Identitarians Charlottesville opinion
Many of the obvious dangers inherent in identity politics have been exposed in recent years. The encouraged polarization of various groups centered around racial, sexual, or cultural aspects of self, and self-identity, have always seemed counter-productive to me, as it relates to social cohesion or national unity.
Since identitarianism is a philosophy which projects and reinforces as unique or authentic to the self, or group, an identity that in fact is defined by its opposition to the Other. (socially, racially, economically, religiously, or culturally) This merely is used as a device to overemphasize the idea in the self (and self-image), that the 'in-groups' dependence hinges on the acceptance of the dominant "others" culture, leading to an internalized conflict of self and place in society. futher exaggerating the idea of an overarching, oppressive hierarchy, operating within the body politic of the nation. An idea or concept of identity politics promotes a victim mentality in its adherents. Those believing they are victims often find themselves striking out irrationally. One can not actually caricaturize thoroughly enough the truly dysmorphic beliefs of those promoting this toxic ideology without including a very sophisticated, and clearly worded caution, against the dangers of what Nietzsche referred to as "ressentiment".
Nietzsche sees ressentiment as the core of Christian and Judaic thought and, consequently, the central facet of western thought more generally. In this context, ressentiment is more fully defined as the desire to live a pious existence and thereby position oneself to judge others, apportion blame, and determine responsibility
http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100416129
Since no warning, ever as far as I am aware, has been found accompanying the promotion of identity politics, I suggest ressentiment is the goal and not a flaw in the ideology promoted.
Identity politics is spreading, filling the chasm where the politics of ideas used to be. Even the general election looks set to be a festival of identity, a less violent form of the communalistic politics we sniffily condemn in places like India. Politicos rarely speak of ‘the electorate’ anymore. Instead, they prefer to change their message depending on which ethnic, gender or generational pocket they’re talking to. Just look at Labour’s pink bus, Operation Black Vote and the Tories wooing of the ‘grey vote’. The end result is implicitly divisive, hinting that the young have different interests to the old, blacks think differently to whites, and women are a distinctive political species.
The politics of identity is strongest among the young, especially on campus. There, the dread phrases ‘As a woman’, ‘As a gay man’ and ‘As a Muslim’ are commonplace. Things have gone so far that some students now insist that you ask a person what their preferred gender pronoun is before addressing them, on the basis that if you were to use the wrong one — such as calling a man a ‘he’ when in fact ‘he’ identifies as a ‘she’ — their personhood would be crushed and they would require months of therapy and tea to recover. The politics of identity is narcissistic and needy. It encourages self-reflection over solidarity with others, sectionalism over universalism. In 1979, the great American thinker Christopher Lasch noted the emergence of this new ‘narcissistic personality’, where individuals ‘cannot live without an admiring audience’. Such neediness is rampant now, as evidenced in all the identity sects demanding supine acceptance of their terminology and worldview from everyone. If you don’t respect their ideas, you hurt their minds and bodies.
It’s all inherently censorious. Because if your political activism is indistinguishable from your natural characteristics or cultural identity, then any criticism of your political activism will inevitably feel like an assault on *you*. This is why student politicos in particular are so insanely cagey about open debate, forever hiding themselves in ‘safe spaces’ and trying to ward off campus anyone who criticises them in the same way monks might once have wielded crucifixes to chase away witches: because their transformation of their navels into the most interesting things in the world, their politicisation of their bodies and sexual preferences, means they can brook no ridicule of their outlook.
