They are endlessly jostling for position on the progressive stack or apologising for their position at the bottom of it. Their only chance is to walk away from the stack.
Left unity is difficult and needs a charismatic centre leaning leader but Trump is a shared goal like no other. It will be interesting to see what happens.
The “identity politics” at play in the US presidential election are nationalist racists of the old style which never really went away, and are regaining power due to immigration patterns.
It has nothing to do with your adorable obsession with academic “identity politics” which is really not a thing in North America (maybe Europe is different).
There is a big issue with millenials being super lazy and not even bothering to vote or voting ironically. That could be some sort of entitlement issue. They are about to learn a hard lesson I think.
Uh ok sure. It really is that simple and God forbid someone approach an issue with some attempt at complexity. The only identity politics at play in the US election were white nationalists. Yes. Ok.
Yes. Don’t encourage pwk’s pseudo-intellectualism that people were really voting against safe spaces and neutral pronouns… those were not even tangentially issues. It is economics and immigration, large scale issues that people actually give a fuck about.
The alt right aren’t stupid. They drove a heavy meme campaign through the working class Latino and Black socmedia communities centred around that stupid Satanist thing because the Latino and black working class are religiously conservative. Did it work? Who knows.
Oh and the Latino (27-33% of males!) and Black Trump vote actually exists, it needs to be analysed. Many of the POC Trump supporters that pop up in my TL are rabid anti-SJWs. That was their sole reason for being a Trump voter.
Many of the Yazidi in my timeline have been RTing and supporting Trump. You know why? The know the Western left are allied with Islamists.They believe only he can rescue them. Isn’t that disgusting? That a race subject to genocide as we speak believe their hope lies with Trump rather than the progressives? Does that make you proud to be a progressive ?
You think allyship is an academic subject when Pretty Boy Trudeau is the men only room at the mosque joking about gender segregation whilst the white women ministers sit hijabi clad upstairs? You don’t think the rest of the world notices this?
Allyship is an academic subject because no one in the real world talks about it. If I were to poll my office, if even 2 people knew what the fuck allyship was I would be astonished. It is literally never a subject of conversation ever.
You know what my Turkish friends talk about though? How much they hate Erdogan, how much they love Putin (because he’s sticking it to ISIS so effectively!!!) and how awesome Trump would be because he’d really get in there and destroy ISIS.
Nobody gives a fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck about safe spaces. They just perceive a strongman who will serve their agenda.
I moved to postmodernism, cultural relativism, post-colonialism and occidentalism a while back, as well as the tribalism that binds many of the identity factions together.
If you don’t think people vote against those concepts,even if they don’t know the schools of thought they dont like the ideas these bring, because occidentalists are pretty much opposed to many of the cultural values and virtues of the centre to right. If you hate “the West” you are going to alienate those who don’t.
Cultural relativism is inflammatory too, the outrage generated over people tying themselves in verbal knots because they refuse to condemn child marriage or women as property is palpable, these memes spread like wildfire through the silent voters and boomer socmedia.
Sorry but white working class voters in the US do not care whatsoever one little bit about Yazidis or child marriage or women as property.
Here’s a sample of what they care about: the supreme court (to protect the 2nd amendment), the loss of manufacturing jobs due to trade, and too much (or in some cases any) immigration.
Also terrorism.
Of course they dont talk about allyship or the exact examples I give because normies dont generally discuss sociology and philosophy, they just get a distilled and warped version of it all that affirms all their fears of the left.
But even though they don’t know what allyship means it doesnt mean they don’t talk about Trudeau bowing to Allah in a mosque, or hysteria over the latest Fox/Daily Mail story about cultural relativism.
The Yazidi question is one for progressives to address not Trump voters. Ask yourself the question. Why didn’t they ask for help from the Western left?
They cared about those things the last two and a half US elections and lost. Though I’m willing to have a debate whether the result is different this time because Hillary was a weak candidate or the reaction to being prejudiced as undesirables because they happen to be white males.
