Problematic Stuff

[Scot Dutchy]

Sorry to tell you, but De Gaulle was solidly planted in the Christian Right tradition, law and order and all that, and he even had a whole constitution crafted just so he could be a de facto dictator, albeit one that was democratically elected and ruled in part by plebiscite.

But after all, Julius Caesar too was made Dictator for life... some people including one Junius Brutus feared he'd take the next step and try to have himself crowned as king, follow some Ides of March shenanigans...

De Gaulle was old school. He was elected. No dictator is democratically elected.

[Hermit]

Does the "alt" mean alternative?

Alt-right is basically a metaphor for "fascist, batshit crazy, more loony than Ayn Rand right".

[pErvinalia]

Sorry to tell you, but De Gaulle was solidly planted in the Christian Right tradition, law and order and all that, and he even had a whole constitution crafted just so he could be a de facto dictator, albeit one that was democratically elected and ruled in part by plebiscite.

But after all, Julius Caesar too was made Dictator for life... some people including one Junius Brutus feared he'd take the next step and try to have himself crowned as king, follow some Ides of March shenanigans...

De Gaulle was old school. He was elected. No dictator is democratically elected.

They can later become dictators, though. Stalin, Mugabe and all the rest.

[rainbow]

Does the "alt" mean alternative?

Alt-right is basically a metaphor for "fascist, batshit crazy, more loony than Ayn Rand right".

"alt" means old style, in the tradition of Attila the Hun.

[Svartalf]

Does the "alt" mean alternative?

Alt-right is basically a metaphor for "fascist, batshit crazy, more loony than Ayn Rand right".

Is it actually to be more batshit crazy, more fascistically loony than ayn rand?

[pErvinalia]

Look up Murray Rothbard. He makes Ayn Rand look sane.

[Svartalf]

De Gaulle was old school. He was elected. No dictator is democratically elected.

wasn't mugabe democratically elected?
and dictator is not about how you come to power , but about the amount of power you personally wield (heck, in Rome, dictators were nominated by the senate)

[Svartalf]

Does the "alt" mean alternative?

Alt-right is basically a metaphor for "fascist, batshit crazy, more loony than Ayn Rand right".

"alt" means old style, in the tradition of Attila the Hun.

[Forty Two]

It depends how broadly you want to define "identity politics"; I'm not convinced it is a useful term, it being used mostly in the pejorative sense...

Who, apart from the alt-right, is using the term in the pejorative sense? I go with the definition I just quoted and which Seabass has quoted earlier. 42 has either not read it or is simply ignoring it in favour of the alt-right version. Now, I'm not saying he is a member of that mob, but he does increasingly quack like one.

Well, plenty do, because the "alt right" is a fringe right wing group, and most people (a) hardly know what it is, and (b) don't belong to it. So often, the term "alt right" is weilded as a pejorative to label anyone who espouses any view considered conservative or even libertarian. When you have a guy like Jordan Peterson being called a leader or philosopher of the "alt right", it's clear that the word is just used to paint anyone undesirable with that evil brush. If you're alt right, you're racist, mean, and help the nazis and facists.

However, plenty of people who consider themselves to be left of center, and moderates, have criticized "identity politics."

I haven't provided an additional response to the issue, because I was asked my definition, and I presented it. I have then explained how, under my definition, the civil rights movement was not overall an identity politics movement. You've rejected that, claiming I've not come close to showing that the civil rights movement was not identity politics. I am not going to reiterate my argument, and you're free to accept or reject it. I don't know what else to say about it. We differ. Big deal? Not that I can see. We have a difference of opinion. It doesn't make me "alt right" to hold the views I have. I don't belong to the alt right. I don't subscribe to their views. The alt right is identitarian, for one thing, it's a form of identity politics - white identity. I don't like that. It's also, it seems to me, tending toward a pro "Christian Nation" mentality and ideology, and I resoundingly reject that. I am very much in favor of separation of church and state and freedom of religion (and non-religion). I am pro-immigration (of the legal kind) and I think we can stand, as a nation, to admit more people into the country, so I don't share their xenophobia. I favor civil rights laws, which prohibit employment and public accommodation discrimination based on race, color, creed, national origin, age, sex, handicap/disability, sexual orientation and the like. I don't think the alt-right is in favor of that. I'm pro choice. I am against the death penalty.

