American Left
-
On Checking Your Privilege
For the record, the real reason privilege checking fell out of favor is because checking your privilege doesn’t do anything. Like so much of cultural studies-inflected pseudo-left practices, it’s an entirely symbolic and semantic ritual. It turns out that even in the rare event that members of privileged groups actually checked their own privilege, they’re
-
How Not to Defend Liberalism
Instead of class conflict, politics became a battle between two cultural factions, neither of which represented the working class. On the left side of these politics are many professionals whose concerns for equality have narrowed to involuted and essentialized conceptions of race and gender detached from the real material needs of the marginalized groups they
-
The Oliver Anthony Dilemma
Good piece in the Atlantic about Chris Murphy and Oliver Anthony. Anthony's song, "Rich Men North of Richmond"… … which became an unlikely national hit, also took jabs at “obese” welfare recipients and high taxes. The right applauded and that turned off the left. Vox christened Anthony a right-wing breakout star; Variety floated accusations that
-
Freddie de Boer on Class-First Politics (Updated)
I myself am a class-first leftist, and indeed the penultimate chapter of my new book is titled “Why is Class First?” And the answer is that class comes first because class approaches to politics are the best approach to combating injustice, including racial injustice. Being class-first is an instrumental position, not a moral one; it’s
-
Self-Transcendence, Constraints, and Social Order
Every society needs moral norms and behavioral codes. Without them we would all be in Hobbes's state of nature. The culture war that is tearing the country apart right now is about who gets to define what those codes are. The main combatants are the Left and Right wings of our Calvinist heritage–the priggish Neo
-
Freddie de Boer on Today’s Left
In his post today: In 2016, it certainly seemed like the Bernie Sanders-Hillary Clinton split was defining a dynamic that would last for a long time: class-focused socialists bent on dramatic change opposed by centrists who weaponized identity politics to try and stop that change. It was very common for people to assume that this
-
Middle American Radicals Twelve Years Later
In December 2010, at a time when thoughtful readers frequently commented on my posts, I put up an essay entitled "Thanksgiving Encounters". It was about visiting with relatives at a Thanksgiving gathering in North Carolina where my father had retired. I found myself astonished to learn that these thoughtful, well-educated relatives, people I care about, were
-
Some Thoughts on Equity Language
Like any prescribed usage, equity language has a willed, unnatural quality. The guides use scientific-sounding concepts to lend an impression of objectivity to subjective judgments: structural racialization, diversity value proposition, arbitrary status hierarchies. The concepts themselves create status hierarchies—they assert intellectual and moral authority by piling abstract nouns into unfamiliar shapes that immediately let you
-
All the King’s Horses, etc.
Can anybody put Humpty Dumpty back together again? Sure secession would be crazy and irrational, but it was in 1861 as well. Lots of smart people then, Lincoln included, thought that saner heads would prevail. They didn't. On Election Day last year I wrote: I've been talking for years about how something has to give,
-
What It Means to be on the Left
To be on the Left used to mean to be primarily concerned about economic justice, to be pro-worker, to see the biggest problem in American society as the astonishingly inequitable distribution of wealth and the disproportionate power and influence of the wealthy. So it was interesting to me to read this morning in Thomas Edsall's