I'm not swayed by buzz phrases like "liberal elites" and "identity politics". They may sound impressive but they mean little
I'm not swayed by buzz phrases like "liberal elites" and "identity politics". They may sound impressive but they mean little
OK, there's two different phrases there that I'm going to have to explain.
The first is "liberal elites". I used this when I was explaining the view that disenfranchised people who are receptive to far right rhetoric hold of wealthy lawyers and the like. This is me paraphrasing a MAGA worldview. I'll come back to that.
The second is "liberal identity politics". This is something I personally am critical of. This is me putting across something of my worldview.
So that's the first thing to clear up.
Next, as a libertarian communist, I use the word liberal in a particular way. I will reproduce a post I wrote a decade ago explaining what I mean by it:
If I call someone a liberal, I mean it in a specific sense. Not to mean that they belong to a capital L political party, nor, as those the American right do, to mean that they are somewhere to the left of wherever the speaker stands, nor do I mean that they are generous in some way.
Rather, I use it to mean that their position ignores the structural issues in the problem being discussed. I use it to mean that they are seeing the problem in terms of individual behaviour rather than social construction. I use it to mean they are missing some important systemic formation, such as class. Usually class.
For example, if someone is complaining of media bias but they are seeing that bias in terms of the individual behaviour of individual journalists, then their approach is liberal.
The liberal limits ideas to individual behaviour. The liberal thinks that in order to free the media from bias, all that is needed is for individuals to behave better, more morally, more fairly. While these aims may in themselves be laudable, they will have limited effect, as the structures will not have been tackled. The liberal's ideas therefore lack rigour. If I call you liberal, I am saying your analysis lacks rigour.
This limiting lack of rigour defines the liberal response to the ills of capitalism for a reason. Liberalism became a political expression of the capitalist class. It offers a lack of rigour because it doesn't want to overturn the privilege of the elite. It limits the debate to a discussion of individual morality, because that way change itself is limited. Liberalism offers individual guilt that change has not come fast enough, but it does not offer real change.
If I call you a liberal, I don't mean it as a compliment.
So that's what I mean by liberal.
An American who is receptive to far right rhetoric however will use it more like they would use "woke". It just means "more left than me".
But the phrase "liberal elite" means something else: it means privileged patricians who belong to a class perceived as being out of touch.
When they look at someone like Harris, they see someone who is wealthy, out of touch, who doesn't listen to them, who talks about things that have no meaning to them, who has skiing holidays in Aspen, and lemon squeezers designed by Phillipe Starke.
This is what they see looking at Harris. This is the image problem the Democrats have.
Put that to one side.
Now I'll explain a bit about what I mean when I say "liberal identity politics". I'm here using liberal the way I describe above. Blind to structure, specifically class, and focused on individualism and individual morality.
I use it in this phrase as a qualifier, because when I just say "identity politics" people are more likely to misunderstand me.
When I'm criticising "liberal identity politics" I'm criticising the idea that an unprivileged black person, say an Uber delivery cyclist, should feel a commonality of interests with someone who has a net worth of about $8 million (as Harris and her husband are said to) simply because they are both black.
It is not the case that Thatcher being prime minister was a good thing for all women. Nor that Patel or Braverman being Home Secretary was good for all British Asians. Nor is it a win for all women that Denise Coates has billions. And so on.
The opposing view is summarised by Fred Hampton:
"We got to face some facts. That the masses are poor, that the masses belong to what you call the lower class, and when I talk about the masses, I'm talking about the white masses, I'm talking about the black masses, and the brown masses, and the yellow masses, too. We've got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water.
We say you don't fight racism with racism. We're gonna fight racism with solidarity. We say you don't fight capitalism with no black capitalism; you fight capitalism with socialism."
It is not a win for working class black people that there are rich black people. The idea that it is a win is what I call "liberal identity politics". And that view, one cultivated and co-opted by neoliberalism, is one of the routes that ended up with Trump back in the Whitehouse.