I don't at all "quack" like the "alt right," and to say so is to appallingly misrepresent anything I've ever said on these forums. One would think we're speaking different languages, and I guess I have to work harder to make sure you understand what I'm saying. Because if you can read my posts and say I quack like racist, fascist, neonazi, type folks, then you are either misapprehending or misrepresenting me.

[Forty Two]

"Race is the foundation of identity. I would say that that’s kind of a more touchy-feely version of this, but it’s maybe the most important one. We understand ourselves as coming from some place. We understand ourselves as being part of a bigger story. We’re part of....this big narrative of who we are. We aren’t just individuals. We aren’t just some raceless, genderless soul or brain existing in the world, interacting with others. No, we have roots."

That's one reason why identity politics is pernicious. That kind of identity ideology separates, tribalizes, and creates discord and sows hatred.

What was at hand were the ashes of the 1960s liberation movements, all of which were at a loss as to where to go next. From this leftover hodgepodge, over time a sharply defined ideology emerged, which we can see today in the contemporary form of identity politics — complete with “intersectionality” and other terms of art.

My generation was the last to have escaped the full brunt of this pernicious ideology. We grew up believing that human difference was not biological but primarily intellectual. We didn’t treat racial, sexual or other differences as inevitable, defined in stone, but fluid realities to be worked around. In fact, it was an insult, if you came of age in that time, to have to commit to a particular identity. Wasn’t that the antithesis of the American idea? How could reinvention take place if you took your spot along a particular identity and stuck with it all your life? Life would be so boring, so predictable, so deadly.

I remember well the debates and controversies of that time. We cheered the freedom movement in Eastern Europe, waiting to see what new economic realities would emerge and how they would affect the quality of life for people around the world. The first Iraq War, which had been preceded by the Panama invasion, made my generation of students all the more eager to see the back of the Reagan ascendancy, as we dreamed of utopian solutions to the kind of economic serfdom that had arisen in 1980s America. When the Soviet Union fell at last, we thought we were past the ideological blinders of the World War II generation, and we couldn’t wait to find out what the cultural thaw would bring. We looked forward to a world that would move along quickly, amid a resurgence of civil liberty, freed of the futile power struggle that had lasted half a century.

There wasn’t a racial, religious or biological dimension to the “peace dividend” we expected, a term that understates the extent of utopian thinking prevalent then. When Francis Fukuyama published his “End of History” thesis in 1989, around the time the Berlin Wall fell, we could see through his simplifications on behalf of a kind of capitalism we were weary of. No one among my cohort actually expected history to end, but it did fit into the tenor of the times, when thinkers reached for the universal. We were proud inheritors of the Enlightenment: That was the intellectual legacy we had to improve on, it was to be our perpetual lodestar, if we were not to be trapped in particularistic thought that could have no good results for anyone. True, Allan Bloom had rung the alarm bells not long ago over the new conformity, but we felt sure that intellectual prowess would reign supreme in the end.

When, a little later, the Bosnian slaughter occurred, we framed it not as Muslims versus the rest, but as a direct attack on the human rights principles we had tried to hold on to in the midst of late Cold War paranoia, which was often ridiculously transparent. Around the same time in the early 1990s, Samuel Huntington came out with his “Clash of Civilizations” thesis, a direct riposte to Fukuyama, a template for a re-energized worldwide conflict of irresoluble identities that has only grown in intensity with each passing year. Now, with the ascent of Trump, it takes us to the edge of a global cataclysm.

https://www.salon.com/2017/09/02/time-t ... enda-down/

Identity politics always breeds its equal and opposite reaction. Identity politics is in fact the father, or the Great Mother, of white nationalism, rather than white nationalism being an independent force that has arisen from quite different sources. At root, both share the same particularistic, extralegal, extra-constitutional, anti-democratic, metaphysical, folkish impulse. Whenever a misguided movement tries to alter people’s thoughts and intentions, rather than limiting itself to people’s performance and action in the transparent democratic arena, then totalitarianism is the necessary result. Even when we dream of an anarchist utopia, we do not try to alter people’s souls, we aim to alter economic arrangements in such a way as to allow people the maximum possible room for freedom. We cannot be readers and interpreters of people’s hearts and minds; such a venture has no business in politics

.

