Divide and conquer
This article makes better than I can a point which has been worrying me for quite some time, namely that “the left” seems to be preoccupied with relieving the oppression of small groups at the expense of relieving the oppression of the vast bulk of humanity by countering the neoliberal agenda of concentrating wealth (and therefore power) in the hands of a smaller and smaller proportion of the human race, and at the expense of finding world-wide consensus for steps to arrest (and possibly reverse) climate change.
Both of those are, to my eyes, existential threats to the whole of human society. If wealth continues concentrating, eventually the have-nots will revolt, and violent revolutions are not things we want to live through, nor are totalitarian governments (which are two non-exclusive probabilities), even if the economic system does not collapse, as concentration purely on supply-side economics will inevitably cause. If we do not urgently address climate change, the sites of most of the world’s largest cities will become uninhabitable (mostly because they’ll be underwater) and, while it is just about possible that farming will be able to relocate largely to Northern Canada and Siberia and still sustain a sufficient population, the population movements resulting are ones which will be devastating.
The thing is, I have, according to much of the “progressive” or “left” camp, no position from which to make this comment. I’m a cisgendered straight white male* from a developed Western country, I’m middle class and I’m a baby boomer. OK, I do have a number of other identity markers which leave me about halfway between the very privileged and the very underprivileged if you play the game of “step forward if” and “step backwards if”. But I’m condemned by that initial set of markers.
I can readily accept that virtually all power in the world since very early times until (and, sadly, including) now has been held by cisgendered straight white males, and that using the principle of affirmative action, I should be ready to take a step back in favour of all those people who do not fall into one of those categories. Indeed, I would be quite happy to do so, if only those who are not quite so encumbered by privilege as am I were willing and able to take the power and run with it. This is particularly so as I’m now a “senior citizen” and am, frankly, tired of political activism (of which I’ve done a lot). However, let’s be real about this; if all other factors were equal, I’d prefer a non-white candidate to a white one, a woman to a man, trans over cis and gay over straight, just on the principle of affirmative action – but not if that candidate’s platform was based on whichever bits of their identity was minority, because I wouldn’t trust them to concentrate on the existential threats.
I’m not particularly convinced by the suggestion that identity politics is based on a conspiracy of neoliberals. But the effect of a concentration on identity politics is that “divide and conquer” is working very well for the neocons. While identity politics argues about which group should have a bigger slice of the pie, neoliberalism is steadily shrinking the pie, and ignoring two factors which might well mean the pie vanishes completely.
To borrow a phrase from 12 step, we should look for similarities, not differences. That way, we might just possibly manage to build a coalition which can deal with income inequality and climate change. Without that, we’re stuffed…
* I don’t fall absolutely neatly into all those categories, but had a choice growing up, which many don’t.