It's been a theory of mine that US intelligence agencies are involved in pushing identity politics as well, but I haven't seen hard evidence. Do you have any articles or other links?
A pretty key element of the entire Cold War was US intelligence agencies pushing racial, ethnic, national, religious, and other identity politics — and pushing groups embracing them to violent extremism — as a tool against Communism and Soviet-aligned regimes.
Of course, another big part of that was the USSR doing to the same thing against western capitalism and US-aligned regimes.
This goes back to Soviet cold-war-era psy-ops. They planted the seeds in the US and now the US is exporting it to the rest of the world. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQPsKvG6WMI
There are rumors that Foucault was promoted by CIA money. If it's true, it's likely because he was an anti-USSR French leftist as opposed to all the pro-USSR French leftists.
As if Foucault has had any major influence. He's literally one among thousands of philosophers and by far not the most popular one. I'm working in a philosophy institute and of all 60+ researchers there is but one postdoc who takes Foucault as a basis of his own theorizing.
I work in the humanities and disagree. I know plenty of people in neighboring disciplines, too, and can assure you that you won't need to read Foucault in any of them if you don't want to.
Every theory (whether true or not) I've heard is this post modernist ideology came out of the French academia. Foucault, Derrida, etc. are who the American right wing blames for IDPOL
> The French intellectuals tend to be ... media stars. The French intellectuals are taken very seriously. They're on the front pages of Le Monde... If you want to be taken seriously, you have to have something exciting to say... And it's not easy to come up with exciting new ideas, so you have to come up with crazy ideas. Then they can make it to the front pages... One of the ways to have exciting new ideas is to tear everything to shreds and say everything is wrong: "The Enlightenment is wrong [etc.]"
Deconstructionism is a tragic mess. Tragic because the benefits it gave are getting overshadowed by base destruction with little to no return, and in fact a net cost as we relearn old lessons with real human consequences in the gap.
The popular thing to do in intellectual circles is to blame America for all of the world's problems, so it's no surprise to me that we're getting the blame for this one as well.
The vast variety and diversity of cultures and peoples historically in Northern Europe discovered after 10 minutes of looking makes both "white supremacists" and white-frighters look equally extremely silly. I understand the idea of wanting to provide an open space to discuss issues of various different people, but it sometimes pays to push your comfort level and be open to new experiences.
Interesting dilemma. Let's take race and politics out for a moment.
Suppose I arrange a meeting for a group with a specific interest. And then suppose people then attend my meeting who disrupt it; I'd be within my rights to ask people to leave, right, because it's 'my' meeting?
Now... does that basic principle change if a) we make that specialist interest related to race or minority issues, or b) I'm a politician?, or c) it's arranged by (e.g) a students' union?
You can be adjacent to the special interest and have a genuine, good faith interest in the discussion, and in the interest of inclusivity, should not be turned away.
Maybe you’re role is to listen more than share your own experiences, but you shouldn’t be turned away.
I totally get why it 'feels' wrong - but what I'm trying to establish is what precisely makes it wrong.
I mean, people hold private meetings with a specific list of invitees all the time around the world, and we don't police peoples' private reasons for who they choose to invite.
To take another example: support groups for women coming out of abusive relationships. Very good reasons to not allow men to attend, no?
Good Q. In point of fact, people might be interested in looking up the percent of lesbian relationships that are abusive and compare to other relationship types.
> people hold private meetings with a specific list of invitees all the time
They're not private meetings, they're public policy meetings. And yes, in Europe, you couldn't even do this on a commercial level (which is more "private" than a political meeting). You can't go "sorry, only people with this skin color are allowed to enter".
I think you can exclude people from a group. But when you're explicitly excluding people from a group on racial lines in the name of inclusion and fighting racism, you should expect some raised eyebrows. If you have an ideal of equality, you cannot use methods that are unequal; if you have an ideal that people should not be excluded based on race, you cannot make it a criterion of exclusion - at least, you can't and still expect anyone to buy that you believe in what you're selling.
