Guest post: When politics becomes identity
Originally a comment by Artymorty on A broader range of social justice causes.
All across the left, we’re seeing this. It’s because the left have conceptualized the causes we hold dear — the environment, gay rights, anti-racism, women’s reproductive rights — not as fixed, external objectives we’re trying to achieve at this point in time in political history (reduction in greenhouse gases, equal rights for sexual and racial minorities, access to contraception and abortion, etc.) but as relative, internalized political identities on an ever-shifting political spectrum. When a progressive cause gains ground and enters the mainstream zeitgeist, it’s not seen as a victory but a loss: the cause is no longer appealing to the activists who championed it because it doesn’t line up with their internal political identity as being more progressive relative to the mainstream.
This is our old friend the Overton Window of course. But there are two extra effects at play here. One is a sort-of feedback loop that develops between the zeitgeist and progressive politics; it seems to be a repeating pattern in history: the point where progressivism suddenly and rapidly melts down into totalitarianism. (I suppose you could call it a “China Syndrome” in more ways than one?) It goes something like this: progressive cause succeeds in shifting the zeitgeist. The zeitgeist now sees that the progressive side is probably correct, and decides that in future it will be quicker to adopt the progressive position. Progressives now see that their cause is no longer progressive, so they quickly shift to a more progressive position. The zeitgeist moves even faster this time to incorporate the progressive position; the progressive wing moves even faster to an even more hardline-progressive position, yadda yadda the feedback loop has a meltdown and we end up with totalitarianism.
The other effect at play is that the “extremification” of the left isn’t just becoming more hardline about progressive causes, it eventually turns hostile to the very causes it started with. In the end, the Chinese Communist Revolution did the exact opposite of abolishing the ruling class and ushering in equality and freedom. Trans is an especially good (bad) example, because it is fundamentally about an inversion: flipping the sexes, thus flipping the polarity of the power structure behind sexism and homophobia, literally putting men and straights (even misogynist men and anti-gay straights) at the forefront of women’s rights and gay rights. Lots of people have pointed out that some of the more extreme “anti-racist” positions around things like cultural appropriation are sounding more and more like old-fashioned segregationism.
As for the environment, I won’t be surprised if eventually some self-styled environmentalists start embracing pro-coal and pro-oil policies under some Byzantine rubric of anti-racism or queer whatever. It sounds absurd, but hey, so much on the left has gone absurd lately. I can already picture a future Greenpeace news release:
“Why shutting down coal power plants is literal violence because it disproportionately harms BAME and Queer Bodies.”
Artymorty, very well put.
This sentence brings to mind several memes I have seen in recent years, in which liberals are lauded for supporting various measures that are generally good for everyone. The purpose of the memes is to encourage people to support and vote for liberals/progressives. It is not to demonstrate that moderate and conservative politicians really should embrace these measures as well. A conservative supporting these measures would be supporting “liberal” rather than “good” policy. I think this ties in well with your observations about “political identity”.
Sackbut wrote:
That’s because the Other Side is intractable. They never change their minds and they’re a completely monolithic block.
A common trope I often heard among the atheist & skeptic communities which applies to political communities was that one argued & debated Christians or Advocates of Woo for the sake of onlookers who might be on the fence. The people you were using persuasive tactics on were lost causes. The hope was that someone else was watching, and capable of learning. The Undecided Voter.
This was often said by the same people who proudly pointed to former fundamentalists— and sometimes said by former fundamentalists themselves.
Sastra @ 2
I’m of two minds on that issue. I do see your point that sometimes The Other Side is amenable to argument. I also think that, practically speaking, many people firmly on The Other Side will not be brought into agreement, and sometimes the point is to show that there is not uniform thinking on an issue, to show that there is another side, to let The Other Side fumble and show their true colors, and so on; performing for the audience, not for the opponent.
I was thinking, though, of a different point: that the positions themselves have a political leaning; that a conservative taking this new position is not adopting a reasonable position that helps people, but is instead adopting a liberal position. That means the conservative has to “lose” in some political sense, and the liberals “win”, rather than both sides achieving something useful.
