It’s an aboriginal thing. You wouldn’t understand. And what’s more — you aren’t allowed to understand, because understanding itself belongs to individual identity groups, with attempts by racial/ethnic/ outsiders dismissed as the colonialist Gaze of the Other, and with dissent from the officially-sanctioned group narrative by certain members of the group itself dismissed as the illegitimate squawking of non-authentic members who can then be written off as either race-traitors, or else those suffering from a form of false consciousness, who have yet to fully accept and understand their own situation.
That is, identity politics is the politics of the tribe, created by the shared adoption of a given identity narrative (often fought over until one version becomes ascendent) and then reinforced by purges of those members who, because they don’t accept the official narrative, don’t (the very circular reasoning goes) come to count as members of that tribe.
I’ve written extensively on the mechanisms that give identity politics its power, including discussions on just how it is that group narratives come to be sanctioned, and how dissenters are then dismissed. Identity politics reduces the individual to spoken-for representive of he collective group will; it rewards consensus and punishes dissent; and it gains political clout by claiming to represent a given identity voter bloc, forcing politicians to adopt and accept its terms.
In short, it’s a tool of collectivism, and a scourge on individual autonomy and sovereignty. Which is why the Left is so keen to use it, breaking us up into these various identity groups in order to make pandering easier, and in order to build voting coalitions.
Class warfare, of course, serves the same purpose — though it operates largely to stoke envy, create convenient scapegoats, and keep the eyes of the “masses” off of the governmental machinations aimed at consolidating and centralizing power.
And until we insist upon our own individual autonomy — and eschew the socially constructed pseudo ontology of identity politics — we are open to being herded and corralled and manipulated by appeals to easy identity markers (with “leaders” of the various identity groups themselves granted enormous power based largely on the fiction that they speak exclusively and legitimately for a given group).
This is what I mean when I say that, ostensible party politics aside, we are playing in the sandbox of the Left, where collectivism is every day and in often unobtrusive ways institutionalized and embedded in the culture, and in the epistemological paradigm we allow to frame and control the cultural ethos.
Find that kind of thing “fundamentally unserious” and believe the best way forward for conservatism is to ignore such arcane, specialized, “academic” matters and elect a plurality of Republicans? Well, then you’re part of the problem.
If you weren’t, the country wouldn’t have ben able to drift left so consistently over the years — despite its being a center-right country by self-identification.
(thanks to TerryH)
The funny thing is that when some stereotypical Southern says “well, you know them Darkies don’t think like good white folk”, everyone knows it’s racist for him to believe that someone’s race defines his thinking.
But they have no problem at all insisting that “Darkies don’t think like [evil] white folk”.
Also funny, but not funny ha-ha: groupthink is evil and wrong when it applies to love of an entire nation, but commendable when applied to dividing that nation into squabbling factions.
Divide and conquer.
Actually love of an entire nation is fine, so long as that nation isn’t too white. “Deutschland Über Alles” is evil (and doesn’t even mean what most people think it means), as is “USA! USA! USA!”, but Mexican nationalism is brown enough to be OK, as are various Arab and Muslim nationalisms. It goes without saying that Zimbabwean and Chinese nationalism are not only hunky, but a little bit dory as well.
So, how does cracker-ass Ezra Levant understand The Other so well, while regular white people can’t?
I’ve liked Ezra Levant ever since those videos where he took on the Canadian anti-free speech bureaucrats. He makes me proud that Canada is America’s hat.
I understand that Formerly Not Free Not Now Free Recently Freed Egypt is already in a heap of decline.
So what’s your point, JHo?
Careful JG, just stating such will get you thrown off a lot of email lists and doorsteps.
Oh.
Whoops. Apologies to Ezra for shooting off at the mouth and thinking he was that other cracker-ass Ezra. The one who knows things like nobody else.
There’s a Cabela’s ad over on the right side of my screen. Caucasian hunter, in camo, surveying wildlands through binocs, bow and quiver at his side.
The Evil White Hunter and his nefarious blood lust polluting an otherwise bracing and vital scene, hills rolling into the distance.
Where he brown and wearing the skin of a previous kill, his thanks and gratitude to God would be genuine. But he’s not brown, damn him.