I say it’s the latter though the turnout numbers mean you could argue either way.
Humans in the real world don’t talk about it, for the most part.
In short, your pet issue is not everyone or even a large minority of people’s pet issue.
For the last year election threads in P&R have consisted (mainly) of hundreds of white guys standing in a large crowd pointing and shouting racist! misogynist! ban them! at anyone or anything that voiced any kinds of concerns against Clinton and now identity politics aren’t important? Are you really that lacking self-awareness?
I also suggest you also read the Daily Mail and watch Fox, because I think you’ll find cultural relativism (especially around refugees), cultural appropriation and other SJW stuff have provided excellent clickbait and propaganda for the right.
Racism is a thing that exists, not some invention of academic institutions and only just now being foisted upon us.
It’s only “identity politics” in the sense that racist dogwhistles (and this time about just open shouting and yelling) are commonly used to mobilize certain segments of the electorate.
What you drone on and on about in this thread, however, is not even on the radar of most voters. Your concerns are not really anyone’s concerns in the real world. It’s been shown time and time again that people do not vote on the basis of micro identity politics: gay marriage, bathroom laws, LGBT rights, safe spaces do not decide or even notably influence elections.
You give outsized importance to your own personal crusade. No one in America cares about Muslim issues. They only care that some percentage might be terrorists or coming to somehow conquer them from within when Clinton “opens the floodgates”.
My comments about Trump seizing identity politics and the white right adopting the victim identity didn’t come from nowhere. The New York Times were writing about it last week.
As have many other outlets written about it too.
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=“identity+politics”&tbm=nws
Whether or not you are astute enough to recognise it too is another matter because the thin slices of postmodernism you keep mentioning, pronouns and safe spaces and what have you is just but a small section of what this ideology represents.
Have you not seen alt right and traditional right socmedia? What do think drives these people? Or is your hugbox your sole source of news?
That second link contains conservative outlets and pundits attributing their victory in part to identity politics ffs.
If you don’t understand them, won’t speak to them, ban them from your socmedia spaces, and aren’t willing to investigate the causes, motivations and fears of your opponents it might explain why you lot lost.
You mean the Western Left that was marching side by side with islamofascists against any kind of exercise of Western military power and doing everything they could to prevent the Assad government from paying any kind of real price for using chemical weapons? That Western Left? (Rhetorical question)
That’s exactly it though.
This stuff; it’s important, but it’s not central to most voters.
I don’t know about the US, but over here, if I look in the Guardian, or on my facebook flist, this kind of thing is right up there as one of the most important issues people talk about. And they’re pretty unpleasant about the people who don’t agree with them.
Do I think people vote based directly on this stuff? No, probably not. But they do see people going on about stuff and insulting people like them? Do you think they subconsciously divide politicians into “people like me” and “people who don’t care about my problems”. Because I do.
And ultimately, in our private lives, and social media worlds, it’s a good thing that racism and misogyny get that kind of priority. But when it comes to dominate the presentation of a national political party it’s a killer. Blair didn’t talk much about the Human Rights Act - he just passed it. He didn’t talk much about institutional racism in the police, he just ensured that it was impossible to get promoted above a certain level unless you said the right things.
Exactly, which is why I used words like “contributed to”, “in part to identity politics” “might be a cause”
None of these might be sole reasons. But denying they have any impact is denying the evidence in front of their faces.
We have what, 3-4 GOP voters on QT3? Or at least anti-Hillarys. Malathor is a few posts above me mirroring my comments on the poisonous nature of identity politics followed by denials anyone cares about them. Post-factualism in action.
All I am saying is that you guys magnify the importance of issues that are mainly only important in your rarefied bubbles.
As for the Yazidis, it is Clinton who knows who they are and might have done something. Trump is going to leave Syria to the Russians and Iraq to Iran.
That’s what we learned Tuesday. That’s what America told the world.