AHISTOICAL “IDENTITY POLITICS” AND THE LEFT NEWSMAGAZINE IN THESE TIMES

 

Normally I like, and am impressed by, articles in the left news magazine/website In These Times (ITT).  However, four articles which appeared in the February and March 2014 issues have raised hackles with me, hackles insistent enough to move me to write this riposte.  For all four show a tendentiousness and “identity politics” lack of clarity that I consider destructive to the further development of the left in our present time—and in their essentially non-class, ahistorical approach both illuminate a severe fault in present left analysis, and through their critique, present ways to overcome it.

The four are:  Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor’s “Where Obama’s Class Speech Failed,” http://inthesetimes.com/article/16121/where_obamas_class_speech_failed, and Dennis Coday’s “The Pope vs. Capitalism,” http://inthesetimes.com/article/16113/the_pope_vs._capitalism, in the February issue; and Susan J. Douglas’ “Grand Old Race-Baiting,” http://inthesetimes.com/article/16260/grand_old_race_baiting,

and Sady Doyle’s “A Canon Without Balls,” http://inthesetimes.com/article/16275/a_canon_without_balls, in the March issue.  While each of the articles does have some merit (in a publication of such caliber as I consistently find ITT to be, it would really be surprising to find an article within that completely lacked merit), this merit is very much attenuated and truncated by the essentially non-class, ahistorical “identity politics” approach that runs through each and all.  An approach that is fundamentally problematic in itself, and only creates more problems when the authors above try to use it.

 

Yamahtta-Taylor’s and Douglas’ articles are about race, and while Yamahtta-Taylor’s does give a gloss of social class and its importance to her argument, she seems to argue more for the irrelevance of class in relation to race and presents an argument that is more a variant of a “new revolutionary working class vanguard based on race” that was once in vogue in left circles, but hasn’t materialized in fact.  This is evident in her noting that blacks and Latinos make up 40% of the low-paid workforce, which, by simple arithmetic, means that a clear majority—60%—of the low-wage workforce is white and “persons of color” generally excluded by the left as such from the “persons of color” distinction—persons of East, Southeast, South and Central Asian descent.  She also omits noticing that often blacks and Latinos fight ethnically and racially with each other over the fruits of labor and entitlements, that they aren’t this homogeneous category of “blacks and Latinos,” even in both constituting major sectors of the low-wage working class.  Also excluded from consideration is that the CEO of the epitome of low-wage labor, McDonald’s Don Thompson, is himself African American—a problem for a race-based analysis, but not so for a class-based analysis, especially one that incorporates Lenin’s understanding of the comprador bourgeoisie.

Susan Douglas notes perceptively how the Republican Party has successfully used race-baiting to divide white workers from feeling affinity with workers of color, especially blacks and, more recently, from Latinos as well, but the illustration accompanying her article contains a photo of Bill Cosby, himself African American and a vigorous critic of what he sees as major dysfunction among his fellow African Americans—an indication in itself that more is involved that simply a black-white dichotomy.  Of course, the real kernel of truth in Douglas’ analysis is that the Republican Party and the Tea Party within have been very successful in the so-called “culture wars” in dividing white workers, especially white male workers, from their counterparts along racial lines, disingenuously channeling white economic populist concerns into racial resentments, into support for policies that go against the needs of white male workers themselves.  Further, this policy has been very successful, and has created a fertile base of support for Republicans and Tea Partiers that has enabled the absolute stymying of progressive efforts to change the political and economic status quo.  But this successful polarization that is so much part of US politics today should give progressives and leftists real concern, because changing demographics that are empowering more and more racial minorities, women and youth to support progressive politics are not in themselves going to end the political impasse that we’ve experienced so frustratingly these past few years, and could well continue for many more years to come. 

Yes, that small but fanatical minority that encompasses the Republican and Tea Parties, and that can also mobilize resentful white male workers as part of its base (a significant part of the Tea Party/Republican base, to be sure, but far from being its entirety, or even its majority), has demonstrated a real political staying power so far unmatched by anything the left and progressives can muster; something clearly demonstrated by the politics of inaction that has plagued the Obama Administration almost from its beginning.  This politics of paralysis has certainly proven its force—another good reason not to abandon the white male working class in favor of a supposedly triumphant future demographics.  Because racial resentment is against the real wishes and needs of the white male working class itself, a nuanced left politics of both race and class could have a positive effect even in the short run, which is as soon as the upcoming 2014 elections—elections which should make all of us progressives and leftists nervous.  But  the progressive and left forces will have to stress commonalities of interest, not triumphalist notions of non-white race-based “vanguard workers,” to bring white male workers back where they belong—in a unified populist movement that stresses social and economic justice for all, while also addressing residuals of past societal racism in a constructive, not divisive, way.

