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Originally Posted by !@#$%!
help me out here. i’m trying to figure a way forward, not a way back. i don’t see identity politics necessarily as an abandonment of rational ideas. i see it as a demand for redress of longstanding historical injustices. i think that once the dialectic is worked out and we define a new enlightenment subject *in practical, actual, cultural terms*, we will all be better for it.
then again maybe all devolves into a fucked up racial or religious war. in that case i’ll fight for the future alliance of federated agnostic mongrels in which everyone is cousins and don’t importune each other with religious proselytizing.
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Identity Politics, as it's defined from within and being implemented, privileges one voice over another, fundamentally. It believes that for one group to speak, another must be silent. That's my lived experience of it, at the level of working in an institution that's adopted it as policy. We can argue about the theoretical underpinnings of it but as you say yourself, it's about praxis, not abstract ideas. But my experience isn't necessarily extendable to the situation as a whole.
Either way, I don't think Trump is a phenomenon reducible to Identity politics, or a backlash against it (I'm sure you don't either). My real interest in it is why so many people who would've traditionally called themselves Left wing appear to be turning away from traditionally (but in my view now only nominally) Left wing political parties. My perspective was always focused on Britain/Europe but the Trump election made me interested in the US, too. I read J.D. Vance's book,
Hillbilly Elegy, alongside, albeit more polemical stuff like Mick Hume's
Revolting, which lead me to make real connections between what was going on in the US, with Trump, and what I saw happening here, with Brexit. As someone who considers themselves 'of the Left' who voted for Brexit against the EU, and (had I ben eligible) would've probably voted for Trump over Hillary (at least in hindsight) that interests me.