lose the support of a massive portion of the traditional Dem base who will never vote for the vulgar, amoral ignoramus, but won’t vote for the other team’s racist either.
And they wonder why turnout is so low. Why can’t those stupid liberals understand how important it is, that they go vote for the latest smug entitled platitude-spouting elite figurehead?
At a cocktail party following the last election, where everyone was a basic NY lib, people talked about length about holding their noses when voting for Hillary, as we knew Trump too well to even entertain the possibility of voting for such a mutt. And Hillary, to progressives, had only one virtue, that being her sex, as she was otherwise a horrible centrist. This next election will prove far more difficult, as the Dems have made it abundantly clear that they neither reflect, nor have any interest in reflecting, liberal values.
Given what happened with Title IX, for example, under Obama, the potential for a disastrous administrative state under a progressive president is every bit as bad, if not worse, than what’s happening under Trump. A pox on both their houses.
I guess I’m a one issue voter.
Who do I want to have the nuclear launch codes, someone that’s a progressive, a liberal, or a conservative?
The argument was proffered that a person of good character matters more than political ideology, but that presents as many problems as it solves. First, is the problem really good character, or the ability to hide bad behind a facade? Second, let’s assume Bernie is a man of good character, but will lead us down a socialist path. Is that better than a vulgar, amoral ignoramus who doesn’t lead us much of anywhere?
It would be great to have someone you could support, both for character and politics, but what if that option doesn’t present itself?
Robert Heinlein.
“Democracy can survive anything except Democrats.”
There comes a time when you swim or sink
So I jumped in the drink
‘Cause I couldn’t make myself clear …
And I know now which is which and what angle I oughta look at it from
I suppose I should be happy to be misread
Better be that than some of the other things I have become
But nobody wants to hear this tale
The plot is clichéd, the jokes are stale
And baby we’ve all heard it all before…
Ms. Penny instructs us as to the difference between progressives and “the far right”: Progressives = those who want transformative justice. The far right = those sharpening their battle-axes for a fascist uprising.
Check. Got that.
I can’t entirely agree with your premise that conservatives can’t see the difference between liberals and progressives. There are prominent conservatives that do acknowledge those differences and Ben Shapiro is one of them. He often goes out of his way to clarify those labels as not to miscast people. On the other end liberals such as Tim Pool and Dave Rubin will acknowledge the same. These people have huge audiences. All is not lost.
The trifecta of vapidness Shapiro, Rubin and Pool. With thought leaders like those..
“There are two kinds of identity politics in this world. The kind for groups of people who enthusiastically support identity politics, and the kind for everybody else.”
Even the enthusiastic might not make the cut.
Editor: Pearl-clutching, eh? Hasn’t that phrase been a bit overused?
Writer: Don’t worry, the masses will never notice.
You can only watch one news show at a time. It should have worked.
Aren’t Fox and ABC/NBC/CBS on opposing teams? How can they all push the same narrative? It’s almost like they are all on the same team and only pretending to have opposite viewpoints.
That video came about because the owner of those stations was the same, and commanded all of the stations to feign legit pursuit of the same ends as if they came upon it on their own. As the video demonstrates, it wasn’t exactly independent thought.
Thank you for helping me realize that my understanding of media consolidation was incomplete. I knew that 5 corporations control more than 80% of all media including TV, movies, radio, print, music and web, but I didn’t realize that many “conservative” and “liberal” local stations were owned by the same companies. It appears that the stations featured above owned by Sinclair. After their left stations finish telling us how evil Trump is and how much he hates women and children, they ply us with the exact same narrative about “conspiracy theories” that we get from the right stations when they are done telling us how wonderful Trump is and how amazing his wall is going to be.
As good Democrats and Republicans, we have to hate each other and disagree on everything, except when we unite against those dangerous conspiracy theories such as the idea that mainstream news isn’t telling us the truth.
This was an annoying post in that it’s causing me anxiety to be reminded liberalism has been co-opted .
On any other day I’d take a Xanax.
But on this day, I’ll recline at my desk, eat a piece of matzoh……then
use the Lyft $4.20 promo code to head to the dispensary, get high as fuck, and go eat a nice buffet.
Thanks a lot for increasing my waist size.
If it makes you feel better, liberalism never stood a chance because it’s too accommodating and open-minded. Give your enemies the benefit of the doubt and the right to disagree and you’ll always lose to the lowest common denominator. And reclining at the buffet does not make your butt look fat.