Or at least whatever passes for “the progressive position” regardless of content*. As I have previously said, the actual specifics hardly matter as long as 1) it’s called “progressive”, “leftist”, “feminist”, “LGBTQ (etc. etc.) rights” etc. and 2) the “right” people (i.e. my people) are doing it. To all that I suppose we can add 3) the “wrong” people (the outgroup) don’t like it.
As I understand it, this is what’s implied by e.g. referring to movement skepticism as “Skepticism™” etc., i.e. the label has turned into a little more than a brand name or another word for “whatever this group/movement/organization/bunch of ‘thought leaders’ etc. happens to think/say/do” (the same way “equality™”, “solidarity™” etc. in the Soviet Union or China were basically just synonyms for “whatever the Party/the leader says or does”). It’s kind of analogous to deciding that because the Republican party were on the right side of the slavery issue, the fight for Racial Equality™ today amounts to blind, uncritical, unconditional, unthinking support for anything G.O.P. does.
* In fact, even if the content is the polar opposite of everything that got you into activism in the first place.
Re. communist China, on of the main lessons I learned from Jung Chang’s biography of Chairman Mao was that the endless purges and show-trials were not even meant to smoke out any real dissenters. At least that wasn’t their main function. The real purpose was conveying the following message: “Someone is going to get it during the next purge whether they are in fact guilty or not. Make sure it’s not you!”. And of course the way to make sure it wasn’t you was by making sure it was somebody else. In other words, it wasn’t enough to be “innocent” of any heretical tendencies. In fact, you didn’t even have to be suspected of any heresy. Insufficient eagerness to inform on others was enough to get in trouble yourself. It didn’t matter how actively complicit you were in pursuing heretics and thought criminals if most of your neighbors were even more complicit. That way everyone was forced to compete to stay out of trouble, and someone was inevitably going to lose. There was no way to be safe.
Another point that too often gets overlooked is this: Terror was seen as desirable not just for its effects on the victims, but just as much for its effects on the perpetrators. Making people get their hands dirty was a means to get them under Mao’s control. The perpetrators were supposed to deduce for themselves “If the chairman goes down, his enemies are going to come after me as one of his accomplices, therefore I have a stake in keeping the Chairman in power for ever”. Another advantage of making people actively complicit in the crimes of the regime was to encourage them to rationalize their behavior and get a justification spiral going: “Only a spineless, despicable coward with no integrity or principles would persecute innocent people on behalf of a psychopatic tyrant to save his own skin. But I’m not a spineless, despicable coward, and I did persecute those those people, therefore it had to be the right thing to do.”
I think all of this applies to wokism to some degree. The endless purity spirals basically force everyone to compete to stay out of trouble, and there is no such thing as “where the line goes”, no way to be safe. Getting people actively engaged in attacking and vilifying others as bigots, haters, TERFs, transphobes, or even Nazis advocating murder and genocide, creates a stake – psychologically as well as strategically – in helping the TRAs win whether or not it’s “right” or “wrong”.
David Brooks writes in The Atlantic: The Terrifying Future of the American Right. He speaks of a movement called “national conservatism”, which he describes as “the intellectual sharp edge of the American Right”. He attended the National Conservatism Conference and had some interesting things to say about the speakers and various themes. This version of conservatism emphasizes state power, and is in a number of ways a radicalized response to the identitarian politics pushed in progressive circles. Interesting column.
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Is good post, Arty, and I do think those two forces are in play. There are others, of course, and I think one is that ‘progressive’ causes are just plain cooler. I’m somewhat (in that I haven’t decided how much yet) in agreement with Bjarte that to some extent and with some fancy PR, just about any policy could be called ‘progressive’.
Where we might differ slightly is that I think we bring along certain emotional and cultural baggage when we talk about ‘progressive’ ideas. They’re usually about helping society as a whole, often by giving extra power and protections to the most oppressed or otherwise vulnerable. By this token, it would be a very hard sell indeed to argue that giving more money to billionaires is progressive, even if those billionaires commit to using that money for something like tackling climate change. The obvious objections would be why are billionaires the right people to do that and – more importantly – why do they want to? Sounds a bit suss. I’m not saying it would be impossible to sell that idea as progressive, but it’d be hellish hard work.
But then…. look at prison abolition. A lot of people seem to think getting rid of prisons altogether (and they usually mean right now) would be immensely progressive despite the fact that the only ways we can even hypothesise about how to make it work would be things like as-yet-uninvented and massively invasive therapeutic and/or surgical techniques or oppressive mass surveillance enforced by Judge Dredd.
