American Mind: Defend America – Defeat Multiculturalism

The American Mind website is always worth reading:

Defend America – Defeat Multiculturalism

“Today, multiculturalism and its politics of identity pose an existential threat to the American political order comparable to slavery in the 1850s or communism during the Cold War. Once confined to graduate seminars and the ethnic “studies” departments at our nation’s colleges and universities, multiculturalism is now the authoritative ideology reigning over higher education, our media and political establishments, legal system, and corporate boardrooms.

If we do not reverse multiculturalism’s advance, it will continue to undermine our country and constitutionalism, destroying the possibility of a common good and a life of civic peace. Indeed, multiculturalism threatens to take down western civilization as whole. …”

The Contradiction At The Heart Of Identity Politics

“David Azerrad has written an incisive, deeply-researched essay which skewers the dominant New Left ideology of American high culture.

Drawing on an extensive intellectual history, he traces this creed back to the black, ethnic, women’s, and gay liberationist movements of the 1960s, demonstrating how their avatars adopted a Manichaean “us-versus-them” worldview that demonizes white straight men. Azerrad shows the problems did not begin with the post-2014 campus antics catalogued by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff but begin in the 1960s. …”

Justice? That Aint’ It, Chief

“Identity politics has breached the confines of the ivory tower, David Azerrad argues in an important new essay. Now, it holds sway over nearly all of public life. Today, writes Azerrad, “we all learn to distinguish the victimized groups who should be honored from the oppressor groups who must perpetually atone for the sins of their forefathers.”

“There are still, of course, other ways of looking at reality in America today, but none so thoroughly dominates the public square as identity politics. While it has not fully conquered the public’s mind, it does reign almost unchallenged among the elites. Politicians, professors, producers, pundits, Fortune 500 CEOs, tech gurus, journalists, and the coterie of other famous, credentialed, and successful people who comprise our ruling class all worship at the altar.” …“

The Moral Basis of Identity Politics

“Today’s political discourse is dominated by the language of “identity politics.” David Azerrad is right about that, and he provides plenty of convincing evidence about what it means.

One wonders whether any policy can now be discussed outside of the framework of “race, class, and gender.” Even environmentalism must be hammered into the same Procrustean bed. Professor Josephine Donovan writes, “feminism … embraces the amelioration of life on earth for all life-forms…. We believe that all oppressions are interconnected: no one creature will be free until all are free—from abuse, degradation, exploitation, pollution, and commercialization. …”

Their Sin, Your Penance

“I’ll respond to David Azerrad’s important essay by taking up a question he suggests in concluding: following its own logic, how might identity politics play out? The question is worth asking for the same reason it’s difficult to answer. The theory and rhetoric of identity politics has little to say about what it would mean—how America would look and feel—if all the grievances of all the victim-groups constituting the identitarian coalition were satisfactorily resolved.

Azerrad’s demonstration that victimhood is central to identitarianism implies that those who happen to belong to groups whose grievances have been fully addressed would regard their identity, formerly essential to their sense of who they are, as a trivial detail, like being left-handed or having a name that starts with a vowel. Identity politics would be self-extinguishing. ..”

Progressivism’s Aristocratic Fantasies

““David Azerrad gives a thoughtful treatment of the origins and essence of identity politics, one that will be useful for those curious about the genesis of our shibboleths: structural racism, intersectionality, white privilege, wokeness. I commend Azerrad for presenting an intelligent, provocative thesis at all; academics whisper these ideas, but few pen them. On question of origins, I will add some comments, and on the question of essence, I must beg to differ.

Identity Politics as Nihilism

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, race, class, and gender groups had “legitimate grievances” for unequal treatment, but broke with the civil rights movement (3, 12).¹ They turned to identity politics, a metaphysics (“the most fundamental dimension of reality”) that disavows nature, or “objective reality,” and frames all relations in terms of power (5, 15). This is more than an “Americanized version of tribalism;” it “is first and foremost a politics…of oppression” that “celebrate[s] victimization” (2, 3, 2). According to Malcolm X and Armando Rendon, whites “are born devils by nature” (5-7). In consciousness-raising, a victim becomes woke to the institutionalized oppression that explains otherwise unrelated phenomena, and one must take sides in the struggle.

That struggle is against America, which for the woke “is at its core a supremacist regime that oppresses certain groups” (5). …”