Considering the author, not really. Both that and the particular ideological bent seem quite par for the course.
But even with that, this part still made me laugh out loud:
> When even Barack Obama, the poet laureate of identity politics, is moved to issue a message to the faithful, hinting that that they could be tipping their hand on all of this—saying during a speech he delivered in South Africa that a culture is at a dead end when it decides someone has no “standing to speak” if he is a white man
Like, on what planet is this a line anyone can say with a straight face? A big part of Obama's broad appeal—for which he was criticized almost as intensely by identity politics activists as his center-right economics were by economic progressives—was avoiding narrow identity politics. If you had to pick a recent leading figure in the Democratic Party to decribe as the “poet laureate of identity politics” (a term which in any case better applies to one of the thought leaders in that movement than any politician), it would have to be Hillary Clinton. Obama cautioning against going overboard with identity politics is decidedly not some surprising sign that things have recently gone far off the tracks, it's what Obama has always done.
The only basis I can see for this labelling is that it follows along with a lot of the racist lies told about Obama that went into high gear when we was nominated and higher gear when he was elected.
I wonder if you read every think piece so uncharitably, or just the ones that have the absolute gall to disagree with your worldview.
- The more people eschew identity politics, the more uncertain is the future of any political party (left or right) that builds its platform on it. That seems self evident.
- There is a significant, and possibly growing, number of people who eschew identity politics. No statistics are presented to support this, but considering the left's "It's Her Turn!" rhetoric failed to hold enough water to put "Her" in office, and actively turned some people against her, I don't think it's such an outrageous notion.
- Peterson is one of the driving forces behind the possible growth of the anti-identity-politics crowd. If you want numbers, just look at the statistics on Peterson's YouTube channel. Agree with him or not, his popularity is undeniable.
Pick apart those points if you wish. But calling the author a liar by pointing out that an image of a person folding laundry doesn't refer to a specific, literal person (you don't say?) is pure sophistry.
Seriously? From the article:
> All across the country, there are people as repelled by the current White House as they are by the countless and increasingly baroque expressions of identity politics that dominate so much of the culture. These are people who aren’t looking for an ideology; they are looking for ideas. And many of them are getting much better at discerning the good from the bad. The Democratic Party reviles them at its peril; the Republican Party takes them for granted in folly.
Were you expecting the article to use my exact wording?
I won't bother defining identity politics for you because you clearly know what it is and how it relates to voting blocs.
It's obvious that you're only interested in derailing the discussion with endless pedantry, so have a nice day.
It explicitly addresses right-wing identity politics briefly, but mostly to note that one particular repulsive group practicing of those politics rejected Peterson as a kind of validation of Peterson through combination of guilt by association and affirming the consequent, and secondarily to further discredit left-wing identity politics by simple guilt by association.
They did not make waves; they did not confront the students who were raging about cultural appropriation and violent speech; in fact, they forged close friendships with many of them. These people sound... hypothetcal, to be as kind as possible.
What they were getting from these lectures and discussions... perhaps the only sustained argument against identity politics they had heard in their lives. Perhaps? Yeah probably not though, and it's disingenuous to throw that in there with nothing to back it up.
That might seem like a small thing, but it’s not. With identity politics off the table, it was possible to talk about all kinds of things—religion, philosophy, history, myth—in a different way. They could have a direct experience with ideas, not one mediated by ideology. Pure bullshit. At best they would be switching one ideology for another. A very old mistake is to assume that you don't have a limited perspective and can see things with an "objective" God's-eye view.
campus free-speech zones where it could be monitored, shouted down, and reported to the appropriate authorities I'm not necessarily saying this doesn't happen, but putting it this way makes it sound like a big problem when it's just not that common.
As with Peterson’s podcasts and videos, the audience is made up of people who are busy with their lives—folding laundry, driving commercial trucks on long hauls, sitting in traffic from cubicle to home, exercising. More fiction.
The left has an obvious and pressing need to unperson him I'm sure that's not what that word means.
There are plenty of reasons for individual readers to dislike Jordan Peterson. The following paragraph is a convenient little bundle of straw men.
And in all this, not a single reason given why identity politics is bad or even what it is.