It's not a dilemma in my mind. They're free to exclude anyone they want from their private meetings. What is disturbing is that there is a sizeable chunk of the population that thinks this sort of exclusion and bigotry is acceptable and would even vote for parties that seek to have such policies codified into law.
Then again, most of the rest of the world is already okay with plenty of "racism" and discrimination when it comes under the guise of justice, so I'm not hopeful that we'll be seeing the light anytime soon.
I think profiling white/people as universally ignorant to minorities’ issues is just a typical stereotype. Yes, there will be ignorant and disruptive individuals, but ban them selectively. One by one. Lumping everyone into “they don’t get it” is like admitting white people are a lost cause, and reinforces “us vs them” combative narrative, playing right into the hand of alt right.
In a similar fashion, the feminist movement can be like that. Or it can be like they did it in Iceland, for example, where (speaking from memory) women pushed a legislation to mandate for women to hold no less than a 40% board seats in public companies. BUT they also made it so that it also applied to men.
So, at the end of the day, it’s just political extremism. They come and go, as the social pendulum swings from left to right and back.
Ok, let's imagine you host a mtg for Linux users who are persecuted by Windows users.
A win user comes in and say that all win users are not like this. Is he disrupting?
He says that Linux users are sometimes harsh too and he suffered from that. Disrupting?
He says that this is all bullshit and win users are great. Disrupting?
For me the last one is - others are not. Except if the mtg is to one way complain (which is also a legitimate reason for a mtg, but it should honestly be announced as such)
I think this emphasis on identity politics will be self-defeating in the long term.
Humans are inherently tribal in nature. I don’t see that ever changing. We can mitigate the issues caused by this by emphasizing that we all belong to a bigger tribe than our race/ethnicity. For example by emphasizing we are all Americans or French or even Humans, and as members of this one big tribe, we should be good to each other.
However, what we are doing is instead emphasizing tribal identity, and even setting up an adversarial relationship between racial/ethnic tribes. This breeds tribal animosity.
If you look at Martin Luther King, Jr, a lot of his appeals to white people were based on “We are all Americans, and this is not how you are supposed to be treating fellow Americans, or we are all Christians, and this is now how we are supposed to be treating fellow Christians” and appealed to shared documents and values (such as the Declaration of Independence, the Bible) etc.
Now there is less emphasis of being part of a larger tribe, less emphasis on shared documents and values.
As a person of color, I worry that the coming blowback to this will end us up in a worse place that we are now.
Classical liberalism mostly did win in the West, which is why it split into the modern western center-to-center-right which is oriented around protecting the interests of the elites established by implementation of classical liberalism, and the modern western center-left-to-left which is focussed on going beyond the concrete program of classical liberalism to further the outward distribution of power. (Outside of the center-left to center-right are a mixture of ideologies which are often, but not entirely, less closely tied to classical liberalism as antecedents; many that aren’t derived from liberalism are reactions against it.
The idea that “enemies” of classical liberalism (or even adherents outside of the mercantile elites) have nothing to be afraid of from it is only true at the level of bland platitudes, not concrete implementation. But that’s not unique to classical liberalism, many ideologies are harmless to anyone, even their opponents, at that level.
> The idea that “enemies” of classical liberalism (or even adherents outside of the mercantile elites) have nothing to be afraid of from it is only true at the level of bland platitudes
I agree that there's things to lose, but I don't think the achievement that the enemies of an ideology should not be put to death should be underestimated! Sure there's things you lose, but there's a lot of things that you were historically at risk of losing when your ideology lost, that you aren't anymore. Like your life, your children, your self-determination. To me that's an achievement well worth protecting and celebrating.
I think inasmuch as that's a bland platitude it's because we've forgotten how bad it was. The guillotine is a tasteless internet joke now.
It's a fun timeline when, compared to the perceived US mainstream politics, even the french socialists seem right wing. Obviously this has to be insta-flagged, can't let the narrative fall apart.
