(February 10, 2019 at 1:13 pm)Gae Bolga Wrote: Yeah, that does seem to be the prevailing mood of the left. Tired of what's become a nearly ancient patriarchal hegemony that asserts a particular american identity which is no longer representative of the country. I have to wonder..so what? So what if the mood has become sick of old white guys? They aren't going anywhere. For now and the forseable future the table of our institutions is set firmly in their favor.
Though, being "sick of old white guys" doesn't seem to be the sort of identity politics being waged inside the left. That boils down, to hear it told, more to personal grievances than any disagreement on the issue of being tired of old white men running everything. To people being made to feel that they aren't "real" liberals if they don't properly virtue signal on an issue that matters little to them. I can certainly understand that.
As I can understand the people on the other side who have a tenuous relationship with the only part of our political spectrum that is willing to so much as accept their existence. Dems have not been consistent in their support, even if they've been consistent in word. So, when those people hear the rhetoric that was used on the right to delegitimize not only their political position..but their very identity..yet now coming from the left...they get a little leary.
It has the unfortunate distinction of being both valid and offensive as criticism. This has been exploited..and even that I understand. The opposing identity here very literally -is- "old white guys". They clearly feel as though the pitchforks and torches are about to come out (or already are, lol..tune in on the right night and you'll be informed that a literal white genocide is currently under way), even if a sober assessment of facts would tell them, just as the other examples of white grievance do, that this is an irrational fear.
The political motivation, on the left, to assume rightwing rhetoric is difficult to describe as anything other than fear that they will lose some coalition, or lose momentum..in sum, lose an election. This is, after all, what the right has been telling them for so long. They don't want to be, or be seen as, the kind of radical extremists that lose elections. I'm not sure that this fear is any more rational than the fear of the anti-white mob above. The reason that the right is bitching to high heaven about identity politics is because it scares the shit out of them. That should be instructive. The right is telegraphing the thing that they know will tank them by brute force of demographics as the identity politics party of a group soon to be relegated to a status less than their traditional majority - with all the privileges that this confers.
Well, identity politics is doing a really good job of knocking off the best socialist leader who has come along in quite awhile. Identity politics exists for one purpose only. To divide the left. And its working really well.
We do not inherit the world from our parents. We borrow it from our children.