https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2015/02/identity-politics-has-created-an-army-of-vicious-narcissists/
From Postmodern Politics and the Battle for the Future
Identity politics has its origins in the "new social movements" of the 1970s and 1980s and, ultimately, the struggles of the 1960s. Yet the "movement" of the '60s both pursued a coalition and alliance politics and challenged the dominant powers on multiple levels -- gender, race, the hierarchical structure of the universities, colonial domination, U.S. imperialism in Vietnam, the alienated nature of work, sexual repression, and the oppressive organization of everyday life. In the 1970s, however, the "movement" fragmented into the "new social movements" which included feminist, black liberation, gay and lesbian, and peace and environmental groups, each fighting for their own interests (e.g., blacks saw the emerging environmental movement in the late 1960s as a bourgeois diversion from civil rights struggles, and environmentalists emphasized wilderness issues while ignoring problems of urban pollution). By the 1980s and 1990s, as the Balkanization process continued, the "new social movements" had become transformed into "identity politics," the very name suggesting a turn away from general social, political, and economic issues toward concerns with culture and personal identity. Identity politics bears the influence of postmodern theory, which is evident in the critique of modern reductionism, abstract universalism, and essentialism, as well as a use of multi-perspectival strategies that legitimate multiple political voices. Foucault's genealogical politics, for example, is explicitly designed to liberate suppressed voices and struggles in history from the dominant narratives that reduce them to silence. In identity politics, individuals define themselves primarily as belonging to a given group, marked as "oppressed" and therefore as outside the dominant white male, heterosexual, capitalist culture. These identities revolve around a "subject position," a key identity marker defined by one's gender, race, class, sexual preference, and so on, through which an individual is made subordinate to the dominant culture. Although class is certainly a major form of identity, identity politics typically is defined in opposition to class politics. But although postmodern theory usually attacks essentialism, there is a form of essentialism in many modes of identity politics which privilege gender, race, sexual preference, or some other marker as the constituent of identity. Moreover, through fetishizing a single all-defining personal identity (woman, black, gay, etc.), identity politics also departs from the insight of postmodern theory that identities are multiple and socially constructed, and that they need to be reconstructed in an emancipatory, autonomous, and self-affirming fashion. In other words, some versions of identity politics fetishize given constituents of identity, as if one of our multiple identity markers were our deep and true self, around which all of our life and politics revolve.In some forms, identity politics also dovetails with liberal interest group politics that seeks to advance the interests of a single specific group, typically in opposition not only to the dominant groups, but also to other marginalized and oppressed groups. Thus, in contrast to the universal and collective emphases of modern politics, a postmodern identity politics tends to be insular and something of a special interest group, perhaps itself a postmodern phenomenon. Hence, where as modern politics focused on universalistic goals like gaining civil liberties, reducing inequalities, or transforming structures and institutions of domination, postmodern identity politics singles out the specific interests of a group and constructs identities through identification with the group and its struggle
https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/postmodernpolitics.pdf
New York Times the end of identity liberalism.
But it is at the level of electoral politics that identity liberalism has failed most spectacularly, as we have just seen. National politics in healthy periods is not about “difference,” it is about commonality
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-identity-liberalism.html?_r=0
Identitarians can never hope to build nor heal the nation, they are capable only of its total deconstruction, by means of a toxic introspective division. Never open to free debate, never willing to try to improve the situation. They are angry, loud, irrational, and growing, ( Evergreen State College Controversy (HBO)
Now Charlottesville
Who would not have known that after all these years of the promotion of identity politics some whites may choose to self-identify as white, and form groups defending and promoting whiteness?
Idiots, morons, and inbred anti-intellectual misfits gathered in Charlottesville to expose their racism and utter stupidity for all to see. They do have a first amendment right to do so. Hopefully, the public display of their overwhelming ignorance exposed their hate, and overt racism, compromising and exposing their ideas and beliefs for what they are, the delusional ramblings of white racists. This is a good thing, as the more exposed intolerant beliefs become, they are less likely to be endorsed or accepted by other people who previously may have been inclined to join said groups or organizations
Further readings.
