[sworkhard]

Originally Posted by rubecube

But the issue primarily affected gays and gays as a group brought the issue to the forefront of political discourse, and part of that process was events such as Stonewall. The issue affected gays as a group. They were being discriminated against based on their sexual identity. That is the point of identity politics, to note the discrimination against groups of people based on their racial, sexual, gender, identities. I don't get you find it problematic to identify issues that affect one group of people substantially more than others. Is that not the intellectually honest approach?

The identity politics of the right is no better than identity politics by the left. That one uses identity to discriminate in a harmful way and the other uses it in to discriminate in a way that's benevolent to a particular group is not a useful defense of identity politics.

Identifying a group that's marginalized and trying to reduce barriers that may disproportionately affect this group is not identity politics.

Identity politics comes in when you demand that a group of people be treated differently (for better or worse) based purely on their descriptive membership of a particular group

And they had to force their way through means that may or may not fit-in with the liberal tradition, including forms of civil disobedience. I would maybe conceded that liberalism perhaps fostered an environment where these tactics could be successful, but the movements would not have had the success they did if they had strictly adhered to liberal principles.

The only reason the could "force' their way through is because of liberal principles and traditions that were widely held. These movements had to take advantage of liberal principles and without them would have been snuffed out ruthlessly before they made any progress.

Actually it's more about not resting on your laurels and I think that's what moderates like yourself are failing to understand. There are still issues that primarily affect certain groups more than others and we're not going to solve them by simply giving ourselves a pat on the back for the progress that's been made so far.

So then why is so much of progressive discourse dominated by some of the most dogmatic, vicious, and unproductive people around. As much as progressives tell themselves it's about not resting on your laurels, the vast majority of the time it's just empty rhetoric and a way of letting people feel good about "helping" a group without actually having to do anything. It seems to me that Progressivism has very much become just what you wish it wasn't.

Just because some issues affect some groups more than others doesn't mean that you have to treat the disadvantaged groups like they are toddlers incapable of helping themselves. Too many progressives think equality is good in and of itself. It's not. Fairness may indicate that equality is in fact good in a particular situation, but determining what's fair is much more difficult that determining what's equal.