Understanding Identity Politics.by John C. DvorakThe Democrat Party somewhere someplace sometime found this non-issue of oppression within American society and decided to bank on it to create a voting bloc of the oppressed. In their mind’s view the idea was that everyone, if identified as a sub-group, could be convinced that there was a small group of oppressors oppressing them. This resulted in identity politics, a term often used but not understood.
Professor Jordan Peterson was one of the first to explain its roots. Here is an excerpt from his entry in the Wikipedia:
Peterson states that postmodern philosophers and sociologists since the 1960s have built upon and extended certain core tenets of Marxism and communism while simultaneously appearing to disavow both ideologies. He says that it is difficult to understand contemporary Western society without considering the influence of a strain of postmodernism thought that migrated from France to the United States through the English department at Yale University. He states that certain academics in the humanities, "started to play a sleight of hand, and instead of pitting the proletariat, the working class, against the bourgeois, they started to pit the oppressed against the oppressor. That opened up the avenue to identifying any number of groups as oppressed and oppressor and to continue the same narrative under a different name.
Peterson was early in spotting the roots of this situation which he broadly refers to as an element of cultural Marxism.
The Democrats have made hay to some extent by identifying a lot of these oppressed groups and in many cases only recently informed them that they were indeed oppressed. This had to be done with publicity stunts like the Transsexual toilet laws which was done to point out oppression and caught a lot of people flat-footed to only be embarrassed by their “lack of compassion.”
The idea of appropriate speech or political correctness, which was instituted as a methodology of free speech control has mutated into an instrument of thought control adopted and accepted by most Americans and everyone in the Democratic party. You say or do something outside the proscribed limitations and you lose your job, your career, your livelihood. The set of rules that make up the politically correct infrastructure have somehow become organic, taking on a life of their own with new rules cropping up all the time.
The most onerous is the considerations for hate speech, which is protected speech under the first amendment, but prohibited by the god of political correctness. This is the case despite the fact that hate speech is ill-defined (like most politically correct anything) and not generally applicable. For example, you can hate whitey and hate men because they have been generally identified as oppressors because they are born to a supposed genetic royalty and thus given white privilege, even though there is no such thing as white privilege.
This idea was actually mocked by Eddie Murphy, when on SNL in 1984, he put on White Face in one of his sketches and found that by being white everything was free.
In fact, the artificial concept of White privilege is the necessary element needed to make identity politics work. If you are going to define groups of oppressed you need convenient oppressors. Why not a single homogenous group? And the group cannot contain any of the supposed oppressed such as gay white men, so they have to be further segmented to straight-only males. But you need a code for this that is new (and post-modern) so we now use CIS-gender white male. They are the oppressors of everyone. And hating them is OK if not encouraged.
How this nonsense is supposed to translate into votes for Democrats is sketchy, to say the least. In fact, the opportunity may backfire for two reasons. First, it’s insulting to white people in general (men and women, straight or gay) who make up over 70-percent of the voting population. And it has the potential to annoy most of the supposed oppressed who do not see things this way and find it insulting to be defined as inferior and oppressed losers, the “poor things” who need all this help.
The backlash potential is huge. This whole direction, stemming from genuinely Marxist ideology, may be the biggest mistake ever made by the Democrats. And there seems to be nobody in the party equipped to deal with any of it because standing against any of it would, ironically, not be politically correct.
The media, which is indeed mostly Democratic Party supporters, has played along like traditional Marxist “useful idiots” and forced the political correctness mechanism into the public sphere as a good thing, when it clearly is not. The media, especially the mainstream, is probably the most responsible for the mess just as they are responsible for getting Trump elected by over-covering his campaign hoping to mock him.
All these trends will continue through the 2018 elections and if there is even a hint that this strategy is working, the societal situation will worsen. There is no alternative strategy on the horizon. --jcd
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