Category: Cntrl-Leftism

What’s wrong with identity politics?

August 31, 2018 • 10:15 am

This interview from the Chronicle of Higher Education is certainly worth reading. The content: Evan Goldstein interviews Francis Fukuyama, political scientist and writer whose achievements are summarized this way in Wikipedia (note: in the Chronicle interview Fukuyama is definitely not a neo-conservative, going hard after “President Trump”):

Fukuyama is known for his book The End of History and the Last Man (1992), which argued that the worldwide spread of liberal democracies and free market capitalism of the West and its lifestyle may signal the end point of humanity’s sociocultural evolution and become the final form of human government. However, his subsequent book Trust: Social Virtues and Creation of Prosperity (1995) modified his earlier position to acknowledge that culture cannot be cleanly separated from economics. Fukuyama is also associated with the rise of the neoconservative movement, from which he has since distanced himself.

Fukuyama has a new book coming out September 11 whose subject is identity politics (click on screenshot just below to go to its Amazon site). The Amazon summary includes the following:

The New York Times bestselling author of The Origins of Political Order offers a provocative examination of modern identity politics: its origins, its effects, and what it means for domestic and international affairs of state

. . . Demand for recognition of one’s identity is a master concept that unifies much of what is going on in world politics today. The universal recognition on which liberal democracy is based has been increasingly challenged by narrower forms of recognition based on nation, religion, sect, race, ethnicity, or gender, which have resulted in anti-immigrant populism, the upsurge of politicized Islam, the fractious “identity liberalism” of college campuses, and the emergence of white nationalism. Populist nationalism, said to be rooted in economic motivation, actually springs from the demand for recognition and therefore cannot simply be satisfied by economic means. The demand for identity cannot be transcended; we must begin to shape identity in a way that supports rather than undermines democracy.

The last bit, about how to usefully weave the need for recognizing people’s identity into the fabric of a functioning democracy, is especially intriguing, because although identity politics permeates both the American Right and Left, it’s hardly led to any progress.

I often think about this, and engage in self-examination about why modern identity politics irks me. After all, the call for group rights has historically identified and rectified great injustices, bringing about things like women’s rights, civil rights, and gay rights. I’d like to think I’m sympathetic to genuine oppression and would try to identify it and call it out; and believe me, there’s plenty of oppression and bigotry still around!

So what bothers me about the increasing balkanization of the electorate? I suppose I see much of it as “me-centered”: a narrative about personal victimhood that can not only overcome a drive for social progress, but also leads to suppression of speech and to the demonization of one’s opponents. A lot of identity politics is excessive—the blather about “cultural appropriation” is a notable example—and it’s created a hierarchy of victimhood that leads not to progress but to finger-pointing. (Seriously, does boycotting a show of kimonos in which viewers are invited to try on the garment accomplish anything?) Too, identity politics sometimes degenerates into unproductive Pecksniffery: does it really push America forward, for instance, to censor books like To Kill a Mockingbird? Is it productive to decry all police as racist, even when the cops are black? And I worry, as I often do here, that the excesses of Leftist identity politics give the Right an excuse to not just mock progressives, but to buttress support for autocratic buffoons like Trump and his Republican minions.

Thus I’m ambivalent about the constant cries of oppression. Some of them are justified, but it’s often hard to weed out genuine wrongs from groups using an oppression narrative for other purposes. This has become harder since certain groups on the Left have tried to silence any criticism, much less discussion, by calling critics “racists”, “Nazis,” and so on. Since liberals are deathly afraid of such labels, they’ve driven some of us straight into the arms of regressives. In this sense the Left has borrowed from the playbook of Islamists, who have learned well the use of bandying about the term “Islamophobia.” None of us want to be Islamophobes, so we avoid criticizing the faith and the actions it provokes. The result: liberals and feminists wind up coddling one of the world’s most regressive and oppressive religions, embracing a double standard based on the bigotry of low expectations.

You can see Fukuyama’s own ambivalence in the article below, which I highly recommend. I’ll put a few excerpts below the title.

Fukuyama on Trump:

Q. Let’s start where you start Identity: Donald Trump. The book is a response to his election. He also made an appearance in The End of History and the Last Man.

