IDENTITY POLITICS, Conclusion: It's Not a Right/Left Issue

 

Remember when you just took people as you found them? You didn't need to first check their tribe, their pronouns, their penis, or their "privilege." Alright, true, that wasn't all entirely universal -- but for a time there, it was at least the aim, wasn't it? 

That was, until today's identity politics took over.  Watching the increasing re-tribalisation of political life, it was hard to miss its arrival; any folk who did could hardly have missed its explosion in the latest TERF v Trans wars. It's real, and it's odious, and it's here. And it will only go away if you understand it, and fight back.

In today's conclusion of this brief series on the what and why and where and how of the identity politics movement and its origins and spread (first published back in 2019, remember), I remind you that the focus of the attack was (and still is) on our right to speak freely ... and it comes from both sides of the alleged political spectrum...

CONCLUSION: It's Not a Right/Left Issue

"Speaking is not only essential to the transmission of ideas; it is also essential

to the formation and validation of ideas. Speaking is essential to thinking."

~ Craig Biddle

As we’ve seen, this is not a right/left issue – it's bigger than that. Both “sides” of that notional spectrum collectivise people this way. And both sides should be damned for it. 

The right for example argue that race determines IQ and earning power; the left that class and gender determine one’s “privilege.” The right use this issue to oppose immigration because “white culture” is allegedly under threat; the left, to oppose “white privilege” in order to protect privilege’s alleged victims.

They disagree about what your particular collective might be, and what precisely this determines about your group, but they join hands in this deterministic embrace of collectivism. That your race determines your culture.

And both sides of the alleged political spectrum are united in opposing free speech: The left publicly celebrates “diversity,” except for diversity of opinion; while the right just as ostentatiously celebrates “western civilisation” by upholding values that civilisation has rightly damned. 

And the left trumpets “tolerance,” all the while being intolerant of those against tolerance; and at the same time the right celebrates their own intolerance, while seeking to ban those who are intolerant of them. 

And while the left wants to shut down and deplatform speakers on public streets and in public universities [and, most recently, in Albert Park], the right wants to regulate and control speech on Facebook, Twitter and on other private social media.[ii] 

The allegedly opposed political tribes are neither opposed nor rational, but on this point they agree fundamentally: the group above all. All they're really arguing about is: "Which group?"

Let me remind you of the three things missing here in all this: your own choices, your own values, your individuality, and your free speech. The values, in short that did build this civilisation, the values these barbarians have dropped. Defending civilisation should begin with embracing those values, and rejecting their tribalism. Because, remember this: "if the west resorts to tribalism to defend civilisation, then civilisation is already irredeemably lost."[iii]

If there is a "side," then it's this one: those on the side of reason, individualism and civilisation, and those against.

Because it's not about left versus right. Or our gang against your gang. That's a pathetic phone war. It's about individualism against collectivism -- especially, in these times, about individualism against this barnyard form of collectivism that has been building and incubating  on either side of the political spectrum, and is now very dangerously busting out again -- and in our own backyard.

The threat to civilisation is not "invaders" from elsewhere. It's our own awful ideas.

Arguing that race trumps reason -- that's wrong. And it leads to much worse.

Identifying collectives by means of race -- seeing conflict as inevitable and racially driven -- identifying ourselves or others by collectives, especially racial or religious or gender-based collectives -- is as deluded as it is deadly.

And it's dangerous whichever side of the alleged political spectrum from which it emerges.

The right's adoption of "identitarian" race-based politics in answer to the left's introduction of identity politics is wrong. Dangerously wrong. Irredeemably wrong. "Crushing the left" by adopting their tactics, strategies, and identity politics is not any kind of "winning" -- it's being captured whole. Killing people in the name of your racial identity is a throwback to a kind of barbarism that should have been, but still hasn't, been buried.

The politics of race is as vile when imposed by the left as it when spat out by the right; it has no place in civilisation.

Bad ideas can only be fought by better ideas. And that, right there, is the value to every one of us of free speech: in an environment of free and open exchange of ideas, we get to hear and think about this free exchange of ideas for ourselves; and the freer the contest, the more likely it is the better ideas that generally win. And then we all do.

It really needn't be a zero-sum conflict.

ENDS 

THIS IS THE FINAL PART of what has become a 7-part series explaining "identity politics," excerpted from one of my chapters in the 2019 book Free Speech Under Attack.

• Part 1: 'What is Identity Politics?'
• Part 2: 'Determinism isn't dead, it just smells that way'
• Part 3: 'Tribal Politics Means Zero-Sum Conflict'
• Part 4: 'Politics + Poly-logic: Marx + Marcuse'
• Part 5: Intersectionality, or: 'How some tribes are made more equal than others'
• Part 6: The right adopts the left’s love child 

 

NOTES 

[ii] See for instance Elizabeth Nolan Brown’s ‘[Trump] White House Seeks Social Media Sob Stories From Conservative Snowflakes,’ Reason, 16 May, 2019.

[iii] Yaron Brook Show podcast, 'NZ Massacre & "White Genocide",' March 19 2019