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Samizdata quote of the day The desperate need of left-wing journalists to see Obama as “pure” and “most successful” — to see him as they’ve reported him instead of how he is — is in part a result of the racial pathology of the left, its tendency to reduce people to their victim group. The notion that “the first black president” has been a failure would be, according to this way of thinking, a nasty slight against a race rather than, what it is, an indictment of bad ideas and their consequences.
– Andrew Klavan
Identity politics is, in my view, one of the great, if not the greatest, scourges of the age. It isn’t an exclusively left-wing phenomenon, either.
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…the racial pathology of the left, its tendency to reduce people to their victim group.
Coincidentally, via Instapundit last Saturday, this post, from a left-wing perspective, says much the same thing.
The criterion which define identity politics have created a form of insanity, where the object, and the characteristics of the object are verboten, instead one must only discuss those things which are substituted for the real object.
By virtue of being black, with no other qualification required or necessary, America said, Yes, we can and elected him. Substance and ideas are “boring” and time consuming in a culture of instant gratification, and thought in a bottle.
It is happening again, this terrible and deliberate twisting of fact and truth, which has but only one purpose, that being the disarming of our minds, and our capability to resist. Ideas have real world consequences, and ideas do matter. If Obama, or anyone really were as great as the politics of Identity demand he is, we’d need little reason to not agree. However the facts are that America hasn’t seen this level of division since perhaps the 1850’s, and it has all devolved into issues of racial and gender identity, and not our commonalities.
Identity politics are the politics of the mindless, the uninformed, and the apathetic.
Yes – the “mainstream media” had all the facts (about Mr Obama’s Marxist family connections and life long associations) and yet insisted on seeing him as nice man and a moderate politically.
The Economist magazine even greeted his inauguration with the headline “The Renewal of America” and Mr Obama with a halo (or at least so the photograph).
They were not being ironic – this was a religious experience for the “liberals”.
Mr Obama was noble – because he was black.
He would create a wonderful new future (in some vague way) – because he was black.
And in 2012 they (the Economist magazine and so on) endorsed him again.
Mere facts could not shake their religious devotion.
And most people in America – even though they believe that United States is on the wrong track (that things are in a mess and are going to get a lot worse) still say they like Mr Obama.
To say one does not like Mr Obama risks one being called a “racist”.
One must like Mr Obama and believe he has good intentions – because he is black.
Which, of course, is a profoundly racialist position.
“Identity Politics” is simply an official term for any ‘(prejudice)’-“ism”. Identity politics is racism, sexism, ageism, class-ism, “able”-ism, trangenderism, sexual oriention-ism….you name it. It’s discrimination by definition.
The illiberal left have so accepted their self-serving myopic definitions (carefully crafted so that only “western” white people are capable of being racist, sexist, etc, especially white straight males, and christians), that they’re incapable of understanding that the very core of their own collectivist methodology requires discrimination, prejudice and privilege, of all the exact sorts that they claim to hate.
As Klavan notes, the illiberal left, (being racists) can’t bring themselves to admit that Obama has been a failed president, or is even less than stellar, because in their minds that would cast a dark shadow over all american blacks. No pun intended.
And The Succubus will be a wonderful president because ‘VAGINA’.
‘Certainly not because she’s ever accomplished anything other than making shitloads of money for herself, drawn from some of the most unsavory mammals in the most unsavory nations on the planet.
Trump belongs to the rich and white and male groups, who are usually vilified by the press, so maybe the Liberals could be induced to support these press victims? If not, and if Trump trumps Clinton, at least they’ll have lots to write about in their columns.
And we seem to be suffering a new instantiation of group-membership based intolerance: Remainer prejudice against Leavers. This is indeed turning up in all quadrants of the political compass, including up.
Simon