patrick.net

I was texted by a Bernie 2020 volunteer yesterday asking if they could count on my support in his campaign. My response:

i supported Bernie in 2016, donated the maximum, phone banked. I was excited about his economic plan. Regarding his 2020 platform, I can't get behind him turning into yet another identity politics drone. also, the DNC is going to cut him out again because he's a White male.

They gone full blown identity politics, they see everything through that lense. It’s impossible to talk to those people, they too coo coo.

Trumpism Is ‘Identity Politics’ for White People - The president’s closing argument in the midterm elections lays bare the logic of his appeal.

Nevertheless, among those who claim to oppose identity politics, the term is applied exclusively to efforts by historically marginalized constituencies to claim rights others already possess. Trump’s campaign, with its emphasis on state violence against religious and ethnic minorities—Muslim bans, mass deportations, “nationwide stop-and-frisk”—does not count under this definition, but left-wing opposition to discriminatory state violence does. (A November panel at the right-wing Heritage Foundation on the threat posed by “identity politics,” with no apparent irony, will feature an all-white panel. )

But the entire closing argument of the Republican Party in the 2018 midterm elections is a naked appeal to identity politics—a politics based in appeals to the loathing of, or membership in, a particular group. The GOP’s plan to slash the welfare state in order to make room for more high-income tax cuts is unpopular among the public at large. In order to preserve their congressional majority, Republicans have taken to misleading voters by insisting that they oppose cuts or changes to popular social insurance programs, while stoking fears about Latino immigrants, Muslim terrorists, and black criminality. In truth, without that deception, identity politics is all the Trump-era Republican Party has.


Trying to scare white people is an effective political strategy, but it is also an effective ratings and traffic strategy. Trump’s ability to manipulate the media through provocation and controversy has been effective precisely because covering those provocations and controversies provides news outlets with the ears and eyeballs they crave. Trump considers the media “the enemy of the people” only when it successfully undermines his falsehoods; at all other times, it is a force multiplier, obeying his attempts to shift topics of conversation from substantive policy matters to racial scaremongering. The tenets of objectivity by which American journalists largely abide hold that reporters may not pass judgment on the morality of certain political tactics, only on their effectiveness. It’s a principle that unintentionally rewards immorality by turning questions of right and wrong into debates over whether a particular tactic will help win an election.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/gop-mid-term-campaign-all-identity-politics/573991/

Kakistocracy says

Trumpism Is ‘Identity Politics’ for White People

This is called a reaction, Kak.

You can't possibly argue that Trump started with Identity Politics.

White Working Class people have a reason to be scared, since the Luvvies/Glitterati/VIPs from CNN to Kristol to SNL has mocked the coming destruction and replacement of the White Working Class in no uncertain terms. And then gaslighting about it when called out.
https://quillette.com/2018/08/17/a-closer-look-at-anti-white-rhetoric/

The Dems as always tipped their hand too soon.

cmdrdataleak says

a politics based in appeals to the loathing of, or membership in, a particular group.

I'd say D's are far, far better than R's in identity politics. Fucking White Males (as well as Asian males) are discriminated against by last piece of racist legislation in US - Affirmative Action.

MisterLearnToCode says

You can't possibly argue that Trump started with Identity Politics.

No, that was a response - never said Trump started Identity Politics - you are trying to twist my words. I've been watching the thread since it was posted. If I was going to "react" like some respondents do on here, it would have been done in less time than it takes to read the thread in it's entirety.

I can give you some examples of a reaction but they will get flagged for being personal attacks.

The title of thread is what ?

And Trump's message is geared to who ?

Modern Democrats are defined by Identity Politics. Trump is tough medicine to a Democrat Disease.

MisterLearnToCode says

Modern Democrats are defined by Identity Politics

And Trump has adopted their style - Identity politics all around for everyone, pick your party, pick your color, pick whoever and whatever you want to blame - it's all good since at the end of the day it don't mean anything.

They (politicians) all answer to a power greater than themselves - greed and money.

Identity politics used to be for Democrats – now it’s for Republicans and they’re using it perniciously.

Donald Trump’s presidency has been dominated by a huge effort to protect the narrow interests of one particular demographic group: wealthy white men.

