The Ongoing Political, Philosophical, Social Theory Thread

[nik-]

This thread has become hilarious whataboutism. Someone should put up a body count scorecard and then maybe they'll feel a little less guilty about being a rampaging evil westerner.

[jammies]

Originally Posted by rubecube

Well, I mean the first regime to adopt a perverse version of it revolutionized a massive country, with a largely dispersed population, operating under an agrarian feudal system, and on the brink of total collapse into an industrial superpower capable of reaching space within a manner of decades, despite global resistance and subversion.

I'm not attempting to romanticize the Soviets or trivialize the atrocities of that regime but those are impressive accomplishments by almost any standard.

I've been meaning to get back to this - leaving aside the massive environmental, social, and technological failures (the Eastern Bloc eventually badly trailed the West even in the areas it was able to target with massive state resources) under communism, I submit that it was the enthusiasm and dedication to the ideology in the first 2 or 3 generations of Soviet citizens that propelled it to a semblance of success, not the system itself. Motivated people can succeed under any system, but eventually the gap between the promises of an ideology and its reality disillusion the bulk of the populace, and people retreat from selflessness to selfishness*. Similar arguments are made about the economic success of fascists, but they (fortunately) didn't last long enough to have their own stagnation set in.

Further, the Soviet Union was never as powerful as it seemed to be. One of the big surprises revealed by the collapse of the Soviets was that their economic output was actually 1/6 that of the USA, not the 1/3 to 1/2 that was estimated. Right up until collapse, they were perceived as a rough equal to the West, but they never really were other than militarily, and even there, the only real successful weapon they ever had technologically superior long-term to the West was the AK-47. The performance of Soviet jets with Soviet pilots over Korea and Vietnam was indicative of not only material inferiority, but doctrinal as well, something which persists all the way to Russia today. The real advantage they've always owned has been effective propaganda and espionage.

Rather than Russia, look at Germany. The East was still a backward hellhole 44 years after communism was imposed, while West was one of the richest nations in the world. Both were ruins in 1945, but without complete buy-in on the part of the population, the communist side was prosperous only by the laughable standards of Romania and Poland.

There is almost nothing to admire about the reality of communism. Therefore, its philosophical underpinnings are also not to be admired.

*For example, the effective calls during WWII for Stakhanovite fanaticism in exceeding work quotas, or for "shock workers" to destroy production norms, transformed into the "we pretend to work, they pretend to pay us" cynicism of the Brezhnev years.

[jammies]

Originally Posted by CliffFletcher

No. Americans have little interest in history - theirs or anyone else's.

Few people of any kind are interested in history at any depth. Most people get a sprinkling of it in school, and from then on get their understanding from popular entertainment, like movies about pirates, or romanticized books about exiled lairds of the Highlands pining for the love of innocent English maidens.

I personally don't take "Western guilt" as a serious thing - if you do have a relatively deep knowledge of history, you learn that every single culture lives on the bones of other cultures, and that there are no innocents and no victims who have not themselves been oppressors. There is a difference between understanding and acknowledging past injustice, and trying to do better than our ancestors did by empowering the oppressed right here and now - which I entirely and enthusiastically agree with - as opposed to shamefacedly picking over the scabs of wounds beyond living memory to let the blood flow freely again.

"Oh, but that's easy for you to say, you're a white male!" Well, my father's family were coal miners in Wales, and my mother's family were coal miners in (at the time) Austrian Poland, poor people from two nations under the dominion of foreigners. Should I still be bitter at the Habsburgs that conquered southern Poland and disenfranchised the petty nobility my family once was? Should I hate the Queen for being a Sassenach tyrant? I think it's better just to not be like my grandmother, cursing the Jews and the, uh, "negroes", and to recognize that virtue does not accrue automatically to those who feel themselves wronged by history, nor does evil weigh down generations who have rejected their ancestors' misdeeds.

[jammies]

Originally Posted by jammies

Should I hate the Queen for being a Sassenach tyrant?

As an aside, I have a Scots uncle and a few cousins who think exactly this, and are members of the Scottish National Party that wants independence from Britain. They will, if encouraged, bang on enthusiastically about how the English have oppressed the Scots for centuries. Yet, if you've been to Scotland, the jackboots and work camps seem oddly absent, and many of their listed grievances hark back to the freakin' Middle Ages.

To be fair, there is still equally daft English prejudice against the boorish Scots, traceable back to border raids where those dastards came at night to steal sheep. Or to Bonnie Prince Charlie and his Jacobite Popery, a threat to all that is truly English, still out there lurking somewhere since the 1740s.

[driveway]

Originally Posted by jammies

I think it's better just to not be like my grandmother, cursing the Jews and the, uh, "negroes", and to recognize that virtue does not accrue automatically to those who feel themselves wronged by history, nor does evil weigh down generations who have rejected their ancestors' misdeeds.

