[CliffFletcher]

Originally Posted by PepsiFree

I thought this was a fairly on-point response by Sleeper:
What Mark Lilla Gets Wrong About Identity Liberalism

From the article:

To secure full citizenship for everyone, labor, suffragist, civil-rights, and other social movements’ have had to wage disciplined but ecumenical struggles against concentrations of wealth and power that, mindlessly or malevolently, inflict and feed upon divisions in the common civic culture. Throughout our history, wounds to civic comity and democratic rights have had to be stopped and healed, across lines of color, gender, and religion.

There are two struggles going on here. One is the struggle to gain equal rights under the law. For people to be treated the same under the law regardless or race, gender, or sexual orientation. The other is the struggle against concentrations of wealth and power to secure equality of outcome.

The former has near-universal support among people in the West today. The idea that someone should be denied an opportunity to be a lawyer because of her gender, or barred from a restaurant because of his race, is regarded as an intolerable injustice.

The second struggle is contentious. Most people feel we have a duty to offer some base level of security to fellow-citizens so they don't live in abject poverty. That's why we have welfare, public school, public health care. However, the notion that:

A) Politics is all a struggle between groups, and
B) All right-minded people have a duty to support policies that 'balance the ledger' of those groups...

...does not have anything close to majority support in Canada, let alone in the more individualistic U.S.

That's why when activists marching under the banner of identity politics speak of wanting equal rights, they often undermine their credibility by using a different definition of 'rights' than most of their fellow-citizens.

I don’t know why he side-steps the much larger problem: people in supposedly prosperous democracies retreat from the public sphere into defensive camps of color and gender when public life is being deranged by the casino-like financing, predatory lending, and intrusive, degrading marketing that produce lethal store-opening rampages the day after Thanksgiving, massacres in schools and on streets, road rage, gladitorialization of sports and entertainment, mass incarceration, and the derangement of political discourse by reality-TV show artists who seem credible as national tribunes. Sovereign citizens are being reduced to notionally sovereign consumers who are really more like flies trapped in spider webs of 800-numbered, sticky-fingered, pick-pocketing and tracking machines.

The frustration crackles off the page. Yes, capitalism can be cruel and unfair. Its excesses do undermine civic society and the common good. But socialist thinkers aren't going to win hearts and minds with the kind of blistering, contemptuous invective against our market society employed by the author. Academics on the left have been raging against the tyranny of the free market society for over a century, and it's done little more than marginalize them from public life - which makes them even more resentful and contemptuous of the general public.

They would do better to promote the benefits of strong public programs - the universal benefits of those programs. Equal per-pupil funding of all schools would help disadvantaged black and white students escape the poverty trap. Legislated maternity and paternity leave would enable all parents to make choices around work and child care that work best for them.

The left needs to offer a positive program that doesn't rely on breaking society into opposing camps and vilifying an enemy. It would probably also help if they reined in their contempt for working class values and habits.