The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - December 23, 2024


Why Identity Politics Destroys Communities

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1068 Christmas Pre-Record ｜ Colombia's Cocaine Hippo Problem

Episode Stats


Length

7 minutes

Words per minute

145.94

Word count

1,108

Sentence count

37

People

Also mentioned:
Kimberly Crenshaw Marx Antonio Gramsci

Harmful content

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I discuss the political phenomenon we colloquially refer to as identity politics. Identity politics is a term coined by Kimberley Crenshaw, a critical race theorist, who attempted to understand why Marx's communist revolution failed in the West and what could be done to make it happen, not only to save Marx's theoretical framework, but also to assist in bringing about communism.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.480 Everyone is by this point familiar with the political phenomenon we colloquially call
00:00:05.040 identity politics. This is academically known as intersectionality, a term originally coined
00:00:10.800 by Kimberley Crenshaw, a critical race theorist. Critical race theorists stand in the long tradition
00:00:16.960 of communists struggling to understand why Marx's proletarian revolution never happened in the West
00:00:23.280 and what could be done to make it happen, not only to save Marx's theoretical framework but
00:00:28.880 also to assist in bringing about communism. The broad purpose of critical race theory and
00:00:33.600 intersectionality then is to attack the mainstream liberal society by empowering its destructive
00:00:39.520 fringe elements and facilitating their rise to power using the existing logic of the liberal society
00:00:46.240 itself. In her 1991 essay Mapping the Margins, Crenshaw draws upon the observations of Italian
00:00:52.640 communist Antonio Gramsci in his prison notebooks. Gramsci noticed that the revolution in Russia
00:00:58.400 succeeded because civil society was weak and did not support the corrupt institutions of the
00:01:03.520 state in their time of crisis. The revolution in the West failed because civil society was strong
00:01:09.440 and the uncorrupted institutions of state were held in high regard by the flourishing free societies,
00:01:15.600 and so they could not be overthrown in what Gramsci turned a war of manoeuvre,
00:01:20.080 and so the communists would have to resort to a war of position instead.
00:01:24.000 A war of position is essentially what America and Russia engaged in during the Cold War,
00:01:29.760 a war in which no battles between the adversaries are fought, but instead they gather resources and
00:01:35.520 strategically undermine one another until one side collapses, allowing the other to claim victory.
00:01:41.600 Crenshaw identified that in the West, liberal human rights laws could be manipulated to do the
00:01:47.280 opposite of what was intended – not to provide an equal playing field, but instead to consciously
00:01:53.280 privilege minorities against the majority. By expanding the definitions of what constituted racism,
00:01:59.840 sexism, homophobia, etc. the liberal commitment to process could be flipped into a communist commitment
00:02:06.720 to equal outcomes. And what's worse is that liberalism seems defenceless against this.
00:02:12.880 By identifying certain categories which were to be protected, such as woman, black, gay, etc.,
00:02:18.320 and providing them with protection from discrimination from the majority, the framework
00:02:23.440 had already been established by which the levelling of community hierarchies could begin,
00:02:28.960 and the underlying philosophy of liberal human rights could be perverted. No longer was the focus
00:02:34.880 of liberalism the protection of the individual from the state, but now the individual or group from their own
00:02:40.720 national community, using the state as the tool of liberation.
00:02:46.160 If this was justifiable for women, blacks, and gays, then Crenshaw noted that the logic of this could 0.89
00:02:51.680 naturally be extended to other, more marginal groups, such as transgenders, aliens, and criminals. 0.77
00:02:58.400 Moreover, the intersection of these groups provided extra dimensions of oppression. A criminal might suffer
00:03:04.800 from the persecution of the lawful society, but a black criminal suffers from the persecution of a 0.93
00:03:10.480 lawful and racist society, doubly compounding the suffering and the inevitability of his lot in
00:03:16.880 life, marking him out as a special beneficiary of grace and resources. Intersectionality was,
00:03:24.160 therefore, used to identify new and hitherto unseen vectors of oppression to identify further marginalised
00:03:31.120 groups which needed the state to protect them from mainstream society. And, of course,
00:03:36.960 this strategy gelled naturally with the existing liberal morality as set out by civil rights law.
00:03:43.920 All the premises had been conceded by the liberals in the 1960s that it was, in fact,
00:03:49.440 the state's job to protect individuals from the tyranny of association and opinion, and so this appeared
00:03:56.240 from the liberal position to be the moral thing to do. A practical effect of this was to provide the
00:04:03.840 power-seeking bad actors of a community the necessary tools to unjustly raise their status in any kind
00:04:10.560 of liberal hierarchy. The atheist feminist woman who was propositioned by an atheist man in an elevator
00:04:17.360 becomes the centre of a scandal as she can characterise her experience, which otherwise had no negative
00:04:23.600 outcomes for her other than being mildly awkward at worst, as one of systemic oppression from the white
00:04:30.640 male heteropatriarchy that targeted her as a woman. When such an accusation as this is recognised by
00:04:37.840 community authorities, they then feel they have a duty to protect the minority from oppression,
00:04:43.680 and thus raise the social standing of the victim, providing them with succour, materiel and status
00:04:49.760 to combat the perceived oppression. However, this has the double effect of conferring a privileged status
00:04:57.120 upon someone who has done nothing to merit such a position, and also stigmatising or criminalising
00:05:02.880 someone who has done nothing to deserve it. From this position, it's easy to see why that
00:05:09.440 in the pursuit of social justice, injustices are committed by the authorities of any given community,
00:05:15.680 and the community's focus has been perverted by making it be governed in an immoral and unpopular way.
00:05:22.400 The net effect of this is to sunder the relationship between the community and its own leadership,
00:05:29.680 who sacrifice this bond of trust to satisfy the moral demands of power-seeking bad actors,
00:05:36.000 who then sacrifice the integrity of their community for their own personal gain.
00:05:42.160 This in turn sours the other members of the community, making the community turn on itself
00:05:47.840 so that it eventually splinters and disintegrates. It is basically impossible for the liberal to
00:05:54.480 prevent this process from playing out, as all it takes for the personal to become political
00:06:00.160 is for the power-seeking bad actor to declare it as such. Any like-minded people can then coalesce
00:06:08.080 into a political faction within that community, and split it into two parts, with the liberal authorities
00:06:14.240 feeling obliged to side with this new minority over the majority. And this process can happen in a
00:06:21.600 community of any size. It could be something as small as an online new atheist group, or it could
00:06:28.480 scale up to a national political scandal in which millions of people could be encouraged to march,
00:06:34.000 protest, and riot over the perceived mistreatment of one group by the other.
00:06:39.920 Either way, the end result is the same. The destruction of the social bonds that bind us
00:06:45.600 together, and the collapse of morale, esprit de corps, and any functional power the community possessed.
00:06:53.200 The war of position is thereby won for the communists and their lumpen proletariat coalition 0.96
00:06:59.360 of the resentful, spiteful, and criminal against the over-society of normal, well-meaning, and law-abiding
00:07:07.120 people. Institutions crumble, and trust between people is destroyed, and the selfless work of
00:07:12.880 years is liquidated to the temporary status games and narcissistic pleasure of the most selfish people
00:07:19.760 among us.
00:07:33.520 you