Jonathan Haidt has drawn this distinction. Eric Vieth transcribed part of a podcast in which Haidt spoke with Joe Rogan.
You can either do what we call common enemy identity politics, where you say life is a battle between good groups and evil groups. Let’s divide people by race, you know, straight versus everyone else. Men versus all the other genders and white versus everybody else. So you look at the straight white men. They’re the problem. All the other groups must unite to fight the straight white man. That’s one of the core ideas of “intersectionality.” What we say in the book is that this leads to eternal conflict.
Much better is an identity politics based on common humanity. We don’t say to hell with identity politics. We say you have to have identity politics until you have perfect justice and equality. You have to have a way for groups to organize to push back on things to demand justice. That’s fine, But you do it by first emphasizing common humanity. That’s what Martin Luther King did. That’s what Pauli Murray did. That’s what Nelson Mandela did. This wonderful woman, Pauli Murray . . . she was a gay, black, possibly trans civil rights leader in beginning the 40s . . . She says, when my opponents draw a small circle to exclude me, I shall draw a larger circle to include them. I shall shout for the rights of all mankind. And this is, again, what Martin Luther King did. He’s relentlessly appealing to our white brothers and sisters. He’s using the language of American. Of Christianity. Start by saying what we have in common and then people’s hearts are open. We’re within a community. Now we can talk about our difficulties. So it’s the rise of common enemy identity politics on campus in the Grievance Studies departments, especially, that I think is an alarming trend.
Unfortunately, I think that people like Haidt or Bret Weinstein or Coleman Hughes or Glenn Loury or James Lindsay are confined to an intellectual ghetto, aka the IDW. Only a few of us on the right know that they exist. We also know about Ibram X. Kendi and Nikole Hannah-Jones. But people on the left know only about the latter.
When I go to YouTube, it recommends mostly my side, but some of the other side. I suspect that when people on the left go to YouTube, they never see recommendations from the ghetto.
As someone who has paid some attention to the IDW, I think they are stuck in a ghetto for a few reasons.
First, it often seems that their appeals and arguments are directed to people on the left, asking them to engage in fair debate and to be more reasonable, etc. Even the quote above is Haidt saying the left should do identity politics in the way he prefers. But the left won’t listen to him, and why would they? They have been much more successful with their approach than he has been with his.
And some others such as myself just get tired of listening to that appeal after a while. I feel like saying: yes, we agree, let’s not police speech and let’s avoid enemy-based politics, what next? It seems to me that they never move on to the “what next?” question.
In contrast, the Woke ideology constantly furnishes its supporters with new projects, battles, and enemies. It also gives them an ideological tool to sideline people they don’t like. Because it has captured the moral narrative, it also seems to engage people who otherwise don’t engage with politics.
A counter ideology to Wokeness (and that is what is needed) would need to have some versions which could appeal to and involve those who don’t constantly engage with politics, and would need more talking points than free speech, ideological diversity, and being nice. I’m optimistic that is possible!
Arnold, by definition, power presumes at least two groups of people and that one group believes to be able to take advantage of the other(s). Therefore, any serious discussion of our common humanity has to deny power as one of the main drivers of humanity (see, for example, https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/09/21/bertrand-russell-nobel-prize-acceptance-speech/ ).
We live our lives searching for people who we know are different but at least tolerant of our differences and not ready to take advantage of us. We also learn to live with others who we know are different, intolerant, and ready to take advantage of us, but sometimes we engage them because we believe we can contain them and benefit from interacting with them. As much as we don’t have a problem with those that are different and like us, we have a serious problem with those that want to take advantage of us and we cannot contain.
The short answer is that the Right has failed to expand the range of things that the Left may not talk about or support, even backsliding on things like socialism and communism.
In contrast, the Left has increasingly succeeded in moving the domain of polite discourse to exclude ideas from the Right and even Center. They therefore have no interest in rational, polite discourse.
If you can kill people in broad daylight and claim it as justified, while you can get a person to lose their job for “racist” remarks made in a private phone call, you know the other side is losing its leverage.
What is really left once you bracket out intersectionality? Citing MLK as an identity politics organizer only reminds me of his vaguely Marxist critique of the war in Vietnam, which in turn reminds me of the intimacy between contemporary American liberals and their spoiled kids — the weird woke sub-culture of Ivy League ner’do wells. How much of identity politics — its arguments, premises and rhetoric in general — is left, once you bracket out the intersectionality and the prior, ubiquitous disdain for the straight white male?