Social postmodernism beyond identity politics . An interesting read on a direction some may suggest the Nation travels. I found the section where he claims science oppressing him amusing. Yet I know no good can come from such a belief. funny or not.
http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/samples/cam034/94049039.pdf
Identity Politics: Limits of Postmodernism and Queer Theory
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057%2F9780230113558_5
Identitarianism is the belief that social identity matters most. Examples include white racists , black nationalists, male chauvinists, and gender feminists . If animals practiced identitarianism, cows and chickens would fight about who is more privileged while the butcher laughed.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=identitarianism
Simon Tormey/ Do we need “identity politics”? Postmarxism and the critique of “pure particularism”
In his recent paper, ‘Multiculturalism, or, the cultural logic of multinational capitalism’ Slavoj Žižek argues that multiculturalism and, by extension, much of what comes under the rubric of ‘identity politics’ is no less than a new strain of ‘fascism’ .1Žižek’s principal point is that multiculturalism enacts a form of postmodern ‘racism’ in which cultures and practices are sanctified insofar as they do not challenge or confront the authority of the Gaze. In this sense the multiculturalists’ ‘neutrality’ stands for his or her superiority over the very forms of life with which he or she is concerned to document and protect. It is a patronising gaze related to, if not the same as, that of the imperialist in his or her relations to the ‘poor bloody natives’. Žižek’s point concerns, however, not merely the character of multiculturalism, but also its political effects. In his view the domination of multiculturalism is at the same time the domination of the particular over the universal, of the fragment over the totality, of surface appearance over ‘essentialist’ critique. The result has been disastrous for emancipatory theory, indeed for any attempt at maintaining a critical distance from the status quo. Žižek’s claim is that multiculturalism has inured the left to the promise of emancipation by as it were ‘rainbow coalition’ (Žižek, 1997, p. 47). In his view however, far from presaging a ‘new politics’ of the subject and a new politics of emancipation or universalism as its supporters claim, multiculturalism’s true raison d’êtreis the papering over the further extension of ‘globalisation’. Multiculturalism is as it were globalisation’s human ‘face’; it speaks to us as concerned citizens of the world, as post-political, post-class bearers of ‘new’, ‘diffuse’ identities whilst at the same time erasing difference in the course its unfolding. The celebration of difference and diversity associated with multiculturalism and identity politics more generally is false: lurking within is a barely concealed will-to-mastery whose realisation involves the subjection and subordination most obviously of the global South and ultimately of all those subject to and oppressed by the logic of capital (Žižek 1997, p. 46; Žižek 1999, pp. 208 ff.). Identity politics (of which multiculturalism is but one expression) is therefore equivalent to the end of politics, or rather it is the ‘post-politics’ of dispossession, not this ‘time’ by nation states, but by multinational corporations. ‘In the long term’, as he mordantly notes, ‘we shall not only wear Banana Republic shirts but also live in banana republics’ (Žižek 1999, p. 216). Žižek should be so lucky: some of us are consigned to live in banana monarchies. As is all too evident, Žižek’s critique comes as a slap in the face to the postmarxian left
https://ecpr.eu/Filestore/PaperProposal/a6092ba9-cde1-4532-b8f0-53240879bd39.pdf
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Who would not have known that after all these of years of the promotion of identity politics some whites may choose to self-identify as white, and form groups defending and promoting whiteness?
Idiots, morons, and inbred anti-intellectual misfits gathered in Charlottesville to expose their racism and utter stupidity for all to see. They do have a first amendment right to do so. Hopefully, the public display of their overwhelming ignorance exposed their hate, and overt racism, compromising and exposing their ideas and beliefs for what they are, the delusional ramblings of white racists. This is a good thing, as the more exposed intolerant beliefs become, they are less likely to be endorsed or accepted by other people who previously may have been inclined to join said groups or organizations
It has become commonplace to note that the far-Right is now using identity politics and epistemic relativism in a very similar way to the postmodern-Left. Of course, elements of the far-Right have always been divisive on the grounds of race, gender and sexuality and prone to irrational and anti-science views but postmodernism has produced a culture more widely receptive to this. Kenan Malik describes this shift,
“When I suggested earlier that the idea of ‘alternative facts’ draws upon ‘a set of concepts that in recent decades have been used by radicals’, I was not suggesting that Kellyanne Conway, or Steve Bannon, still less Donald Trump, have been reading up on Foucault or Baudrillard… It is rather that sections of academia and of the left have in recent decades helped create a culture in which relativized views of facts and knowledge seem untroubling , and hence made it easier for the reactionary right not just to re-appropriate but also to promote reactionary ideas.”
