Peter Hartcher, the political correspondent of the Sydney Morning Herald, has made a similar argument to the one I made a few weeks ago about identity politics, so I’m just going to explore the points of difference and similarity. He also refers to Francis Fukuyama’s new book Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment. Obviously, this is an argument which is timely.
Quotes from Mr. Hartcher’s article are in italics.
He begins:
“Politics since World War II has been dominated by the ideological struggle along Marxist economic lines. The working class versus the capitalist class.”
He implies this is now over because of identity politics. I’m not sure about that, I think class war helps drive certain types of identity politics. As Warren Buffett, the great investor, said in 2006 “There’s class warfare, all right but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” In 2011 he said more firmly, “there’s been class warfare going on for the last 20 years, and my class has won.” This seems correct, given the lessening of wages and increase in profit as percentages of the national income in many states, and the ease with which donors and industries threaten governments.
“According to the right of politics, it’s the left that’s guilty of playing identity politics, fomenting the resentment and anger of minorities. In truth, the right plays it just as hard. The difference is that the right foments the resentment and anger of the majority.”
This seems basically correct, although the right also foments the resentment and anger of minorities as well. They do this to support their class war on ordinary people. I also agree that the Right pretends it is not doing this.
“From a time when power resided only with kings and warlords, the rights revolutions have, over centuries, extended recognition and power to ordinary citizens, to slaves, to women, to indigenous peoples, to the disabled, to homosexuals, to children and, increasingly today, to animals. The Australian philosopher Peter Singer has pictured this force as an “expanding circle of empathy.”
Being a Humean in terms of ethics – that is asserting that ethics is based on what Hume called ‘sympathy’, or what we today call ’empathy’ – this also seems to be an accurate statement. We have, at least in some places in society, been extending the range of humans and creatures we feel are like us. Some people have argued that this extension is an accidental consequence of reading novels, as you may have to understand people who are not like you, to read one. Good novels teach us that other people and sometimes animals are human too. I’m not saying this argument is true, but it seems to me that empathy requires imagination; in a novel we imagine the other as like us, or as capable as feeling as we might if we were in their situation.
‘Fascism’ also requires imagination, the ability to imagine that our next door neighbours are not human, or that they engage in dastardly, inhuman, or subhuman, acts that you, yourself, would never do. The imagining is usually visceral, fascists imagine their neighbours are disgusting, and they try to make those they hate physically repulsive to them, and completely different. That helps prevent other kinds of thinking and imagining. There is nothing inherently good about imagination, but its vital for real ethics.
“But the way identity politics is being played today is not a quest for equality. It is about asserting not equal rights but superior rights“. Emphasis added.
True, if you modify to read, “but the way identity politics is being played today, by the right in particular, is not a quest for equality. It is about asserting not equal rights but superior rights…”
“It is an intolerant impulse that claims greater rights for one favoured group over others. Members of outgroups are even denied the right to be heard.”
We can see this sometimes in the left, but they are usually trying to prevent specific occasions of speech, rather than speech in general. After all there are right wing TV programs and papers who will allow the expression of almost anything if it supports them, and will prevent, or attack, anything being said if it does not. The right has an advantage here as the winners of the class war own most of the mainstream media. The right often seems to try to prevent speech in general. They, for example, identify people who may hold them to account, as leftists, and try to prevent visible account holding happening at all. This is the basis for much criticism of the ABC, and it is worrying because sometimes, in Australia, the ABC is the only organization that holds them to account or asks difficult questions.
Hartcher points to a ‘left’ example by saying “the activists in the Black Lives Matter movement fume against anyone who says “black and white lives matter”“.
The point here is not that activists are denying that white lives matter, just that the number of black people imprisoned, beaten up, or shot by white people especially cops is far greater than the other way around (especially per head of population). Official society looks, and acts, as if black lives really don’t matter. Saying “all lives matter” can seem like an attempt to diminish the crisis faced by black people, even if its innocently intended. Saying all lives matter, can be a way of saying “we don’t really have a problem”. Its like saying candidates should be selected on merit, not because they are women. The point is that if there is no effort to have female candidates, then male dominance will ensure most candidates continue to be men. If we say ‘all lives matter’, then it may appear ok for black people to be harassed and shot in proportionally much larger numbers, as they are now.