Identity politics have long been central to the message of the Democratic party, viewed as a constituency of African American people, Hispanic people, educated white progressives, LGBTQ people, single women and more.

Conservatives, meanwhile, had previously defined themselves ideologically.

Ronald Reagan’s so-called “three-legged stool” united a coalition of ideologically distinct groups – national security conservatives, social conservatives and fiscal conservatives – to pursue a single set of policies.

But from protests around the removal of Confederate statues to the backlash over NFL players kneeling in protest at police brutality, Donald Trump’s first year in the White House has shown Republicans to be the real drivers of identity politics. It’s just one development that typically goes unremarked upon.

Sarah Schulman has written that: “Gentrification is a process that hides the apparatus of domination from the dominant themselves.” Just so, Trump’s prioritization of America’s traditionally powerful class (white, male and wealthy) has been gifted a cloak of invisibility.


The right is quick to accuse Democrats of identity politicking when they do things such as prioritize voter turnout efforts and equal access to services for same-sex couples, say, or when they promote legalizing undocumented immigrants and healthcare for the half the population that isn’t male. And even prominent progressives such as Bernie Sanders say the party focuses too much on identity, to the detriment of more important things.

But it’s Republicans who have been working overtime to protect the narrow interests of a chosen demographic group. Because we take the privileges of the powerful for granted, however, only the interests of minority groups get described in these terms.

Minority groups are criticized for “playing the woman card”, or benefiting from affirmative action, when in fact it’s the powerful in society who’ve benefited from an invisible form of affirmative action all along. Not having to acknowledge that privilege allows the powerful to engage in a game of make-believe, perpetuating the myth that their success is a matter of strict meritocracy.

In his piece for the Atlantic, Reflections of an affirmative action baby, Peter Beinart demonstrates uncommon insight and honesty when he explains how he benefited from such unwritten rules as a young editor at the storied liberal magazine the New Republic. The owner and editor-in-chief at the time felt a particular hostility to affirmative action, Beinart explains, but the irony was the magazine was itself was already “a hothouse of racial and sexual preference”, just one that skewed away from women and certain minorities.

Ta-Nehisi Coates describes the benefits of race, gender and class provided to so many of us as a “tailwind”. And Beinart, to his credit, saw his own experience in that metaphor. He writes: “I was running hard. But without that tailwind, it’s unlikely I would have become the magazine’s editor at age 28.”

Trump and his party haven’t been so honest.

When I was in Maine visiting my husband’s family this summer, a prominent former lefty leader bemoaned his party’s “emphasis on identity politics”, adding what Democrats really need is a more “masculine” candidate and a focus on the white working class.

This is the most pernicious form of identity politics of all: identity politics for me but not for thee. Trump and others on the right and sometimes the left have sought to dress it up as a form of populism, but it’s just old-fashioned nativism with a new 21st-century twist.

There were glints of it with the rise of the Tea Party but never have white identity politics – the costumed politics of bigotry – reached such great heights, all while still passing for invisible. If there’s a three-legged stool to the GOP now its legs are all of a piece: whiteness, wealth and masculinity

Trump hasn’t accomplished much policy-wise but his tax bill is designed to drastically lower taxes for the wealthiest Americans at the expense of its weakest. Coupled with his recent campaigning for an alleged child molester and refusal to condemn white nationalist forces in Charlottesville earlier this year, it’s clear Trump is carrying off the most shameless form of identity politics of all: protecting entrenched power and its abuse.

The good news, if there is any, is that Trump’s grasping signals the dominant power is no longer so dominant. Where before it went unquestioned, it has to defend itself now.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/06/republicans-now-party-identity-politics-donald-trump

Democrats are identity politics, have been for last 50+ years.

Like every socialist party, they create begrieved groups, pit people against one another, and demand equality through redistribution.

Kakistocracy says

And Trump has adopted their style - Identity politics all around for everyone, pick your party, pick your color, pick whoever and whatever you want to blame - it's all good since at the end of the day it don't mean anything.

It's a reaction. The Majority is tired of being blamed for every social ill, tired of paying for indigent 3rd worlders (most of whom receive public benefits and especially Rapefugees), tired of flat wages because Neoliberals use SJWs to keep the labor supply - particularly of unskilled 3rd worlders who keep the wages down of unskilled Whites and Blacks. Tired of having American historical monuments torn town because of Crybully SJWs. The Confederate Flag is an American symbol of a Civil War, not the flag of a foreign invader.