A. One of the arguments I made in The End of History was that it’s good to have a democracy linked to a market economy because it acts as a sponge for the ambitious energies of people who could otherwise become Julius Caesar or Adolf Hitler. That’s the context in which I mention Donald Trump. Our political system has to absorb such people and render them safe. At that time, it looked like our system was doing that. He could be a real-estate developer or, later, an entertainer. That wasn’t enough for him, and he went into politics. Now we’ve got a real problem. Our constitutional system was designed to prevent the rise of fantastically ambitious individuals, to limit them through a system of checks and balances. That’s the test we’re up against right now.

Fukuyama’s ambivalence:

Q. Is there anything inherently problematic about minority groups’ demanding recognition?

A. Absolutely not. Every single one of these struggles is justified. The problem is in the way we interpret injustice and how we try to solve it, which tends to fragment society. In the 20th century, for example, the left was based around the working class and economic exploitation rather than the exploitation of specific identity groups. That has a lot of implications for possible solutions to injustice. For example, one of the problems of making poverty a characteristic of a specific group is that it weakens support for the welfare state. Take something like Obamacare, which I think was an important policy. A lot of its opponents interpreted it as a race-specific policy: This was the black president doing something for his black constituents. We need to get back to a narrative that’s focused less on narrow groups and more on larger collectivities, particularly the collectivity called the American people.

The role of college campuses:

Q. To what extent is this fragmentation in our politics exacerbated by certain tendencies on campus?

A. This is a complicated question because specific incidents are picked up by conservative media and blown up to be representative of higher education. Friends of mine say: It’s obvious there is no freedom of speech left in universities. That seems excessive. The question is important, however. What happens in universities sets the tone for a lot of other elite institutions. What happens on campus ultimately does filter down to the rest of society.

The last sentence, with which I agree (just look at The New Yorker and the New York Times these days), explains why I devote so much space on this site to campuses. And I’ll continue to do so despite some folks telling me in no uncertain terms that I should stop writing about college politics and concentrate on the nastiness of the Trump Administration. (My response is that everybody’s going after Trump, but criticism of college politics has been largely the domain of the Right.)

The interview continues:

Q. You tie some campus developments to a therapeutic turn in American life.

A. It began to unfold back in the ’60s and ’70s, when identity came to the forefront. People felt unfulfilled. They felt they had these true selves that weren’t being recognized. In the absence of a common cultural framework previously set by religion, people were at a loss. Psychology and psychiatry stepped into that breach. In the medical profession, treating mental health has a therapeutic mission, and it became legitimate to say the objective of society ought to be improving people’s sense of self-esteem.

This became part of the mission of universities, which made it difficult to set educational criteria as opposed to therapeutic criteria aimed at making students feel good about themselves. This is what led to many of the conflicts over multiculturalism. This played out in a vivid way at Stanford.

Q. In the book, you quote a leader of Stanford’s Black Student Union in the late ’80s arguing that the university’s Western-civ curriculum “hurts people mentally and emotionally in ways that are not even recognized.”

A. Instead of saying we want to read authors that are outside the canon because they’re important educationally and historically and culturally, the way it’s framed by that student leader is that the exclusion of those authors hurts people’s self-esteem: Because my people are not equally represented, I feel less good about myself. That is part of the motive that drives administrators and professors to expand the curriculum, to fulfill an understandably therapeutic mission. But I think it can get in the way of universities’ fulfilling their educational missions. What makes students feel good about themselves is not necessarily what’s most useful to their education.

Pay attention to that last sentence, which carries a lot of wisdom about the mission of universities.

Q. A majority of Republicans and right-leaning independents now think higher education has a negative effect on the country. Is higher ed to blame for this perception problem?

“We’re a university, we’re dedicated to the free debate of ideas, so that’s what we’re going to do.”

A. When faced with the sort of threats to free speech that trigger conservative reactions, a lot of professors and administrators tend not to be outspoken. And they ought to be. I admire the president of the University of Chicago [Robert Zimmer], who has been out front on these issues. We need more presidents like him. They should say they’re not going along with any of this nonsense. We’re a university, we’re dedicated to the free debate of ideas, so that’s what we’re going to do.