Who else criticizes identity politics, or uses it as a pejorative, other than the alt right? Well, some voices left of center, for sure.

Add to the above Salon article, another liberal, Mark Lilla, who wrote "Once and Future Liberal" recently on this same topic. Also, other liberals, like Sam Harris, and such have voiced similar viewpoints. Brett Weinstein from Evergreen State College, a Bernie Sanders lefty, also has voiced such viewpoints.

[Hermit]

...plenty of people who consider themselves to be left of center, and moderates, have criticized "identity politics."

Before reading the rest of your post, let me see if we can clarify this. In doing so, I need to repeat the Wikipedia's take on identity politics:

Identity politics refers to political positions based on the interests and perspectives of social groups with which people identify. Identity politics includes the ways in which people's politics are shaped by aspects of their identity through loosely correlated social organizations. Examples include social organizations based on age, religion, social class or caste, culture, dialect, disability, education, ethnicity, language, nationality, sex, gender identity, generation, occupation, profession, race, political party affiliation, sexual orientation, settlement, urban and rural habitation, and veteran status.

So, the suffragettes were conducting identity politics. Women campaigned for their rights as women (hint: they identified themselves as women within society at large) to attain the right to vote. Similarly, black civil rights activists (hint: they identified themselves as blacks within society at large) campaigned for their rights to drink from the same water founts, ride in the same school buses, drink in the same bars as everyone else.

Now, are you seriously arguing that plenty of people who consider themselves to be left of centre, and moderates, have criticised identity politics, or are you simply conflating fringe groups who attempt to dominate others through identity politics with mainstream groups practising identity politics who are after no more than social equality? Or, to reiterate in other words, are you seriously suggesting that plenty of people who consider themselves to be left of centre, and moderates, have criticised identity politics as such?

[Forty Two]

No, I've listed people who are moderate and left of center who have written about the issue. Liberals, moderates, and moderate left, have voiced opposition to identity politics. The fringe is the progressive SJW left, and they consider anybody to the right of them to be neofascists and "far right" or "alt right" etc.

93% of British people say they're not feminists - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/ ... feminists/ That's below the 18% of Americans who call themselves feminists. If you're saying feminism an identity politic, then it seems a lot of mainstream, moderate people aren't in favor of it. Unless, of course the mainstream in Britain is coextensive with the 7% of the population who identify as feminists, and the 18% of americans who do the same. That would be rather coincidental, of no part of the overwhelming majority are moderate, mainstream, left of center, or at least something other "alt right" and such.

[Hermit]

No, I've listed people who are moderate and left of center who have written about the issue. Liberals, moderates, and moderate left, have voiced opposition to identity politics.

Suffragettes, Martin Luther King and so on were identity politics campaigners. List the liberals, moderates, and moderate lefts, who have voiced opposition to them. Alternatively tear apart the Wikipedia's definition of identity politics.

[Forty Two]

See above, where I have listed them. If you're not going to read the post, then we're not going to have a good discussion. The idea is not that people oppose MLK's call for equality based on race and his call that his children would see a day where they are judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. The idea is that calling for that kind of equality is not identity politics, and that the identity politics now is the exact opposite of that, stating that if you do not judge people on their race, then you're the racist. I mean, I've already posted links, citations and quotes, stating exactly that. I've done it more than once. Scroll up and read the posts -- Mark Lilla for one - "The Once and Future Liberal" and his pieces in the New York Times. Brett Weinstein, who was excoriated and chased off campus because he said he would not leave campus just because he's white. Others I've listed, and others I can list.

You don't have to be in this ridiculous "alt right" camp in order to oppose identity politics. There are plenty of articles and other pieces out there where people are doing this. If people come forward and call Brett Weinstein a white supremacist and alt right-er because of his view, they're nuts. The guy is a Jewish, liberal, liberal arts professor who voted for Bernie Sanders.

[pErvinalia]

You are missing the point. Hermit is using the wiki definition. He's asking you to quote liberals against identity politics within that context.