> It's a fun timeline when, compared to the perceived US mainstream politics, even the french socialists seem right wing.
Race-gender politics and the economic left-right political axis don’t have a strongly essential alignment; certainly the current alignment between race and economic politics on the US isn't universal, either globally or even in US history, its something that developed and strengthened over the last couple generations.
Maybe, though in the last 100 years, at least in the West, the left was generally anti-racist, emancipatory and internationalist while the right was nationalist, sexist and racist. They're now switching on the racism+sexism thing in many Western countries with the left going for active racism and sexism (with role reversal) while the right (minus the far right, maybe) adapts more egalitarian policies.
It's unclear how homogeneous the left is on these positions. It appears that we're now at a point where splits are happening in the left, at least in Europe, it looks more unified in the US (though I guess the typical argument is that there is no significant left in the US).
The Nordic countries' left is now more right-wing on immigration and integration than central Europe's conservative parties -- it's going to be an interesting future.
Well, there is the view that the “left” in America has always been the party of racism - in the mid 19th century the democrats were pro slavery, in the early 20th century they were promoting eugenics[1], in the mid 20th century it was the democrats that had to be cajoled/bribed/whipped to get the civil rights act passed, not the republicans. In the late 20th century, Thomas Sowell was making a pretty compelling case that the welfare state (advocated for by the left) was only serving to keep black society in the gutter, the Clintons were talking about “super-predators”, and the criticism of the “soft bigotry of low expectations” was leveled precisely at leftist policies.
Today, it’s the democrats arguing for a new form of segregation (separate ceremonies for graduation, separate standards of success, painting things like hard work, self reliance, and the nuclear family as “white” values[0]).
People like to promote the idea that the parties “switched” at some point in time, but looking at the history of the US since the civil war, it’s hard to see where that would have happened in any meaningful way. Seems like the same crap dressed up in whatever rhetoric is convenient, which at times is mind-numbingly contradictory.
A lot of people with good intentions are taken in by it though.
> Well, there is the view that the “left” in America has always been the party of racism - in the mid 19th century the democrats were pro slavery, in the early 20th century they were promoting eugenics[1], in the mid 20th century it was the democrats that had to be cajoled/bribed/whipped to get the civil rights act passed, not the republicans
the Democrats weren’t, even relatively between the two major parties, on the left, until the partisan realignment that started with the New Deal coalition (usually characterized as the US’s Fifth Party System) and hadn’t really completed before being overlayed with another realignment triggered by Johnson’s 1968 move on civil rights and completed around the mid-1990s (the US’s Sixth, and current, Party System).
> People like to promote the idea that the parties “switched” at some point in time, but looking at the history of the US since the civil war, it’s hard to see where that would have happened in any meaningful way.
On economic issues, its pretty easy to pin the starting point of the major shift to 1932, though obviously there had to be some lower-level shifts to enable that from-the-top shift. Before that, the Democrats and Republicans were both on average more to the right than the post-1932 Democrats, and neither was clearly right-or-left of each other (they both had fairly broad left-right spans, which remained true for some time after the realignment started; they were more regional and less left-right ideological splits.)
On race, in the same way, its very easy to clearly pinpoint 1968 as the pivotal moment. (And just look over history at which major parties rallies are most likely to see people proudly waving symbols of the confederacy, or which party has intellectuals arguing that American slavery was good for Blacks, or which party is actively imposing voting restrictions with the overt intention of reducing Black turnout, and which parties presidential candidates have been actually endorsed by the KKK, and the idea that the parties have not switched on this is revealed as ludicrous.) Also important is that (unloke the temporary split of the Dixiecrats previously), the Republicans actively exploited disaffection among White racists from the Democrats after 1968, appealing to them and flipping them over time to supporting Republicans. This was an actual reversal, not the adoption of a new axis of differentiation, and is directly thr cause of why the South flipped from solidly Democratic to become solidly Republican, except where inroads in black voting later weakened that.