On social media:

Q. What about the role of social media?

A. Social media is perfectly made for identity politics. It allows you to close yourself off in an identity group, get affirmation of everything you say, and not have to argue with people who think differently. It’s hard to tell what’s cause and effect. I used to think that the driver was society itself, and that technology only accelerated it. But I’m beginning to think causality moves the other way: that we wouldn’t be where we are if not for the internet and social media. This is something future historians will have to unpack.

Amen. All of the interview makes me want to read Fukuyama’s book, and I will.

 

Lindy West writes a confusing column on free speech for the NYT

July 6, 2017 • 12:00 pm

Apparently Lindy West , identified by Wikipedia as “an American writer, feminist, fat acceptance movement activist, and film criticism editor”, now has at least a semi-regular column in the New York Times, as she’s described there as a “contributing opinion writer”. I think that decision was a mistake. Not only do I not find her funny when she tries to be, but she’s from the Cntrl-Left wing of Leftism. Further, her first column,  “Save free speech from trolls” (subtitle: “Criticism is not censorship no matter how insistent Twitter’s free speech brigade might be”) is a confused mishmash of ideas that doesn’t seem to have much of a point. What it is is an extended claim that people who harass minorities or women on the Internet shouldn’t be allowed to use the defense that they’re exercising “freedom of speech.” By “allowed”, it’s not clear to me whether West is calling for banning of what she and other Cntrl-Leftists see as “harassment” or “hate speech”, or simply her view that people should be called out for using the Free Speech defense when engaged in what she sees as harassment.

Her point seems to be summarized in these excerpts:

Criticism is not censorship, and no matter how insistent Twitter’s free speech brigade might be, I felt safe knowing that we could always go back to the text. The Constitution was on my side.

. . . the anti-free-speech charge, applied broadly to cultural criticism and especially to feminist discourse, has proliferated. It is nurtured largely by men on the internet who used to nurse their grievances alone, in disparate, insular communities around the web — men’s rights forums, video game blogs. Gradually, these communities have drifted together into one great aggrieved, misogynist gyre and bonded over a common interest: pretending to care about freedom of speech so they can feel self-righteous while harassing marginalized people for having opinions.

You can find disingenuous rhetoric about protecting free speech in the engine room of pretty much every digital-age culture war. The refrain has become so ubiquitous that it’s earned its own sarcastic homophone in progressive circles: “freeze peach!” Nothing is more important than the First Amendment, the internet men say, provided you interpret the First Amendment exactly the same way they do: as a magic spell that means no one you don’t like is allowed to criticize you.

The law does not share that interpretation. “The First Amendment only regulates the government,” explained Rebecca Tushnet, a professor of First Amendment law at Harvard

She’s partly right here: the First Amendment says that the government can’t make laws abrogating free speech or a free press.  So there is no absolute “right” to go on a privately owned site like Twitter or Facebook and say anything you want, and then use a Constitutional defense. But that doesn’t mean that banning such speech, or saying that you shouldn’t exercise it, is good. There is a difference between legality and morality here, and it’s crucial.  I will defend your right to call me a “kike” or a “Hebe” in public, but that doesn’t mean that I think you should do that.

So this  xkcd cartoon, which is reproduced by many Cntrl-Leftists, isn’t exactly correct. The legality issue is correct, but who is an “asshole” is a matter of judgment (was Charlie Hebdo an “asshole organization”?), as is what constitutes “showing you the door”. Deplatforming someone, or shouting down a speech at a private college may be legal, but it’s illiberal and has a chilling effect on freedom of expression.

And West is also right that some of the “speech” going around on the Internet isn’t good, and constitutes bad behavior on the part of the speaker. When Anita Sarkeesian gets a death threat, or is called offensive names, that’s wrong and reprehensible—and the former is illegal. But by conflating legal freedom of expression with the illiberal attempts to shut down speech that one considers “harassment”, West at the same time mixes up legitimate criticism with true harassment and offensive words. Both are legal, but only the first aligns with true liberal values.