Dennis Coday’s “The Pope vs. Capitalism” strikes this ex-Catholic left writer as too much a gushing, teenage-crush love letter on the new Pope instead of a sober analysis.  Truth is, the new Pope is far more ambiguous and even doctrinally reactionary than Coday portrays.  And the Pope’s first encyclical, Evangelii Gaudium, not only critiques capitalism sharply, as Coday correctly notes, it also upholds the Catholic Church’s traditional opposition to birth control and abortion, insists on the male-only Catholic priesthood, and when discussing women and their concerns, has a distinctive air of patronizing about it.  A patronizing further demonstrated in a later interview with the Jesuit magazine America, September 30, 2013,  http://www.americamagazine.org/pope-interview, in which the Pope dismissed women’s concerns over equality in the Church as “female machismo.”  Further, even Pope Benedict XVI spoke in opposition to “unbridled capitalism” (during his Papal visit to Brazil in 2007; see “In Brazil, pope assails capitalism, Marxism. Sees decline in church influence,” Victor L. Simpson, Associated Press, May 14, 2007), so Pope Francis’ economic message isn’t completely novel, though certainly his tone and his broader sweep are—and are enough to cause the political right to mistake him for an actual Marxist! (Give credit where credit is due.)   However, on the issue of Catholic priest-pedophilia, as Archbishop of Buenos Aires Pope Francis sent very conflicting messages on this, as he hardly moved decisively against priest-pedophiles in his own diocese.  (For further reading on these matters see Adele Stan’s dissection of Evangelii Gaudium in AlterNet, December 6, 2013, “Killing Them Softly: Pope Francis Condemns Income Inequality, Sanctions Gender Inequality,” http://www.alternet.org/killing-them-softly-pope-francis-condemns-income-inequality-sanctions-gender-inequality; the British National Secular Society’s provocative October 31, 2013 blog by Terry Sanderson, “Are we being bamboozled by this charming Pope?” http://www.secularism.org.uk/blog/2013/10/are-we-being-bamboozled-by-this-charming-pope;  and Catholic investigative reporter Jason Berry’s December 31, 2013 article on GlobalPost which examines the new Pope’s ambiguous record on priest-pedophilia as bishop in Argentina, “How Pope Francis took 2013 by storm,” http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/italy/131231/how-pope-francis-took-2013-storm.)  As for the Pope’s establishing a Commission to “study” the priest-pedophilia issue, noted by Coday and now operational, wouldn’t it be far better to just turn over suspected priest-pedophiles and their personnel records over to the civil authorities for investigation and, if warranted, prosecution?  And same with covering-up clergy and bishops—turn them and their personnel records, correspondence and e-mails over as well to the civil authorities for investigation and possible prosecution of child endangerment or obstruction of justice?  Shouldn’t that be at the top of the new Commission’s agenda for “study”?  I believe a lot of people, Catholic, non-Catholic and ex-Catholic alike, would agree!

When I read Sady Doyle’s “A Canon Without Balls,” the first thought that entered my mind was how it reminded me of feminist lawyer Catharine MacKinnon’s Andy Warhol fifteen-minutes-of-fame during her speech before the Harvard Law School in the early 1990s advocating censorship on feminist grounds, dismissing works of “literary or scientific merit” with a cavalier “If a woman is involved, why should it matter?”  For what Doyle seemed clearly to be proposing was a feminist litmus test for deciding if any work of literature was “politically correct” or not.  Indeed, her screed harkened me back to my reading of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s powerful dystopian novel We, and how it had run afoul of militant “political correctness.”  Zamyatin, a Soviet writer in the 1920s, had written We as a science-fiction extrapolation of disturbing trends he’d already found apparent in the fledgling Soviet Union; and in 1923 the reading of his manuscript elicited vigorous and indignant attack from the new commissars of Socialist Realism, i.e., literature that conformed to the “needs” of Socialist Revolution, at the meeting of the All-Russian Writers Union.  My impression of Doyle’s essay is that she is reading literature in the spirit of these Socialist Realism commissars—more concerned with “correct political line” than with quality literature as such.  But all quality literature, whatever its ideological bent, is a contribution by the best of humanity to the best of humanity as its audience, and of course that includes within it that half of humanity which is female. 

As for “bad,” “harmful” and “reactionary” ideas, the purging of them “to protect the innocent” from the “offensive” has always been the rationale of censors, whether overt, or more “benign,” as through “ideological criticism.” Yet it has been censorship or tendentious “criticism” that has more often than not given such “bad” ideas their attractive force—and yes, there are indeed “bad,” reactionary and chauvinist ideas in many great works, and yet—while they may give “offense” to some readers, has anyone been harmed by them who read them as literature should be read, with a critical yet open mind, a mind capable of separating the wheat from the chaff?  In just my own particular case, did I become a neoliberal because I read Wealth of Nations and the popular works of Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom and Free to Choose?  Was I made susceptible to sadism because I read the account of God-sanctioned genocide in the Book of Joshua?  And haven’t feminists themselves been more harmed by censorship than by exposure to “male chauvinist” writers such as Saul Bellow and Jack Kerouac?  To ask the question is to answer it.

Just as an updated footnote to the above, we can also pointedly note what the Atlantic, in May 2014,  termed “empathetic correctness,” http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/05/empathetically-correct-is-the-new-politically-correct/371442/, the new push for “trigger warnings” to preface readings and films shown in academic settings that might—just might, not necessarily would, even among the most  squeamish and vulnerable—set off emotional reactions of unease, discomfort and panic.  Which we should invidiously dismiss as just another unfortunate example of our contemporary left’s penchant for protecting people—from fundamental reality itself!  Of course, this is just another “benign” form of censorship, and is patronizing itself to the 3% of the population (according to the Center for Disease Control) which suffers from PTSD, “concern” for whom motivates the “trigger warning” advocates to embrace yet another variant of censorship.  But just as censorship is no substitute for therapy, it is also no preventative of panic, or any other “disturbance”—although it does encourage, even directly cause, disturbance, disruption, and even elimination of the capacity for critical thought!  Truly a “cure” far worse than any disease it supposedly prevents.