Colleen Flaherty has an interesting summary of the discussion in InsideHigherEd here:
Point and counterpoint is the rhythm of academic life, but some ideas elicit more of a response than others. Case in point: scholars and other intellectuals have spent the past couple of weeks debating “The End of Identity Liberalism,” an opinion piece by Mark Lilla, a professor of humanities at Columbia University, in The New York Times.
Attempting to explain — as so many have — Donald Trump’s success in the recent election, Lilla blamed the political left’s affinity for what he called “identity liberalism.” He described college and university campuses as ground zero for a brand of liberalism that focuses on individual identity and diversity to the exclusion of other perennial but urgent questions about “class, war, the economy and the common good.” And while Lilla said he considers the U.S. “an extraordinary success story” in terms of diversity, he argued that that brand of liberalism cost the left the election and resulted in its “repugnant” outcome.
Lilla presumably opposes Trump but said his supporters are logically reacting “against the omnipresent rhetoric of identity, which is what they mean by ‘political correctness.’” Essentially, Lilla argued, “Those who play the identity game should be prepared to lose it.”
Arguing for a ‘Postidentity Liberalism’
“Fox News and other conservative media outlets make great sport of mocking the ‘campus craziness’ that surrounds such issues, and more often than not they are right to,” Lilla wrote. “Which only plays into the hands of populist demagogues who want to delegitimize learning in the eyes of those who have never set foot on a campus. How to explain to the average voter the supposed moral urgency of giving college students the right to choose the designated gender pronouns to be used when addressing them? How not to laugh along with those voters at the story of a University of Michigan prankster who wrote in ‘His Majesty’?”
Lilla — echoing common arguments against contemporary approaches to the humanities — advocated instead for a “postidentity liberalism,” which “should draw from the past successes of pre-identity liberalism.” High school history curricula, for example, “anachronistically project the identity politics of today back onto the past, creating a distorted picture of the major forces and individuals that shaped our country.” While the achievements of, say, women’s rights movements, “were real and important,” he wrote, “you cannot understand them if you do not first understand the founding fathers’ achievement in establishing a system of government based on the guarantee of rights.”
Such a liberalism would, over all, “concentrate on widening its base by appealing to Americans as Americans and emphasizing the issues that affect a vast majority of them,” Lilla said. “It would speak to the nation as a nation of citizens who are in this together and must help one another.” And as for “narrower issues that are highly charged symbolically and can drive potential allies away, especially those touching on sexuality and religion, such a liberalism would work quietly, sensitively and with a proper sense of scale. (To paraphrase Bernie Sanders, America is sick and tired of hearing about liberals’ damn bathrooms.)” …
There are a number of factors at play, and identity politics is most definitely one of those factors.
For example, liberals would have us believe that a person born with a penis and XY genes could one day become a woman as “equal” as a person born with a vagina and XX genes. When you’ve abandoned objective reality that far, don’t be surprised when the rest of us aren’t jumping off that bridge with you.
If you were one of the people born with a penis and XY chromosomes who for one reason or another–including certain medical conditions–chose to identify as a woman, you would feel very different about what reality is. What “liberals would have us believe” is that something this personal is an individual choice which should be respected. On the other hand, what certain segments of the right would rather irresponsibly have us believe, for purely partisan purposes, is that this kind of basic respect is evidence of clueless elitism.
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Would that it were so simple.
The so-called “sex” chromosomes present in numerous other ways apart from XX and XY. Other fairly common arrangements that are seen are X, XXY, and XXYY. Further, sex chromosomes do not always correspond to genital presentation at birth. Many “men” born with penises have XX chromosomes, and many “women” with vaginas have XY chromosomes. Have a look at this picture: https://goo.gl/fycySz. Each of these people were born with female sex organs, yet all have XY chromosomes. A famous example is the athlete Maria Patino, who was assigned “female” at birth and lives her life as a woman. Nevertheless, she was disqualified from competing because of her chromosomes despite “passing” every other sex-test, including tests of hormone levels.
Professor Anne Fausto-Sterling has estimated that as many as one in every fifty babies born cannot be classified using traditional two-sex criteria. The taxonomy of “male” and “female” is therefore somewhat arbitrary and culturally specific. There is no “objective reality” that determines sex.
Keep in mind, I agree with you in some sense and I think we’re on the same side.