Sarkeesian is a good example here, for she’s been subject to repeated threats and what I consider unconscionable harassment. On the other hand, I see her as a liar and a grifter: someone who has repeatedly told untruths about video games in the name of her brand of feminism, and has both refused to debate her genuine critics and blocked all comments on her “Feminist Frequency” videos. She has a cause and is not in the least open minded about it, nor will she debate her views or her analyses of video games. Further, she has repeatedly conflated honest critics—gamers who have called her out for her lies without making threats—with genuine harassers who produce threats of rape or attack. There are two reasons I despise those harassers. First, their behavior is unethical and harmful; who would want to be on the receiving end of it? But it also gives Sarkeesian an excuse to ignore genuine criticisms of her views and repeatedly call attention instead to her harassment, even using it to monetize her lame projects. Like Muslims, she plays the offense card to try to shut down her honest critics. (Again, I decry those who threaten and harass her.)

When West says, then, that “criticism is not censorship,” referring to her own attacks on what she considers “trolls,” she should also add, vis-à-vis Sarkeesian and others, “criticism isn’t harassment, either.” You can have both together, but genuine criticism, well meant even if it’s wrong, should not be banned or termed harassment.

Further, I haven’t seen a lot of harassers use the First Amendment to defend their actions. They just harass. Where I have paid attention is when genuine critics of religion, gaming, feminism, affirmative action, and so on, maintain that they should not be silenced because it abrogates their freedom of expression.

In the end, I get the sense that West really wants rules to ban harassment and “hate speech”, but she can’t go so far as to actually say that. She just intimates it, as she does here:

Unfortunately, as any scientist can tell you (for as long as we still have those), more often than not, sunlight makes things grow. Conflating criticism with censorship fosters a system in which all positions deserve equal consideration, no bad ideas can ever be put to rest, and lies are just as valid as the truth.

What she’s saying here, I think, is that those “harassers” who claim freedom of speech as a defense are hurting society, and should be suppressed. We need to put those bad ideas to rest. (That, at least, is Sarkeesian’s view.)  My own view is that true harassment should be called out, mocked, reviled with counter speech, and taken to the law if it constitutes illegal or threatening behavior, but that we have to be very wary of what we really want to ban on private venues.

Finally, we have the biggest problem: who gets to decide what speech is acceptable? West doesn’t want the harassers (or critics) to do that, but then who? That’s one reason why we should be very careful about deciding what speech is unacceptable and should not be permitted. West shows her cards when she says this, which I suspect means that she and her “allies” like Sarkeesian should be the Deciders:

“There are women who have said to me [West], or to people in my circles, that they don’t want to be me,” Ms. Sarkeesian told me. “They don’t want what happened to me to happen to them, and so they keep their head down and they stay quiet.” Absence is invisible. We don’t even know who has been lost — how many were scared away before they even started. What about their speech?

Refusing to quit, as Ms. Sarkeesian has, yields often invisible professional consequences as well. “Our videos on YouTube don’t get promoted and supported in their algorithms the same way that hate videos about us do, because we can’t have comments open,” she said. “That punishes us.”

. . . “Freedom of speech is such a buzzword that people can rally around,” Ms. Sarkeesian said, “and that works really well in their favor. They’re weaponizing free speech to maintain their cultural dominance.”

Sarkeesian has testified before the UN in the cause of shutting down “cyber violence” and harassment online (she’s defended only the harassment of women, I believe), and one gets the feeling that she and people who agree with her should be the ones who decide what speech is unacceptable. In view of Sarkeesian’s failure to engage her honest critics, and her lumping all criticism together as “harassment”, I don’t trust her to be the Decider. Nor do I trust West.

The issue of nastiness on the Internet is a difficult one, and though I despise it, I don’t want to prevent it because I’m not a good Decider, as nobody is. Real threats and other illegal speech can already be dealt with by the law.

West’s column is a mess, conflating criticism with harassment, the First Amendment with a liberal valuation of free speech, and actions that are legal with actions that are right. It’s not a good start for West’s new journalistic position, nor does it do credit to the New York Times.