For both, the final major wave of shifts of members-in-government-office that can be viewed as essentially completing the realignment occurred just after the 1994 midterm elections.
1968 is one of a few time periods when people like to say the parties switched (others put it decades earlier). And I understand the ‘65-‘68 theory, probably the most compelling of the theories; but I just don’t think it holds much water beyond the hopeful ambition of the time, diluted as it is by the countervailing evidence in the years since.
I don’t think a Democrat of, say, 1871, would find the practical outcomes of the 2021 party’s racial politics all that alien.
> And I understand the ‘65-‘68 theory, probably the most compelling of the theories; but I just don’t think it holds much water beyond the hopeful ambition of the time,
The description of a post-1968 political realignment has nothing to do with “hopeful ambition”; that racists were disillusioned by Johnson’s action is well-established fact (as it is they had been by Truman’s 20 years before), that the Republicans exploited this disillusionment, preventing it from resolving as the Dixiecrat split did is well-established fact. That the same institutions (and, until they died) that had supported, or been Democrats, advocating against racial equality, racial integration, or against federal action on those fronts under thr banner of “states rights”, largely switched to the Republican Party if they didn’t recant is also well-established fact.
> the countervailing evidence in the years since.
What countervailing evidence? The Democratic support by and for overt white supremacist rallies? The crowds backing a Democratic Partt waving confederate battle flags that stormed the Capitol?
Actually, I think that the main problem is that this question is... the wrong problem !
The problem should not be if there should exist some meetings to discuss of some specific problems with only concerned people (black, arabs, women...or plumber) but why these people need to meet only together to be able to express themselves freely.
IMHO, the real problem is that we seem to be less and less able to discuss freely, to listen to other opinions and to accept that other people may have different point of view. It's harder and harder to express himself freely in public without someone feeling bad, insulted, either right or wrong!!!
So people meet "together", to be sure to hear the other say exactly what they want to hear.
"We don't talk anymore", we try to convince the others that we are right
All this is going to do is empower the white supremacists. We were so close to a point where we could acknowledge our wrongs and build something new together, but idiots like this decided to use it as a wedge to build their own powerbase.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 130 ms ] threadIf my asian ass don't want your french ass coming to my private meeting... what about you don't try to impose yourself?
EDIT: vouched for the article as it seems to carry many interesting details
Somewhat ironic but also dystopian that something that was born out of US intelligence agencies (identity politics) is now infecting the world.
Of course, another big part of that was the USSR doing to the same thing against western capitalism and US-aligned regimes.
A lot of reading material down that rabbit hole. Very interesting.
In my experience he's inescapable in the humanities.
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault#Influence_and_...
* Politicians using it as a technique to divide people. It definitely ramps up around elections
* Bots on twitter and Reddit pushing it
* Meeting several "woke" people deployed by the state department in foreign countries
* The narratives are all usually very flawed and crafted to cause outrage rather than right previous wrongs or bring people together
Can i get some sources on this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cqTE_bPh7M
> The French intellectuals tend to be ... media stars. The French intellectuals are taken very seriously. They're on the front pages of Le Monde... If you want to be taken seriously, you have to have something exciting to say... And it's not easy to come up with exciting new ideas, so you have to come up with crazy ideas. Then they can make it to the front pages... One of the ways to have exciting new ideas is to tear everything to shreds and say everything is wrong: "The Enlightenment is wrong [etc.]"
I think someone got carried away by the recent mention of Gloria Steinem’s relationship to the CIA.
Suppose I arrange a meeting for a group with a specific interest. And then suppose people then attend my meeting who disrupt it; I'd be within my rights to ask people to leave, right, because it's 'my' meeting?
Now... does that basic principle change if a) we make that specialist interest related to race or minority issues, or b) I'm a politician?, or c) it's arranged by (e.g) a students' union?
Genuinely interested in people's views on this...
Maybe you’re role is to listen more than share your own experiences, but you shouldn’t be turned away.