From my experience, his heart more resembles the American Indian’s than any other, but my experience is subject to instantaneous revision by persons not myself whose cultural authority outweighs mine.
He’s not authentically American Indian at heart unless he’s crying at litterbugs.
According to the news this morning, we’ve got a robber on the loose who can only be narrowed down by his “very severe acne”.
He has no other “skin condition” other than the zits.
Now if he were white, I think he’d be described as a “white male, about 5’8″, with severe acne”, but as it is, we only have the acne to go on.
80% of the Ohio 8th grade has been brought in for questioning.
A great deal of the American Indians around here are entirely too fond of the firewater.
“There’s a Cabela’s ad over on the right side of my screen. Caucasian hunter, in camo, surveying wildlands through binocs, bow and quiver at his side. ”
Cabela’s other, better, ad is a deer named Steve chuckling and humming Jingle Bells as he stalks and shoots his fellow deer… Ya gotta love Cabela…
OT: Stiller is Meara, Goldwater is Rockefeller, and Christine O’Donnell is a Romney supporter.
And on the day that story jumps out McGehee, The Daily Caller runs a headline titled “Bachmann camp claims Gingrich trying to buy Tea Party support”. Heh, had to laugh.
This is her reason.
So how soon before the Tea Party becomes the Reboot Party? Because I see starting over (with or without the bloodshed and attendant horrors) as more and more likely each day people don’t tell the SCOAMF and his cronies to fuck off.
The people at the top are firmly entrenched. We have to go from the ground up. I’m more interested in winning a majority in the Senate than winning the White House at this point, because the front-runners we have are both statists.
Still, we haven’t had any elections yet, so we cannot know what’s going to happen.
Hopefully we can just re-boot who we send to the government through elections. We’ll see.
Racists
So she’s committing the Sarah Palin sin of personal loyalty? Pikachu meltdown in 5… 4… 3…
What carves the world?
A rilly, rilly big knife.
Ha! That’s probably what Aristophanes thought.
Christine O’Donnell is a Romney supporter.
A great many heads at Ace’s will explode in agony, then
piss and moan for a few more weeksfall into silence.More delightful, er, tribalism.
linky
Di’s quote about tribalism put’s me in mind of something Jared Diamond wrote in Guns Germs and Steel about tribes in Papua New Guinea. It seems if two strangers meet on a jungle trail, they’ll sit down and discuss their family/clan/tribal lineages —if they’re related, you see, then they’re not obligated to try to kill each other. I’ll have to see if I can find that.
@ #20 McGehee posted on 12/14 @ 11:54 am
I was completely surprised that Romney had endorsed Rubio, Haley, and O’Donnell.
We never tolerated things. We turned our back on people.
Sure, but only after caving their skulls in.
Not particularly smart to do otherwise when operating in the State of nature.
There were circumstances (or are circumstances still, I suppose we may as well say) when tribal formation, organization, identity, preservation, and all its attendant distinguishing characteristics worked to the good of the humans within it. Thing is, once people formed up larger and larger villages and then, collections of villages into cities, poloi, along with these new forms come new organizations and identities, political organizations and identities, to be specific. The shape and content of the interests of the whole take on new meanings, relative to the smaller groupings of people. [The Athenians, in an aside for instance, showed tribal organizations still at Marathon in 409, where though they fought for the city as a whole were set out in ranks by tribe and under tribal leadership — though these same peoples went on to invent politics as such shortly thereafter if not in the midst of the time itself (and if the thought that Athenians invented politics as such is disturbing, I’d gladly restrict the sense to the linguistic aspect alone, though I think it stronger than that).
Evenso, surely for the most part, tribal organizations today are flip anachronisms in the contexts of great nation-states of the likes of the US and Canada, aren’t they? Yet they’re “tolerated” as quaint and tiny loci of particular interests, and, more often than not, simple corruption: corruption running in both directions, to and from the tribe and nation. Ha.
Louis L’Amour claimed in a couple of his western novels that the Indians(circa 1800’s mind you) didn’t have a word for “stranger”. Only “friend”, or “enemy”.
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[…] awarded to the James Madison of The Restoration, Jeff Goldstein, for providing us with a useful and succinct description of what Identity Politics is and it’s consequences: …Identity politics reduces the […]