Cops in Charlottesville came under fire from both sides after Saturday’s fatal car crash, in which a neo-Nazi drove into a crowd of anti-racism protesters .
“Unite the Right” organizer Jason Kessler said Sunday that police “exacerbated the violence” in part by being “poorly underequipped for the situation.”
A counter-protest organizer, Brittany Caine-Conley of Congregate C’ville, also told the New York Times that cops did nothing as people beat each other bloody.
“It was essentially just brawling on the street and community members trying to protect each other,” she said.
Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe told CBS News said he was “proud of law enforcement here,”
When police do nothing to stop violence, violence escalates. I did not know about this until I read it in the post just now. Some responsibility for this atrocity can be laid at the feet of a lax, and poorly thought out response from those sworn to "protect" and serve.
Is this an article to be discussed, or is this an attempt to make some money off of a tragedy?
Is this an article to be discussed,
Yes.
I am not Tim Pool. I linked two of his videos. I can not remove the advertising.
Identity politics is nothing new. In fact, it's as old as the Republic. It was called "faction" at the beginning and was something that the founders warned about and practiced eagerly by those who ran for office. And it's been practiced all across the social and political spectrum despite the right's constant whine that it's all the fault of liberals. Much of it is based on feelings of exclusion or persecution of a minority but the most recent, loudest, absurd and now violent of the species is that of a small segment of the majority population claiming fake-victimhood because they perceive, correctly, that they are losing their former privileged position. They plaint is against the natural order so it's doomed to fail. They might want to read more history of the first majority of this land: the native people who were here when the first European invaders arrived. Now there was real, bloody and nearly complete loss of privilege (i.e., genocide).
Identity politics is nothing new.
You confuse differences between groups of peoples (their idenity) and the concept of identity politics. It was in the NYT article linked above. You know, the alt-right white supremacists of The New Youk Times?
But the fixation on diversity in our schools and in the press has produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups, and indifferent to the task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life. At a very young age our children are being encouraged to talk about their individual identities, even before they have them. By the time they reach college many assume that diversity discourse exhausts political discourse, and have shockingly little to say about such perennial questions as class, war, the economy and the common good. In large part this is because of high school history curriculums, which 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.
You confuse differences between groups of peoples (their idenity) and the concept of identity politics.
I do not. Every new wave of immigrants soon learned that to have any kind of political power they had to unite. So there were Irish and Italian and Jewish and Polish identity groups within the political parties. And those still exist. The fact that we have more now just reflects more recognition of the political advantage of those identities as well as more groups now being recognized by society for having rights and dignity that was not there historically. To repeat: identity politics has been the norm for this country from the beginning.
To repeat: identity politics has been the norm for this country from the beginning.
Did you angerly stamp your feet as you wrote that?
Please try to correct professor Kellner at UCLA, and not me.
He, She, Ze or Zie, can be found at the university's Graduate School of Education & Information Studies. Informing anyone reading the article, that it is a fairly recent phenomenon, just emerging fully and clearly only in the 1980s and 1990s. I'm sure your view will welcome since it is a random ignominious critique of the academic field of study. here is the link..go at it. Since I'm not a postmodernist, I will choose well-researched academic reason over the "feelings" of unknown online commentators. Thank you.
Since I'm not a postmodernist, I will choose well-researched academic reason over the "feelings" of unknown online commentators. Thank you.
Okay, but you asked for it. Neither of the two authors of the piece you've relied on for your case are historians. Kellner is the only one, as far as I can tell, who's on the UCLA faculty.....of Education. His degrees are in education and philosophy. I can't find any evidence for the academic credentials of Steven Best. Let's look at their bibliography for the article:
1.Steven Best and Douglas Kellner (1991) Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations. London
and New York: MacMillan and Guilford Press, and (1997) The Postmodern Turn. New York:
Guilford Press.
2. Mary Wollstonecraft (1975 [1792]) Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Baltimore: Penguin
Books.
3. Jean Baudrillard, (1988) "The Year 2000 Has Already Happened," in Arthur and Marilouise
Kroker (eds), Body Invaders: Panic Sex in America. Montreal: The New World Perspectives: 44.