For a generation to reject the misdeeds of their ancestors, does it not stand to reason they must also reject the wealth and power which have accrued as a result of those misdeeds?

[CliffFletcher]

Originally Posted by driveway

For a generation to reject the misdeeds of their ancestors, does it not stand to reason they must also reject the wealth and power which have accrued as a result of those misdeeds?

How do you possibly parse out who benefited? Did Jammie's coal miner great-grandparents benefit from the British Empire? Is a Canadian of upper caste East Indian origin the victim of misdeeds, or the beneficiary of them?

The clearest beneficiaries of wealth and power are the children and grandchildren of the very wealthy. Do we demand that everyone reject the wealth they inherit? Should Brad Treliving be punished or stripped of power because his father's money gave him tremendous advantages in life?

[jammies]

Originally Posted by driveway

For a generation to reject the misdeeds of their ancestors, does it not stand to reason they must also reject the wealth and power which have accrued as a result of those misdeeds?

No. They should share that wealth and power, though, and do everything possible to raise the less privileged up. Treating history as a zero sum game where we take turns being top dog will never solve anything.

[Itse]

Originally Posted by jammies

I submit that it was the enthusiasm and dedication to the ideology in the first 2 or 3 generations of Soviet citizens that propelled it to a semblance of success, not the system itself.

I don't think that separation makes much sense. There is no system without an ideology, and vice versa.

[jammies]

Originally Posted by Itse

I don't think that separation makes much sense. There is no system without an ideology, and vice versa.

That's why I'm using those words synonymously in what you quoted. I don't intend there to be a separation, rather quite the opposite.

[Flash Walken]

In specific context of the Soviet Union, the threat of German expansion and Soviet/Slavic annihilation are/were powerful weapons to insure belief in an alternative future. While Leninist political sentiment may have been the catalyst for the revolution, what held the nation together during famine and material paucity was the existential threat to their existence.

American threats in the 50s and 60s were a galvanizing sequel to overt German aggression that had crippled an entire generation of Soviet citizens both pleb and leadership alike.

Without that sort of external enemy propaganda the readily apparent corruption of the Soviet system became unsupportable and would have likely collapsed much sooner.

The existential creep of Muslim dominance is of similar value to some in the West now. It works well in concert with the fear of dilution of labour supply with Mexican immigration.

The collectivist under pinnings of white supremacy in the united States and Christian nationalism in Western Europe are interesting because of their parallels to the national socialist movement of germany of the 20s and 30s which was inherently anti-capitalist in nature. many early labour organizations that strictly limited membership by race and in the cases of places like South Africa were strongly supportive of racist government policies that restricted labour of minorities, artificially restricting the supply of labour. The same can be said of some of America's early prominent socialists as well.

Specifically in the united States you appear to have labour leaders 'flipping' to the GOP as the GOP continues to abandon long held core beliefs about free market capitalism in favour of a return to pre-regulatory monopolies.

What is unclear is whether this zeal to return to the bad old days mixed with a seeming return of some of the environmental hazards of the bad old days will see an equal and opposite resistance like we saw in American society in the 30s. There will have to be some kind of overarching, galvanizing obstacle or enemy to keep this loose coalition together in the way the Soviets had the German and then American boogyman, otherwise the ready corruptness will hollow out the political structure in a similar vein to what happened in the Soviet Union.

[Knalus]

Originally Posted by CliffFletcher

But that goes for everything, not just natives and slavery. Americans are woefully ignorant of history in general, not just the unpleasant stuff their government did. Take World War 2, a key part of America's patriotic past, lionized by conservatives as well as liberals, and a global event that happened within living memory.

And yet a quarter of American students couldn't identity who Hitler was. Most couldn't name the major combatants. Half couldn't identity when it ended.

Only half of Americans surveyed can even name the three branches of government.

Isn't this one of the biggest issues with politics today? The majority of the population seems unwilling or unable to actually understand what they are fighting against?

Take the ideas of privilege. In my opinion, this is a fascinating topic for an intellectual discussion, when individuals can discuss the merits, and understand the point, of what privilege means and how far it can be taken.

However, I believe we are seeing nowadays just how destructive this well meaning idea - right or wrong - is in the hands of those unwilling to really understand the nuance of it, from both sides. One side appears to be using it in an overly aggressive assertion of political moral superiority, and the other feels it is a narrowly focused nearly personal attack against them, that minimizes their own very real struggles and concerns so far as to be cruel.

But the big issue isn't whether or not privilege is real or not - the big issue is how the idea is being wielded as a political weapon in such a hamfisted, and simplistic terms. What was a discussion that was originally intended (I believe) to help others understand the issues being faced by another group in society, is now being used to shut down that very discussion. And why? Because people don't want to really dig into these kinds of ideas in a deep, meaningful and nuanced way. Oh sure, some of us are interested in that, and there are many other people out there who also are, but there are many, many more who are not. Sadly, we need to recognize that there is a (far too) large subsection of the population that cannot.