I mean, people hold private meetings with a specific list of invitees all the time around the world, and we don't police peoples' private reasons for who they choose to invite.
To take another example: support groups for women coming out of abusive relationships. Very good reasons to not allow men to attend, no?
So women cannot be in abusive relationships with other women?
Are all men abusers?
Edit: Downvotes? So allies are not possible? Is everyone in a given group summarily guilty because of their identity?
They're not private meetings, they're public policy meetings. And yes, in Europe, you couldn't even do this on a commercial level (which is more "private" than a political meeting). You can't go "sorry, only people with this skin color are allowed to enter".
Then again, most of the rest of the world is already okay with plenty of "racism" and discrimination when it comes under the guise of justice, so I'm not hopeful that we'll be seeing the light anytime soon.
In a similar fashion, the feminist movement can be like that. Or it can be like they did it in Iceland, for example, where (speaking from memory) women pushed a legislation to mandate for women to hold no less than a 40% board seats in public companies. BUT they also made it so that it also applied to men.
So, at the end of the day, it’s just political extremism. They come and go, as the social pendulum swings from left to right and back.
A simple thing is just reverse the position.
Imagine a public meeting by WASPs discussing the (black/Latino/Asian/Jewish) “problem”.
Imagine this being a public meeting by men discussing the “female problem”. There would be massive backlash.
Look at college campuses. Left wing groups do not allow right wing speakers to even “speak to their own”. The disrupt and try to shut them down.
You can’t both fight to prohibit speech you don’t like and then have speech they aren’t likely to like and expect them to be quiet about it.
So ask those people to leave if they disrupt the meeting. But asking someone to leave a meeting because of their race is racism.
A win user comes in and say that all win users are not like this. Is he disrupting?
He says that Linux users are sometimes harsh too and he suffered from that. Disrupting?
He says that this is all bullshit and win users are great. Disrupting?
For me the last one is - others are not. Except if the mtg is to one way complain (which is also a legitimate reason for a mtg, but it should honestly be announced as such)
Depending on your politics, you could say the same about the 1980s.
Humans are inherently tribal in nature. I don’t see that ever changing. We can mitigate the issues caused by this by emphasizing that we all belong to a bigger tribe than our race/ethnicity. For example by emphasizing we are all Americans or French or even Humans, and as members of this one big tribe, we should be good to each other.
However, what we are doing is instead emphasizing tribal identity, and even setting up an adversarial relationship between racial/ethnic tribes. This breeds tribal animosity.
If you look at Martin Luther King, Jr, a lot of his appeals to white people were based on “We are all Americans, and this is not how you are supposed to be treating fellow Americans, or we are all Christians, and this is now how we are supposed to be treating fellow Christians” and appealed to shared documents and values (such as the Declaration of Independence, the Bible) etc.
Now there is less emphasis of being part of a larger tribe, less emphasis on shared documents and values.
As a person of color, I worry that the coming blowback to this will end us up in a worse place that we are now.
The idea that “enemies” of classical liberalism (or even adherents outside of the mercantile elites) have nothing to be afraid of from it is only true at the level of bland platitudes, not concrete implementation. But that’s not unique to classical liberalism, many ideologies are harmless to anyone, even their opponents, at that level.
I agree that there's things to lose, but I don't think the achievement that the enemies of an ideology should not be put to death should be underestimated! Sure there's things you lose, but there's a lot of things that you were historically at risk of losing when your ideology lost, that you aren't anymore. Like your life, your children, your self-determination. To me that's an achievement well worth protecting and celebrating.
I think inasmuch as that's a bland platitude it's because we've forgotten how bad it was. The guillotine is a tasteless internet joke now.
Race-gender politics and the economic left-right political axis don’t have a strongly essential alignment; certainly the current alignment between race and economic politics on the US isn't universal, either globally or even in US history, its something that developed and strengthened over the last couple generations.