But, I think it is more helpful to tell the truth, the number of true intersex people is actually only about .018%. See, Sax’s reply to Fausto-Sterling, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3813612?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
When you tell people in Harney county, with a population of 7,000 and a size similar to Massachusetts, that 2% of people are intersex (i.e., not a boy or girl), they are (rightfully) going to call bullshit on that. They can see that that’s not true with their own two eyes.
We lose all moral high ground when we can’t tell the truth about society.
Sax is really just arguing for a more precise definition of “intersex.” Fausto-Sterling’s point is broader, simply that 2% of people don’t meet all of the biological and cultural requirements of “male” or “female.” I wouldn’t argue that 1 in 50 are intersex, but it’s easy to imagine that 140 people in Harney county do not privately identify with the current cultural definitions.
The key element in all this is that there is no single, objective way to define sex, so the “reality” that people observe is not invariable. “Men are men and women are women” is a meaningless statement not because there are a lot of intersexual people, but because the definitions themselves are flawed.
But I agree, we’re on the same side. It’s a communication issue that our side needs address, rather than rote moralizing from a factual high-ground.
The exploration of ideas is always a messy affair and often looks silly from the outside. That would not change if people stopped talking about issues involving identity but instead spoke about class or militarism.
Regarding the election, there seems to be an effort to downplay race, or tribalism more generally, as the factor leading to very high turnout in rural areas (my county went over 80% to Trump). I live in such a place and it certainly feels like the most important factor down here. But it is veiled behind economic issues similar to how the cause of the Civil War is veiled behind states’ rights. Sure, many people are hurting economically, but if you drill down, the real issue is that they feel Obama is giving preference to black and hispanic voters. “They’re being allowed to cut in line” is a common theme.
Obviously I have no idea whether Bernie would have fared better (and that seems to be the subtext of most of this navel-gazing), but I don’t see how he could have overcome that issue and maintained the Obama coalition. I think the Hillary people viewed the uneducated, rural white voters as a lost cause and made a calculated decision to focus on turning out the Obama coalition. And it probably would have worked if they hadn’t stumbled often and faced relentless attacks from the media and the FBI fiasco.
I think the previously dormant nationalism, always an
unhealthy element of a country, has unfortunately been woken up by the Trumpinator
I’m reminded of an interview that Christopher Hitchens gave about 20 years ago:
“Hitchens: I remember very well the first time I heard the slogan ” the personal is political.” I felt a deep, immediate sense of impending doom.
Q: Why?
Hitchens: That slogan summed it up nicely for me: “I’ll have a revolution inside my own psyche.” It’s escapist and narcissistic. In order to take part in discussions we used to have, you were expected to have read Luxemburg, Deutsche, some Gramsci, to know the difference between Bihar and Bangladesh, to know what was meant by the Goethe Program, to understand the difference between Keynes and Schumpeter, to have read a bit of Balzac and Zola. You were expected to have broken a bit of a sweat, to have stretched your brain a bit, in order just to have a discussion. And you were expected to keep up with what was going on as well. If you couldn’t hold up your end on that, you wouldn’t stay long in the discussion.
With “the personal is political,” nothing is required of you except to be able to talk about yourself, the specificity of your own oppression. That was a change of quality as well as quantity. And it fit far too easily into the consumer, me-decade, style-section, New-Age gunk.”
Along these same lines, this article is worth reading:
http://www.chronicle.com/article/What-Liberal-Academics-Don-t/238428/
But, in addition to the problem of identity politics, post-truth politics also bears significant blame for the rise of Trump. Of course, we are all aware of the alt-right’s lies and things like PizzaGate and all the fake news.
But, we also see liberal (academic) elites tell lies to working class people about gender, race, and class. We tell people that men and women are “the same”, but then talk about the gender wage gap. We tell people that blacks and whites are “equal”, but then talk about differential incarceration rates that are based on race.
We can’t continue to lie to rural people and the working class and expect them to buy into something that doesn’t jibe with the objective reality that they are living in. As it turns out, if you snicker and sneer call someone a “rube” or a “deplorable”, then they’re going to get pissed about it and vote against you.
If our goal is to have equality for all, we need to acknowledge those truths.
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The bottom in line is in rural America that turn you off if you say the word white privilege. They don’t feel privileged. They often just want to work, and feel like their livelihood has been sucked away by the same upper class elites who are telling them they have privilege. The silent majority was marginalized by the party focused on eliminating marginalization.
