Understanding Identity Politics.
By
John C. Dvorak
The Democrat Party somewhere someplace sometime found this
non-issue of oppression within American society and decided to bank on it to
create a voting bloc of the oppressed. In their mind’s view the idea was that
everyone, if identified as a sub-group, could be convinced that there was a
small group of oppressors oppressing them. This resulted in identity politics,
a term often used but not understood.
Jordan Peterson was one of the first to explain its roots.
Here is an excerpt from his entry in the Wikipedia:
Peterson
states that postmodern philosophers and sociologists since the 1960s have built
upon and extended certain core tenets of Marxism and communism while
simultaneously appearing to disavow both ideologies. He says that it is
difficult to understand contemporary Western society without considering the
influence of a strain of postmodernism thought that migrated from France to the
United States through the English department at Yale University. He states that
certain academics in the humanities, "started to play a sleight of hand,
and instead of pitting the proletariat, the working class, against the
bourgeois, they started to pit the oppressed against the oppressor. That opened
up the avenue to identifying any number of groups as oppressed and oppressor
and to continue the same narrative under a different name.
Peterson was early in spotting the roots of this situation
which he broadly refers to as an element of cultural Marxism.
The Democrats have made hay to some extent by identifying a
lot of these oppressed groups and in many cases only recently informed them that
they were indeed oppressed.
This happened with carefully orchestrated publicity stunts. A
good example was the transsexual toilet laws controversy. This pointed out
“oppression” and caught a lot of people flat-footed to only be embarrassed by
their “lack of compassion.”
The political correctness, which became a methodology of free
speech control has mutated into an instrument of thought control adopted and
accepted by many Americans and everyone in the Democrat party. You say or do
something outside the proscribed limitations, and you lose your job, your
career, your livelihood. The set of rules that make up the politically correct
infrastructure have somehow become organic, taking on a life of their own with
new rules cropping up all the time.
The most onerous are the considerations for hate speech, which
is protected speech under the first amendment, but
prohibited by the god of political correctness. This is the case despite the
fact that hate speech is ill-defined (like most politically correct anything)
and not generally applicable. In essence hate speech can only apply to the
oppressed and never the oppressors.
For example, you can hate whitey and hate men because they are generally identified as oppressors, born to a supposed
genetic royalty and thus given white privilege, even though there is no such
thing as white privilege.
This idea was actually mocked by Eddie Murphy when he
put on “white face” in one of his SNL skits and found that by being white
everything was free.
In fact, white privilege is the necessary element – although
an artificial construct – needed to make identity politics work. If you are
going to define groups of “oppressed,” you need convenient oppressors. Why not
a single homogeneous group? And the group cannot contain any of the supposed
oppressed such as gay white men or women, so they have to be
further segmented to straight-only males. But you need a code for this
that is new (and post-modern) so we now use the awkward term CIS-gender white
male. They are the oppressors of everyone. And hating them is OK and
encouraged.
How this nonsense is supposed to translate into votes for
Democrats is sketchy, to say the least. In fact, the opportunity may backfire
for two reasons. First, it’s insulting to white people in general (men and women,
straight or gay) who make up about 70-percent of the voting population. And it
has the potential to annoy most of the supposed oppressed who do not see things
this way and find it insulting to be defined as
inferior and oppressed losers, the “poor things” who need all this help.
The backlash potential is huge. This whole direction, stemming
from genuinely Marxist ideology, may be the biggest
mistake ever made by the Democrats. And there seems to be nobody in the party
equipped to deal with it because standing against any of it would, ironically,
not be politically correct.
The media, which is indeed mostly Democrat Party supporters,
has played along like Marxist-branded “useful idiots” and forced the political
correctness mechanism into the public sphere as a good thing, when it clearly
is not. The media, especially the mainstream, is probably the most responsible
for the mess just as they are responsible for getting Trump elected by
over-covering his campaign hoping to mock him.
All these trends will continue through every election and if
there is even a hint that this strategy is working in any circumstance, the
situation will worsen. There is no alternative strategy on the horizon.
--end
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