4. Teresa Ebert, (1996) Ludic Feminism and After. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan
Press, and Hal Foster (1983) "Introduction" to The Anti-Aesthetic. Washington: Bay Press.
5. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Toward a
Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso Books.
6. Ernesto Laclau, "Politics and the Limits of Modernity," in Andrew Ross, Universal Abandon.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988: 33.
7. Laclau, op. cit., pp. 79-80.
8. Laclau, op. cit. 72.
9. Chantal Mouffe, "Radical Democracy: Modern or Postmodern?" in Ross, op. cit.: 48.
10. Best and Kellner 1991, op. cit. and Steven Best, The Politics of Historical Vision. New
York: Guilford, 1995.
11. Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt. Boston: Beacon Press, 1972: 71-72.
12. See Best and Kellner 1997, op.cit, Chapter 3.
13. Rudolph Bahro, The Alternative in Eastern Europe. London: New Left Books, 1978.
14. George Katsiaficas, The Subversion of Politics. European Autonomous Movements and the
Decolonization of Everyday Life. New Jersey, Humanities Press, 1997. 15. See Best and Kellner
1991 for our discussion of the need to overcome the antitheses between modern macro politics
and postmodern micropolitics and how both perspectives can be deployed in a more inclusive
politics of the future. In Chapter 8 of Postmodern Theory, we suggest how a combination of
micro and macropolitics were combined in the struggles against state communism in 1989, thus
putting in question theories that would privilege one dimension to the neglect of the other.
16. Herbert Marcuse, Negations. Boston Beacon Press, 1968.
17. Douglas Kellner, Media Culture. London and New York: Routledge Press, 1995.
18. Janet Biehl, Rethinking Ecofeminist Politics. Boston: South End Press, 1991.
19. Mark Dowie Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth
Century. Cambridge: MIT Press. 1995.
20. Best and Kellner 1997, op. cit., Chapter Five.
21. Best and Kellner 1991, op. cit., Chapter Eight.
22. Best, op. cit. and Douglas Kellner, "The Obsolescence of Marxism?" in Whither Marxism?,
edited by Bernd Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg. London and New York: Routledge, 1995: 3-
30.
23. Ann Cvetovitch and Douglas Kellner, editors, Articulating the Global and the Local. Globalization and Cultural Studies. Boulder: Westview, 1997.
Not only is there not a single reference that is a history or even a political history of this country but there's not a single reference that goes back beyond the mid-20th century. Oh, wait. There is one: Mary Wollstonecraft's piece on the rights of women from 1792. That reminded me that I left out one of the major categories of "identity" politics in my list above: Feminism. That also dates back to the beginning of our Republic. I guess even a modernist or post-modernist or whatever the fuck they call themselves have at least some sense that there were events going on before the period that they confine themselves.
Now that we have determined this to be a discussion, allow me 2 questions:
1) The event was declared unlawful (because the Gov feared violence). So why did local authorities let it go so far?
2) Is there a moral equivilency between the avowed racists and the counter group that showed up to sqaure off with them?
1) The event was declared unlawful (because the Gov feared violence). So why did local authorities let it go so far?
My question is why they made no effort to separate the groups? Did they want some violence? The actions of the authorities raise questions.
2) Is there a moral equivilency between the avowed racists and the counter group that showed up to sqaure off with them?
They are both identitarian groups fueled by a toxic ideology. Believing violence is better than dialogue, reasoned conversation, or debate. The only difference I see is one member of one group, escalated the violence to a higher level than expected by either group. Violence was the clear objective of both groups, and yet the police did nothing. Could there have been a stand-down order? Why were the police on the sidelines. Remember, as you said.
The event was declared unlawful (because the Gov feared violence)
My question is why they made no effort to separate the groups? Did they want some violence? The actions of the authorities raise questions.
It is my understanding that the permit for the Nazis for the Sat. rally was cancelled after the violence of the previous night. But the Nazis gathered and marched anyway and the counter-demonstration was so massive that there was no way for the police to contain either group.