This would obviously be massively regressive and would do little to help the vulnerable and oppressed. In fact, The thing with the billionaires solving climate change is arguably a better approach, if that’s the goal, and perhaps even with a more realistic chance of success. Although having billionaires run prisons hasn’t turned out too well, has it?
So what’s going on here? Why does one terrible idea seem cooler and more progressive than the other? The idea is to help the same sort of people with the same sort of problems, after all.
I think part of it is your idea, Arty, about the progressivism arms race. But I also think there’s a kind of hook based on baggage, which makes some ideas seem automatically cooler, regardless of how terrible they are.
Prison abolition sounds cool because it comes from thinking about prison and social reform, which I think we’ll all agree are good and progressive things. We’re sliding downhill. It feels like a logical conclusion if we ignore the logic part. And the same with gender ideology, of course. It has that great (if stolen) background of LGB rights; we all know why the T was force-teamed onto the LGB, we’ve discussed it here endlessly. Gender ideology was a downhill slide.
The thing with the billionaires? It doesn’t have that baggage. We have to trudge one hell of a long way uphill first before we can slide back down again. Even if somebody were to work out the details perfectly and demonstrate that it would definitely be the best way to help the most people, it would still not seem progressive and I think it would therefore remain a hard sell.
Yes, I’m talking about adaptive landscapes, here. I’m saying that progressive ideas might seem progressive because so much of the work has already been done for us. And I’m saying that some of the most radical-seeming ideas might often be, in that sense, some of the most conservative. After all, the most actually radical idea here is the billionaires one, not the prison one.
So something like this, Arty, might be a small missing piece in your analysis. Why do progressive people want to embrace ever more progressive ideas? Why do we want to be (or seem) progressive in the first place?
Perhaps partly because it’s easy. It’s all downhill. We’re sliding down from the shoulders of giants at ever increasing speed. The problem is that we’re not necessarily looking where we’re going.
That is my random, off-the-top-of-my-head, wild, untestable, unhelpful speculation of the day. I’m trying to limit myself to just one, these days.
This is what I was talking about when I said that while Genderism isn’t liberal, it is nonetheless liberal. Suppose that foo-ism is a well defined political philosophy, then a foo-ist idea is one consistent with foo-ism, and a foo-ist is someone who agrees with foo-ism or works to implement it. Now that we have labeled a group of people, however, we can observe their behaviors, beliefs, and attitudes in general, and take note of any trends, especially those somewhat peculiar to the group. Something true of and peculiar to foo-ists would then be called foo-ist. (Referring to a practice by group name is so common and fundamental to language and thought that I’ve often found that people are unaware that they do it, by the way.)
Complicating this process is when people believe themselves to be foo-ists but don’t understand foo-ism, or when multiple versions of foo-ism exist. (Christianity’s internecine conflicts provide a ready example of what this looks like.) Statements about foo-ism, foo-ist principles, foo-ists, and facts about foo-ists that would be true (or false) become otherwise without additional qualification. Although first- and second-tide foo-ism is grounded in synthesizing equality from the differences between grue and bleen, third-tide foo-ism holds that grue and bleen are no different and might not even exist. To say that foo-ists deny the existence of grue is a true statement. To say that foo-ism requires the existence of grue is also a true statement
And that’s where we are with progressivism, feminism, conservatism, liberalism, anti-racism, and all the various isms. Meanings muddled beyond straightforward discriminatory utility, the terms are little more than tribal shibboleths. Most people are left with an understanding that goes no further than a fractured iconography, and empty icons are just symbols to be interpreted. Everything has become a cargo cult, a mass of radio towers without radios that will never call for a supply drop, built by people who don’t know what radios, towers, or even supply are. As long as the tower is painted in butter-side-up colors, butter-side-uppers will see a butter-side-up tower. They’ll know by their fellow butter-side-uppers: those in the tower calling for supply with them. They’ll know by their enemies: the crazed mob of butter-side-downers standing outside shouting something about fire. And they won’t listen, maybe won’t even understand, even though just yesterday they stood outside a butter-side-down tower, held by horror as they watched it burn.