No, sorry, 100% no. This is one of many examples of Hitchens being contrarian for the sake of being contrarian by deliberately misunderstanding the meaning of “the personal is political.” He then dismisses any legitimate grievances about racial or gender oppression by stirring in his own brand of snobbishness about who gets to have political opinions and what those opinions should be about. Hitchens was an entertaining and interesting guy, but he was also often a thoughtless jackass.
Until this election, it was news to me–as I’m sure it was to other liberal, coastal, academic, “elitist” latte-drinkers–that we all had this deep contempt for rural or working-class people. And then I started looking at right-wing media. Pushing hatred of other Americans who are supposedly contemptuous of you and your values gets eyeballs and votes, so it’s been the go-to GOP strategy at least as far back as Nixon. But it’s a hoax, just like the war on Christmas.
As but one example, liberals weren’t the people making all the noise about gendered bathrooms, because liberals, like other sane people of any political persuasion, just don’t care that much about who’s in the next stall. It got turned into a major battle in the culture war by the Ann Coulters and Sean Hannitys who branded this a “liberal issue” rather than a low-level no-brainer civil rights issue. No Dem politician at any level thinks bathrooms are more important than the economy. Only the wingiest wingnuts do, and they’re the ones who’ve been holding the megaphone.
It’s bad enough many conservatives have bought this stupid story. Liberals should know better and stop with the self-flagellation. Trump won [sic] for a very simple reason: he went straight to people who felt like they were getting screwed and yanked hard leveraging their basest, nastiest, most self-delusional tendencies which the GOP has spent the last several decades cultivating.
Last thing we need is another person speaking based on your personal impressions as opposed to sound analysis. The idea that the topic of gendered bathrooms was a conservative news creation is lunacy. See here, or just do some basic googling of media outlets: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/18/opinion/transgender-bathroom-hysteria-contd.html. Honest discussion and analysis should be the foundation of public discourse regardless of which side you’re on.
I would argue that many cultural wars have been nurtured for political exploitation by the democratic party republican party, it just didn’t work in the democratic party’s favor this time. You have to update your playbook.
In 2004, Bush used same sex marriage initiatives to get out the republican vote. Didn’t work 8 years later for Romney.
In 2012, Romney was painted as sexist for saying things like “Binders full of women” and the war against women used to turn out the progressive women vote and paint Romney as a sexist. Occupy Wall St was used as progressive tool to get millenials out to vote.
In 2016, the black lives matter movement was taken and used as a way to turn out black voters who had turned out in record numbers to vote for Pres Obama. It didn’t work. The student loan crisis used to try to turn out young voters, it didn’t work. Or at least didn’t work well enough.
@counter: I’ll ignore your crude ad hominems and just point out the gross false equivalence of comparing a NY Times editorial on the backlash against North Carolina’s bathroom law with this kind of nonstop hate-mongering crazy:
https://twitter.com/anncoulter/status/719221481058611200
The best part is how it’s directed against John Kasich for being a reasonable human being, which in wingnut-land apparently meant he didn’t speak for real Americans.
I’m on the side of gender neutral bathrooms. The UO Economics Department was the test case for these, and we’re proud of it. No problems, except some confusion as to whether or not you should lock the door when you’re just washing out your coffee pot. Stop by the 5th floor of PLC anytime for a guest shit, @counter.
https://uomatters.com/2016/05/progressive-uo-economists-first-to-try-out-gender-neutral-bathrooms.html
The topic is not gender neutral bathrooms (which I support). It’s trying to maintain some semblance of honest discourse. If you want to implicitly back Just Different’s assertion that Trump’s victory is a product of “leveraging their basest, nastiest, most self-delusional tendencies,” that’s your prerogative, but I don’t think there is enough evidence to support vilifying half of the country.
I agree. I’m astonished by how liberals in general, and liberal professors in particular, have shown so little interest in understanding why so many people voted for Trump.
Its because they know why. They are racist (even though they voted Obama twice).
Nothing do being marginalized by the party preaching the need to end marginalization.
I can’t speak for liberal professors, but in my particular bubble there has been a deluge of wherefore-Trump analyses from every conceivable viewpoint. In fact, it’s hard to imagine that any election outcome ever has been so heavily scrutinized from every possible angle.