It is my understanding that the permit for the Nazis for the Sat. rally was cancelled
The ACLU prevented that from happening.
The ACLU is very hawkish about infringement of the first amendment.
My question is why they made no effort to separate the groups? Did they want some violence? The actions of the authorities raise questions.
Good point. IMO, They needed violence for the necessary justification of denying a protest.
They are both identitarian groups fueled by a toxic ideology. Believing violence is better than dialogue, reasoned conversation, or debate. The only difference I see is one member of one group, escalated the violence to a higher level than expected by either group
Agreed. Nationwide violence from both sides. I recall the recent shooting of a member of congress by someone who identifies as left wing democrat. One as bad as the other.
One as bad as the other.
True that.
True that.
Nope. LIE, that.
I recall the recent shooting of a member of congress by someone who identifies as left wing democrat. One as bad as the other.
That's a highly political recollection you got goin' there. The ball field shooter was a lone actor who was only ever identified a Bernie supporter which included many non-democrats. His actual political party affiliation, if any, was never mentioned by him or anyone else. His act was harshly condemned by democrats, including this very liberal one. To compare one lone wolf to a pack of them, many of which are blatant neo-nazis, is a stretch even for a hard core Trumper.
That's a highly political recollection you got goin' there.
Who has closer tangible connections to real racists Obama or Trump?
Let's see if Orwell's memory hole is in effect?
Who has closer tangible connections to real racists Obama or Trump?
Short of Trump actually showing up to lead his neo-nazi scumbags on Saturday in Charlotte, it couldn't get any closer.
You know...
I looked up "Identity politics" because you use it to start off a number of your paragraphs. (Or whomever you cut and pasted that from used it a lot.)
Then I looked up "Identitarians"
The very FIRST thing it said when I looked up "Identitarians" was "NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH IDENTITY POLITICS."
Then I looked back at all the crap you've posted above about Identity politics and Identitarians (and that took a long while because ther is so much crap here) and there is only one conclusion to be drawn.
YOU SEEM TO BE VERY CONFUSED!
No offense, but... You really should try to figure out the difference, and maybe post two seperate articles rather than try to confuse others with this load of confusing crap.
Then I looked up " Identitarians "
But decided not to share the links? (LOL)
first used in negative dialectics
Then I looked up " Identitarians "
But decided not to share the links? (LOL)
there is one dictionary's definition in the article already.
"Identity politics , also called identitarian politics "
Identitarianism
These are the definitions I am using.
Ressentiment is the word, that I thought would be questioned.
One can not emphasize enough the dysmorphic beliefs of those promoting this ideology without including a very sophisticated, and clearly worded caution, against the dangers of ressentiment .
Here is a better link.
Resentment/ Ressentiment
Resentment is a recurrent problem for democracy. With its normative commitment to satisfying the principle of equal respect, democracy encourages and legitimates the expression of resentment against injustice, inequality, and corruption. Yet, as John Keane’s recent analysis of contemporary democracy implies, rising tides of resentment can easily turn citizens against democratic principles and promote so-called ‘democide’.
self-abasement
the belittling or humiliation of oneself.
(Not living in mom's basement. Although openly admitting that could work too, I guess.)
It means resentment. Why use a French word when we already have our own (admittedly, coming from the French).
It means resentment. Why use a French word when we already have our own (admittedly, coming from the French)?
"To compare one lone wolf to a pack of them, many of which are blatant neo-nazis, is a stretch even for a hard core Trumper."
I will go a step further. Progressive ideology as is currently practiced is the moral equivelent of "racism". It is unfortunate but that ideology has accepted violence, anarchy and the denial of free speech. From the UC Berkeley riots to the unlawful removal of a statue in North Carolina to the execution of police officers.
It was no stretch at all.
It was no stretch at all.
Comment removed for skirting the CoC. jwc2blue
Additionally; Vic Eldred, the use of purple text is reserved for moderators to facilitate tracking in threads. Thank you for your cooperation.
What happened to the " Code of Conduct" ???
Will do