“Trump, of course, is the high priest of the low order of angry right-wing identity politics. Muslims are terrorists and must be banned from entry; Mexicans are rapists and must be sealed off behind a wall; women are objects that can be grabbed by the pussy; and the Ku Klux Klan aren’t really all bad.”
This comes back to class war. Trump and the Republicans, probably can’t win support for their policies enabling corporations to maim workers, poison people, kill endangered animals, and pollute with ease. They can’t win many votes in dismantling the Affordable Health Care Act, especially given that many Republicans seem to think that Affordable Care was different from Obamacare, or was the Republican improvement of Obamacare. It may be hard to convince people, who have been continually warned about the dangers of big government surpluses, to support massive tax cuts for wealthy people which increase the surplus, or that the military needs more spending which increases the surplus.
Focusing on right wing identity politics is helpful to the right, and they ask for special rights to be able to diss other people, especially precarious people who most likely cannot fight back with the same force, and to exclude them.
Apparently Francis Fukuyama has a new book, in which he argues that left “political correctness” is responsible for this, as it removed the ability of white males to complain about how bad things were for them. “You are not listening to what’s been happening in the last few years if you think there’s no connection between the two.”
This is obvious bullshit. White people, and white working class people, could always complain and have complained. The problem would only occur for white people if they complained that their problems came from ‘niggers’, ‘towelheads’, ‘poofters’ or whatever, and that these minorities should be shot or expelled or whatever. In other words the left were trying to shut down fascist imaginings. This may have been counter-productive, but it was not oppressive. ‘Political correctness’ as used by the left often functions as a request for both politeness and sympathetic imagination directed towards the relatively powerless. Politeness was at one time a conservative virtue, but not any more. The term “political correctness” is often used by the right to help stop thinking, as in: “Perhaps we should not cut down every tree in the country,” “Oh stop being politically correct”, “Perhaps we should have an inquiry into Church abuse of children” “Oh stop being politically correct”. In other words the division between people was already established, partly because of class war, and the engineered shift of attention.
Fukuyama says about the economic crash of 2008 onwards, “But people’s reactions were expressed in identity terms, not economic terms. If it was an economic reaction they should have lined up behind the parties of the right and left” on income or class grounds.”
This is precisely the point. In modern neoliberal economies, you don’t have a majority living on high incomes. Those truly benefitting from the order are a tiny percentage of the population. You may need a fascist kind of identity politics to get people to support the neoliberal wealth elite and keep voting for the interests of that elite, and that is what the right (on the whole) agitates for.
“It’s the nature of right wing populism to demonise elites, plus an out-group. It doesn’t matter which out-group. Jews, Muslims, Chinese, any minority will do to fill the vacancy.”
The issue is that not all elites will be demonized by the Right. The corporate elite are largely spared in rightwing identity politics. “The wealthy are like us, and we can aim to be like them.” The Right can even elect billionaires who have inherited most of their wealth – you can’t get much more elite than that.
This is a careful anti-elitism. Anti-professors, anti-science, anti-knowledge, anti-art, not anti-wealth. Australian right wing members of parliament, or right-wing media propagandists on huge incomes, often pretend that they are not an elite, but that those criticising them are.
“To date, the major parties [in Australia] are flirting with identity politics. But only flirting.”
No, not true. What else is the anti-refugee policy and the “Christian religious freedoms,” the “aboriginal life style choices”, the “bludgers on the dole, taking your money” and “more money for private schools” stuff?
Fukuyama again:
“The retreat on both sides” – left and right – “into ever narrower identities threatens the possibility of deliberation and collective action by the society as a whole. Down this road lies, ultimately, state breakdown and failure.”
No, again. The left is still visibly trying to work with the idea that women are equal to men, that black and white should have equal rights, that gays should have equal rights, that transsexuals are people, that we should not kill all koalas for profit and so on. They are still following the expansive nature of their identity politics.
So we have identity politics on both sides. No question. However, we do have a destructive identity politics on the right apparently built up to support the victors in the class war. The right nearly always pretends that its vices are universal rather than engineered for the benefit of dominant elites.
To reiterate:
Left wing identity politics wants more people to be recognised as having a legitimate and relatively safe place in the public domain. Right wing identity politicians want to have a safe space to declare that they are superior and have the right to supress other people of less favoured categories.
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