When Clinton used the word “deplorable” she wasn’t talking about all Trump voters, or all white rural voters, or all anything. She was talking about certain elements of Trump’s support that are racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, anti-Semitic, etc. See here for an explanation: http://www.vox.com/2016/9/14/12896540/hillary-basket-of-deplorables
Now it’s pretty obvious, in the wake of Trump’s election, that there are a lot of people like that in the country. And I’m with her: I’m perfectly willing to call those people deplorable. I don’t apologize for that.
But she wasn’t talking about all Republicans, all Trump voters, or all rural people. It’s simply untrue to say that she was.
There are plenty of selfloathing liberals thought who seem united in believing otherwise.
I know. I was one of them for a long time. The left is always, for some reason, willing to buy the line that we’re not “real Americans,” that our values are somehow inferior to those of Harney County (mentioned above), that we’re out of touch and condescending and it’s all our fault…
But the right is far more open, loud, and vicious in the way it talks about the left (and women, and blacks, and gays, and non-American-citizens) than the left is about the right. And I don’t see many of the commentators above calling out Trump and his supporters for that.
And look: we got the majority of votes this time. A pretty healthy majority (Clinton up by 2.65 million last I read). We lost the election because the electoral system overrepresents underpopulated areas of the country, a problem that decades of Republican-led gerrymandering have made worse.
But the majority of the country, even the majority of the people who voted this time, agree with us. We have nothing to apologize for. We may have some restrategizing to do, because the system is the system and it’s not going to change easily, if at all. And as just different says, the left has been thinking about it obsessively.
But we don’t have to change our values.
Something else I find rich is the way more mainstream conservatives are now championing the downtrodden working class against Democratic “contempt,” after the GOP spent the last half-century destroying the economic foundations of their way of life.
It is true that a national conversation is long overdue on (1) whether the 60 million or so non-degreed working-age Americans “deserve” a $60K job with benefits and a good pension at 55, and (2), if the answer to (1) turns out to be “No,” then where do these people fit into American society? If we move beyond all the culture-war horseshit, the most telling fact about this election is that the non-degreed segment of the population really is living in another America:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/11/22/donald-trump-lost-most-of-the-american-economy-in-this-election
The Democratic party did not “marginalize” these shoulda-been-Dem Trump voters.
The wingnut propaganda machine did that:
https://cdn0.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/9WdLNSafNJkR40L4lCiAngYDO9c=/800×0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/7091295/racism.png
Trump’s brilliance, such as it is, was to redirect their legitimate feelings of being left out–helped along by their deep-rooted belief that they were more deserving than those “others” as a function of being white real Americans–while convincing them that unlike those snotty Democrats, he was one of them and would therefore represent their interests. It’s not hard at all to understand who turned out for him and why.
As a third party voter from the outside looking in, heavily disenfranchised with both specturms, my personal observations beg to differ (“The Democratic party did not “marginalize” these shoulda-been-Dem Trump voters.
The wingnut propaganda machine did that”). Granted, it may be the demographics of my own social media, but the cause of the “silent Trump” voting demographic was painfully obvious from the degrading content spewed and reposted by my leftist friends engaging in a mass cyber-bullying campaign. My friends on the right were no saints either, but in terms of civility, the hate-barometer on my feed (and in headlines on popular news/opinion sites) was heavily slanted towards the demographic of love and inclusion.
Is the cause and effect straight here? All, and I do mean all, of the evidence that I’ve seen cited for the idea that liberals are contemptuous of rural or working-class people seems to fall into one of three categories: (1) dipshit college kids lecturing their elders about privilege, (2) people ridiculing Trump, and (3) people calling out Trump and/or his supporters for bigotry and/or stupidity. The level of discourse of (3) varies with the context, so it doesn’t surprise me that social media communications by random people on the internet is ugly on both sides. On the right, however, the ugliness goes all the way up to professional mass media.
In none of these cases can it be said that contempt for rural or working-class people was the cause of support for Trump. Kids have been annoying adults and people have been making fun of politicians and attacking political opponents since the dawn of time. And bigots should be called out on their bigotry. But I have yet to see a single example of anyone who is representative of American liberalism expressing disdain for the rural or working class just because they think they’re dumb flyover hicks.
Given that “liberal contempt” is supposedly what made the WWC support Trump in the first place, there should be plenty of good evidence of it. But I haven’t seen it at all. If you have, I’d really be curious to know.