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Originally Posted by jammies
However, it's inaccurate and just plain myopic to think we owe all progress on human rights to this idea. Identity politics is necessary in many cases because people like generalizations and are mostly incapable of looking beyond group identity when thinking about themselves and others. You can't evolve society based on how people SHOULD think if they were completely rational beings, because they just aren't fully rational.
It's a useful simplification to say "a woman's right to choose" is a women's issue, or that "black lives matter". Creating narratives around a disadvantaged group or members who share the same struggle makes those struggles comprehensible and visceral; narratives built around abstract ideas of universal justice make for near-universal yawns and incomprehension.
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Yes, people prefer emotionally-satisfying narratives to rational and utilitarian approaches to problems. The problem is that emotionally-satisfying narratives have villains. And once citizens in a democracy start turning everyone who disagrees with them or is outside their group into villains, then you lose the universal civic virtues that make democracies work. And when those narratives of heroes and villains are associated with identifiable racial, gender, or religious groups, you're pouring gasoline on the fire.
The transformation of the Republicans into a racial identity party is a catastrophe for American democracy. But it's a catastrophe people who know their history had been warning about for years. It's the entirely predictable - and inevitable - consequence of other kinds of identity politics.
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Originally Posted by jammies
Yes, identity politics can lead to injustice and oppression, to the quelling of unpopular opinions and to backlash against a perceived revolutionary transfer of power. It's an imperfect tool for an imperfect world. That flawed tool, though, is preferable to a perfect tool for a perfect world, for we don't live in some Platonic plane of ideas inhabited by philosopher kings - we live on a ball of sh*t and mud surrounded by tribally evolved barely sentient animals. The appeal to logic only works, alas, with the logical.
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We're also violent animals. But we're far less violent animals than we were 200 or 1000 years ago. Civilisation is largely a matter of overcoming our natural instincts. We'll never completely overcome our in-groups vs out-group tribal instincts. But we can recognize how toxic they are to pluralistic democracies, and moderate them. Maybe divert them into more benign identities based on sports or entertainment franchises.