In my Sisyphean quest to let neither conservatives nor progressives seize the word “liberal” and distort its meaning into their own, a new ally has emerged. Sadly, the ally is a unduly passionate dolt, but one takes one’s allies where one finds them.
Whatever happened to the grand unifying issues that used to drive the march of progess [sic]? What happened to the universal us, which emphasised [sic] what we had in common? Can’t we all just get along?
Eleanor Penny makes the notion of a “universal us,” of everyone “getting along,” sound kind of childish and silly in a Rodney King sort of way.
But those who want to single out “identity politics” soon run into a problem: all politics is grounded in identity. All politics requires that we build coalitions around a shared picture of reality, a shared image of the future, deeply rooted in our image of ourselves, and what justice or progress might look like. Racial or ethnic background will shape how you experience the criminal justice system. Your gender shapes how you experience work, or how you experience violence. If you’re disabled, you’re more likely to be at the frontline of austerity. These aren’t indulgent departures from real politics – they are rooted in concrete realities of who has power, who has resources, who is exposed to violence and who is sheltered from it. They are cultural frameworks for understanding, organising and indeed changing the world.
First, the “problem” to which she refers isn’t our problem, but the problem born of the myopia of progressive delusion. See things through an identity politics lens and everything is identity politics. Putting the word “all” in italics isn’t an argument and doesn’t make it so. It would be fair to dismiss Penny as a simplistic believer in her own view of life, pushing her word salad rhetoric for the millionth time as if repetition of meaningless jargon will somehow carry the day this time.
Of course, the bad dudes are bad.
This is nothing new. Nationalism is a form of identity politics, crafting a sense of a collective, and then using that image to determine policy priorities: who gets welfare payments, who gets employment priority, who gets bombed. White supremacy is a form of identity politics, too; one which has dominated global politics and class relations for hundreds of years.
But then she finally gets to the crux of the matter.
The collective pearl-clutching over about the embattled state of “western liberal democracy” is a kind of identity politics. It concocts an idea of a shared of universal “progress”, which must be defended at all costs from, well, progressives.
By calling it “pearl-clutching” in order to ridicule “western liberal democracy,” she lets us know that she ain’t buying.
The phrase pearl clutching, which means being shocked by something once-salacious that should now be seen as commonplace, like sex, is ubiquitous on blog posts, especially in media geared towards women. For instance, a recent post on Jezebel called Girl Land author Caitlin Flanagan a “professional pearl clutcher.” Less than two hours later, another Jezebel writer called a sexy Calvin Klein ad “sure to inspire pearl-clutch-y local news stories across the nation.” The feminist website Feministe used the phrase in a blog post about privilege and oppression; another feminist website, Tiger Beatdown, used it to deride a Wall Street Journal writer who was panicking about the subject matter of YA novels. But the phrase isn’t just used in the lady blogosophere: A Washington Post columnist wrote dismissively last week about the “pearl-clutching that hippies’ parents did in the 1960s.” Basically, a writer who discusses pearl-clutching is saying, “I’m too blasé and worldly to be shocked by this.”
How this cry of “pearl-clutching” relates to her complaint is unclear, but that’s pretty much all she’s got to say about why liberalism is identity politics, like nationalism and white supremacy. Because it is.
But her inability to mount a cogent argument, or any argument, in support of her claim is secondary to the only thing of value to be found in this vapid polemic. Liberals are not progressives, and progressive are most assuredly not liberals. Someone else can argue whether nationalism, as a concept, is identity politics, and it seems fairly clear that white supremacy is, even if there are either extremely few, or huge numbers, of white supremacists according to whose definition you use.
But liberals? The folks who want to see due process for everyone, the opportunity for every person to find success and happiness without regard to identity, the people who believe in equality for all, rather than special pleading for the peculiarly fragile who wear their victimhood like a badge of honor. Liberals are the antithesis of identity politics. Where you demand people put your identity first and foremost, liberals refuse to acknowledge it. You are a human being, and are to be given all the rights and privileges enjoyed by every other human being, without suffering any detriment on account of your characteristics.
Progressives can’t argue the point, both because they tend to be particularly poor at persuading anyone not inclined to adopt their delusion, and because they have no argument approaching rationality. But they do have a few things, a hardcore viciousness toward those who won’t succumb to their ideology, academics willing to indoctrinate impressionable youth, whether because they believe or they fear the march of the woke with torches on their classroom, a media determined to advocate rather than report and well-executed ownership of a political party.
The problem for liberals is that the word has been debased by both sides, morphed into meaninglessness and, as Orwell warned, non-existence. as both conservatives and progressives have use it to conflate liberals with progressives.
Penny, despite her inability to explain a point in comprehensible words, is absolutely right about one thing: liberals are not at all progressives, and to progressives, are just as evil as nationalists and white supremacists (which basically covers everyone who isn’t progressive from the progressive point of view). Damn straight. And progressive efforts to shame liberals by putting them into the same category as nationalists and white supremacists isn’t going to work, because liberals will no more support racism and sexism from one side than the other.
A Progressive’s Confession: Liberals Ain’t Us curated from Simple Justice
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