In short, people are dumb.

[CliffFletcher]

Originally Posted by Knalus

But the big issue isn't whether or not privilege is real or not - the big issue is how the idea is being wielded as a political weapon in such a hamfisted, and simplistic terms. What was a discussion that was originally intended (I believe) to help others understand the issues being faced by another group in society, is now being used to shut down that very discussion. And why? Because people don't want to really dig into these kinds of ideas in a deep, meaningful and nuanced way. Oh sure, some of us are interested in that, and there are many other people out there who also are, but there are many, many more who are not. Sadly, we need to recognize that there is a (far too) large subsection of the population that cannot.

In our political climate today, understanding and persuasion (you need the one to employ the other) have taken a back seat to the striving for recognition and airing of grievances. Some argue that this is an essential element of modern culture - that the awareness that we live in a pluralistic society alongside people who have different values and opinions is tremendously distressing. And that distress fosters an overriding desire to have others recognise and value you and your identity. We want to be seen and heard as individuals, and as groups. We want to tell, not listen.

Persuasion is hard. It's easier to denounce. That way, you don't even have to regard fellow citizens who disagree with you as thoughtful people who are pursuing their own notions of good. They can simply be disregarded as morally deficient foes.

This is, of course, bad for democracy. When we focus only our asserting our own identities and maligning those with different outlooks and values, we undermine the common purpose that underpins a healthy society.

The End of Identity Liberalism

...But the fixation on diversity in our schools and in the press has produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups, and indifferent to the task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life. At a very young age our children are being encouraged to talk about their individual identities, even before they have them. By the time they reach college many assume that diversity discourse exhausts political discourse, and have shockingly little to say about such perennial questions as class, war, the economy and the common good...

..We need a post-identity liberalism, and it should draw from the past successes of pre-identity liberalism. Such a liberalism would concentrate on widening its base by appealing to Americans as Americans and emphasizing the issues that affect a vast majority of them. It would speak to the nation as a nation of citizens who are in this together and must help one another. As for narrower issues that are highly charged symbolically and can drive potential allies away, especially those touching on sexuality and religion, such a liberalism would work quietly, sensitively and with a proper sense of scale. (To paraphrase Bernie Sanders, America is sick and tired of hearing about liberals’ damn bathrooms.)..

- New York Times

[PepsiFree]

Originally Posted by CliffFletcher

[INDENT]The End of Identity Liberalism

Lilla's piece reads like he's just cobbling together the opinions of others without the required depth of understanding to have a substantial point.

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

At first glance, our arguments are so close that if you read Lilla’s essay alongside Liberal Racism's introduction,you might think he's just channeling what I wrote two decades ago. The experience of reading his essay alongside my intro is almost surreal. Even Lilla'sinsistence that “one of the many lessons of the recent presidential election campaign and its repugnant outcome is that the age of identity liberalism must be brought to an end” seems a stark vindication of my prophecies of 20 years ago that liberal identity politics would accelerate swift, dark currents distorting and dividing the trans-racial American civic culture that liberal democracy depends on.

But diversity liberalism’s folly is the only “lesson” Lilla addresses. It’s almost as if he were driven, wittingly or not, to eclipse all other, more fateful lessons with an occasional, airy bromide or ceremonial bow to “the common good.” Where does he think the common good comes from? Weasel words and sinuous turns of phrase betray his evasion of the question, and his selective finger-pointing leaves little doubt he’d rather be a mincing critic than a fighter for the common good against its real enemies.

Not everyone has to be a fighter, but if Lilla wanted to nourish a race-transcendent, liberal-democratic civic culture and a vision of citizenship thick enough to rely on, he’d show that Americans have always had to wage disciplined battles for a common citizenship that wasn’t prepared for them by the republic’s founders, who had deep doubts about its viability.

The bold is something I see a lot, especially here when certain parties are busy extolling the virtues of Mills' liberalism.

[Red Slinger]

I'm always a little skeptical when I hear an outright dismissal of identity politics. I think that most people are able to assert our own identities without maligning others. You can believe what you believe based on what you've experienced, at least partly because of WHO you are, while also listening to and respecting views of others. That's hard when the other view is directly in contrast to your "identity" but that's life. Identity politics don't come from nowhere. Usually it's a reaction to an existing condition. This may be a simplistic answer but if you want to get rid of identity politics first you have to remove the cause of the Cause.

[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.

[PepsiFree]

Originally Posted by CliffFletcher

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.

...which is Sleeper's point, and has been his point for 20+ years, long before Lilla thought to weigh in.