And speaking of Foreign Flags:

San Diego


DNC Convention These delegates had to be forced to take them down under threat of expulsion from the hall, bad optics.


Chicago Trump Rally


Rally against ICE, Chicago

Even the German Bund didn't dare make such a demonstration of their pro-foreign sympathies in the lead up to WW2. Third World Invaders do.

Reactions are not sound decisions - responses are.

Reactions are emotion driven, responses are thought driven.

Reactions to a situation can get you killed - a response will save your life

Kakistocracy says

Reactions are not sound decisions - responses are.

Democrats don't believe in 2nd order effects of their policies.

I hope more foreign born wave foreign flags, everytime they do, it creates thousands of Trump Voters.

MisterLearnToCode says

I hope more foreign born wave foreign flags, everytime they do, it creates thousands of Trump Voters.

Something to remember - this too shall pass away.

What has swung to the right in politics will be followed by a swing to the left.

The only hope is the pendulum somehow finds a way to stop somewhere near the middle somewhere in the future

White Working Class people have a reason to be scared

That would be all working class - Black, White, Hispanic, etc.

Kakistocracy says

The only hope is the pendulum somehow finds a way to stop somewhere near the middle somewhere in the future

Will never happen until all the radical, lefty Socialists in control of your party are finally extinguished.

If Democrats acknowledge that scaring white people can make them vote Republican, why are they trying so hard to scare white People into voting against them? Adopting an anti-white people platform, and especially anti-white male stance isn’t the way to win the white vote.

Honestly, how cucked must a white person (especially a male) be to vote for people claiming white people are all evil racists and should be minimized?
You’d have to be KakiKrazy to vote for your own destruction!
But there’s plenty of mental illness on the Left.
If it weren’t for crazy people and naive kids, nobody would vote Democrat!

Quigley says

If Democrats acknowledge that scaring white people can make them vote Republican, why are they trying so hard to scare white People into voting against them?

Part of their "Master Plan/Final Solution"

Kakistocracy says

And Trump has adopted their style - Identity politics all around for everyone, pick your party, pick your color, pick whoever and whatever you want to blame - it's all good since at the end of the day it don't mean anything.

Not at all. Trump has gone out of his way to signal support (his whole life) for Gays, Blacks, etc. He only became a racist homophobe sexist in August of 2015 after 3+ decades in the public eye. Duh, he would have never had the Apprentice with such a reputation.

It's part of Liberal Lack of Critical Thinking Skills to believe that the "White Supremacist Patriarchal Capitalist Evil Male" line wouldn't result in a valid and just response, which is to want an end to the ceaseless nattering nabobs of identitarian politics pushed 24/7 on CNN, PBS, by every Dem Candidate, etc.

"I can't believe Whites and Males in particular finally got sick of being demonized 24/7/365 in the Media and by Democrats. Why can't they just grovel and accept our ceaseless attempts to stick Hard Left Progressive Stack Theory Criticism on them, and surrender all their assets and power? I can't believe there is such thing as 2nd order effects!"

A reaction, just like one would react if Bezos revealed that his new Alexa-controlled Amazon Juicer used Soylent Green, and the Media was advertising how wonderful it was that poor White people were being selected to participate in the program.
"Stop being so reactionary! It's better to be in my juicer than for the laid off MIG welder do to meth! They weren't prime membership material anyway, no loss! He also manspread on the Greyhound bus after catcalling a hot blonde in club clothes at 6AM on a Monday Morning! Evil!"

The valid reaction stops when the Dems drop the demonization of Whites and Males they started.

Dems are actively committing political suicide every day. It’s kind of breathtaking!

To try and claim that Trump is playing Identity Politics is projection at its worst. The Left is who makes everything about identity, while the Right has moved on from such a juvenile ideology. Sorry, but to say it and read it from a Left wing news source doesn’t make it so.

The fact that the Left is being exposed more and more for their ridiculous Identity Politics, it means they’re now trying to deflect and project it onto the Right. It’s a silly defense mechanism that’ll never work because it’s 100% foundationless.