It's unclear how homogeneous the left is on these positions. It appears that we're now at a point where splits are happening in the left, at least in Europe, it looks more unified in the US (though I guess the typical argument is that there is no significant left in the US).
The Nordic countries' left is now more right-wing on immigration and integration than central Europe's conservative parties -- it's going to be an interesting future.
Today, it’s the democrats arguing for a new form of segregation (separate ceremonies for graduation, separate standards of success, painting things like hard work, self reliance, and the nuclear family as “white” values[0]).
People like to promote the idea that the parties “switched” at some point in time, but looking at the history of the US since the civil war, it’s hard to see where that would have happened in any meaningful way. Seems like the same crap dressed up in whatever rhetoric is convenient, which at times is mind-numbingly contradictory.
A lot of people with good intentions are taken in by it though.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/museums/african...
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/commentisfr...
the Democrats weren’t, even relatively between the two major parties, on the left, until the partisan realignment that started with the New Deal coalition (usually characterized as the US’s Fifth Party System) and hadn’t really completed before being overlayed with another realignment triggered by Johnson’s 1968 move on civil rights and completed around the mid-1990s (the US’s Sixth, and current, Party System).
> People like to promote the idea that the parties “switched” at some point in time, but looking at the history of the US since the civil war, it’s hard to see where that would have happened in any meaningful way.
On economic issues, its pretty easy to pin the starting point of the major shift to 1932, though obviously there had to be some lower-level shifts to enable that from-the-top shift. Before that, the Democrats and Republicans were both on average more to the right than the post-1932 Democrats, and neither was clearly right-or-left of each other (they both had fairly broad left-right spans, which remained true for some time after the realignment started; they were more regional and less left-right ideological splits.)
On race, in the same way, its very easy to clearly pinpoint 1968 as the pivotal moment. (And just look over history at which major parties rallies are most likely to see people proudly waving symbols of the confederacy, or which party has intellectuals arguing that American slavery was good for Blacks, or which party is actively imposing voting restrictions with the overt intention of reducing Black turnout, and which parties presidential candidates have been actually endorsed by the KKK, and the idea that the parties have not switched on this is revealed as ludicrous.) Also important is that (unloke the temporary split of the Dixiecrats previously), the Republicans actively exploited disaffection among White racists from the Democrats after 1968, appealing to them and flipping them over time to supporting Republicans. This was an actual reversal, not the adoption of a new axis of differentiation, and is directly thr cause of why the South flipped from solidly Democratic to become solidly Republican, except where inroads in black voting later weakened that.
For both, the final major wave of shifts of members-in-government-office that can be viewed as essentially completing the realignment occurred just after the 1994 midterm elections.
I don’t think a Democrat of, say, 1871, would find the practical outcomes of the 2021 party’s racial politics all that alien.
The description of a post-1968 political realignment has nothing to do with “hopeful ambition”; that racists were disillusioned by Johnson’s action is well-established fact (as it is they had been by Truman’s 20 years before), that the Republicans exploited this disillusionment, preventing it from resolving as the Dixiecrat split did is well-established fact. That the same institutions (and, until they died) that had supported, or been Democrats, advocating against racial equality, racial integration, or against federal action on those fronts under thr banner of “states rights”, largely switched to the Republican Party if they didn’t recant is also well-established fact.
> the countervailing evidence in the years since.
What countervailing evidence? The Democratic support by and for overt white supremacist rallies? The crowds backing a Democratic Partt waving confederate battle flags that stormed the Capitol?
The problem should not be if there should exist some meetings to discuss of some specific problems with only concerned people (black, arabs, women...or plumber) but why these people need to meet only together to be able to express themselves freely.
IMHO, the real problem is that we seem to be less and less able to discuss freely, to listen to other opinions and to accept that other people may have different point of view. It's harder and harder to express himself freely in public without someone feeling bad, insulted, either right or wrong!!!
So people meet "together", to be sure to hear the other say exactly what they want to hear.
"We don't talk anymore", we try to convince the others that we are right
Well done, idiots.