The problem with Lilla (and those who blindly support the characterization of IP as the looming liberal boogeyman) is the complete ignorance or acknowledgement of the forces that create the need. As Red Slinger said: the cause of the Cause. Every action is a reaction.

As soon as you prioritize IP as problem #1 (or even in the top five), you've missed the point. The screams of illiberal behavior ring hollow when they're focused on the behavior and not the deeply illiberal cause. You should take issue with the problems that IP have created, but they should be fairly low on your list when looking at the main issue. It's the same types who complain about the protest more than what is being protested. It's suggesting you should stop taking your medicine because the side effects are bad, while ignoring the condition the medicine is fighting is much, much worse. It's a complete absence of scope.

By confronting the cause and seeking to eliminate that, you then eliminate the need for the Cause.

There is essentially no better way to show the virtue of your solution than by enacting it, but sitting at the side lines and observing others while saying "Your solutions arent working" is lazy and meaningless. It has nothing to do with "the left" needing to create some universal solution, that's almost awkwardly hypocritical. A universal solution to these problems needs to be created outside of group-lines, by examining the core of the problem and looking to fix it.

The solution to identity politics is not working against identity politics, it's working towards the same core goal and showing the virtue of your solution, bringing everyone in. As soon as you create a boogeyman out of IP, you're not part of the solution, you're just furthering the problem.

The basic concept of 'All Lives Matter' was right on, but the execution was just dismissive and idiotic. If you look at it, the correct response to a movement like Black Lives Matter IS 'All Lives Matter,' but with the acknowledgement that Black lives are viewed as less and an actual effort to rectify a situation where not everyone shares the same opportunity or treatment. All Lives Matter was the perfect example of the problem with old liberalism: "This is the way it should be, but we're content to tell you you're wrong and do nothing to promote our solution." Liberal or conservative, there's not a huge difference between those that ignore a problem and those who pretend it doesn't exist.


TL;DR

If more staunch liberals put effort into enacting the universal solutions they idolize and actually acknowledged the problems that exist in the world without a "yeah, but," then they'd see progress towards the ideal they dream of. But as long as the focus is on rejecting tribalism and identity politics first, while putting zero effort into remedying the cause of those things (or worse, ignoring it outright) then they'll continue to be seen as out-of-touch academics after some un-graspable utopia.

Lead by example when you have a clear and virtuous example in mind is easy, but probably hard if you don't really care in the first place.

[Itse]

Originally Posted by PepsiFree

If more staunch liberals put effort into enacting the universal solutions they idolize and actually acknowledged the problems that exist in the world without a "yeah, but," then they'd see progress towards the ideal they dream of. But as long as the focus is on rejecting tribalism and identity politics first, while putting zero effort into remedying the cause of those things (or worse, ignoring it outright) then they'll continue to be seen as out-of-touch academics after some un-graspable utopia.

Lead by example when you have a clear and virtuous example in mind is easy, but probably hard if you don't really care in the first place.

I very much agree with the general point, but I think reality itself is kind of in the way here.

For many liberals, it's become a case of near and far enemies.

The conservatives are essentially far away enemies. I know they're out there, but they don't show up in my personal life much. That one crazy drunk pro-Russian uncle nobody takes seriously is not much of an issue.

Stupid un-constructive liberals on the other hand cause problems in the circles I hang in. When they start picking fights, I HAVE to deal with that. If you get very involved in those fights, it's very easy to start feeling like those fights are all the fights you have. And when you start feeling like its all the fights you have, it's easy to start thinking that maybe the liberals are really the problem.

It's kinda dumb, but it's very human.

[CliffFletcher]

American political dialog has muddied the waters as to what terms like liberal, progressive, and leftist mean. There are genuine and fundamental differences.

Leftists seek equality of outcome while liberals lean towards equality of opportunity. The left hews to structuralist explanations for problems, while liberals look at culture and individual choice. Leftists often believe in the blank slate and the noble savage, while liberals are more likely to have a tragic view of human nature. The left puts a higher value on security, liberals on freedom.

That means while liberals and the left may agree that a particular thing is a problem, they often have fundamental disagreements about the source of the problem, and the best solution.

[Itse]

Originally Posted by CliffFletcher

Leftists often believe in the blank slate and the noble savage, while liberals are more likely to have a tragic view of human nature.

I think the rest was accurate, but I think you have this part backwards.

The left in general I feel are really the most cynical people when it comes to human nature, and liberal policies pretty much require you to have a rather positive view of people.

Liberals want to create opportunities because they believe the key is to not hold people back, because people are awesome. Left wants to create support (and control) structures because the key is to help people since a lot of them can't (or won't) get it done on their own.

[rubecube]

Pretty good interview with a self-proclaimed Marxist lamenting the rise of identity politics. Thought Cliff, Corsi and others would find it interesting.

http://www.seattleweekly.com/news/a-...tity-politics/