> I don't think the left thinks of privilege solely as racial or gender privilege.

The left doesn't thing of privilege as even primarily racial or gender privilege. (The people that do are centrists; the actual left centers class privilege, though there are leftists who see race/gender issues as important secondary/connected issues to class issues.)

You have it exactly backwards. Centrists center class privilege while leftists center race/gender/etc privilege. For example, when discussing racial inequality, leftists will tend to argue “disparity thus discrimination” while centrists (and moderates of all stripes, really) will argue that the mechanism is classist but it manifests as a disparity because the class distributions aren’t uniform across races.

I certainly agree that historically leftists were very concerned about class, but that hasn’t been the popular analysis among American leftists for a decade.

Eh, I think he's right. On the ground, the "centrists" are mostly the Clinton/Obama wing of the party who are very fluent in identity issues and the "leftists" are mostly the Sanders wing of the party who are more focused on economics.

Maybe ironically, as one of them I wouldn't say "centrists" center anything. We tend to see the whole thing as a milieu. Not that economic issues aren't super important, but there's no serious way to analyze the US without taking both economic and identity issues into account.

Agreed that centrists (or more precisely, "moderate Democrats") are more aligned to Clinton/Obama wing, but the idea that Clinton/Obama are the identitarians rather than the progressive wing (Warren, AOC, Pressley, Tlaib, Omar, etc) is beyond belief. Clinton and Obama might've capitalized on their identities in pandering to the progressive wing, but that's the point: the identity stuff is coming from the far left side of the party which is absolutely breathless about identity stuff (Sanders here is the exception to the rule). On more than one occasion, Obama explicitly cautioned against left wing identity extremism while "The Squad" cheerleaded the BLM riots. Do you think Warren, AOC, Omar, etc are really "moderate Democrats" or do you disagree that they are committed identitarians?

> Agreed that centrists (or more precisely, “moderate Democrats”) are more aligned to Clinton/Obama wing, but the idea that Clinton/Obama are the identitarians rather than the progressive wing (Warren, AOC, Pressley, Tlaib, Omar, etc) is beyond belief.

> Clinton and Obama might’ve capitalized on their identities in pandering to the progressive wing

If you look at where Hillary Clinton’s support was vs. Bernie’s , Bernie’s was on the economic left, Clinton’s was with all the identity-politics factions. (Not just what is predictable by “exploiting her identity” as straigh cisgender heterosexual white woman.)

It can be confusing, because there is also a leftist/progressive identity politics which is highly intersectional and also highly integrated with class politics, but the dominant neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party has long been deeply dependent on the very different bourgeois identity politics which rejects the class struggle, as what distinguishes them from the more moderate fringes of the Republican Right (this was especially true during the period of the neoliberal consensus, less so since Trump replaced corporate capitalism with a side order of culture war social politics to energize the base with White nationalist culture war populism as the center of the Republican Party.)

> Do you think Warren, AOC, Omar, etc are really “moderate Democrats” or do you disagree that they are committed identitarians?

I think all of them (even Warren, who remains overtly pro-capitalist and is more centrist than the others) center economic/class issues more than identity politics, and all but Warren do so fairly explicitly because the kind of identity politics they engage in are precisely the progressive/left kind, not the bourgeios kind.

I guess I disagree with your taxonomy, and I think The Squad has wrestled with being progressives while also being unwilling to let identity issues go. I'm very pro-Warren, but I think if you look at the policies pushed not just by her but by the other women you named, you'll find a lot of economic and climate policy (I mean Green New Deal, come on).

The right-wing propaganda machine is very hard on ambitious women (as a former Hillary staffer I can attest to this), and it's definitely part of the plan to smear these folks in particular. I think we should be asking why there's a concerted, well-funded messaging effort against these women and not against people saying similar things like Hakeem Jeffries or Bernie Sanders. My personal view is that it's raw misogyny. And, frankly, I think you're repeating a lot of it here. In particular your use of the word "cheerleaded" is a pretty gendered criticism.

We're all misogynists, we're all racists, we're all homophobes, because of the culture we grew up in. But by introspecting on this, we're able to fight against it and create a fairer society.

The right has plenty of criticism for Sanders but they don’t criticize him for being an identitarian because he largely isn’t. There’s nothing wrong with gendered language, but that wasn’t how I was using “cheerleading” and if we want to lob accusations it seems pretty sexist to imply that men oughtn’t be cheerleaders. (: Anyway, I reject most identity doctrine, including that we are all racist, sexist, etc.

> The right has plenty of criticism for Sanders but they don’t criticize him for being an identitarian because he largely isn’t.

It feels like you missed Sanders' entire campaign then [0] [1] [2].

The main differences between Warren and Sanders is that Warren's policies are better, and Sanders is a Jewish man (I feel like potentially being our first Jewish president didn't get enough play, but it would have been a powerful moment for the US and humanity as a whole).

> it seems pretty sexist to imply that men oughtn’t be cheerleaders

If you use phrases structured as "[stereotype] [people the stereotype is used against]", that's a stereotype. If your excuse is that the stereotype isn't absolute, it's a tacit admission that you used a stereotype against people. Own it or don't, up to you.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3mvbxeA1UA

[1]: https://feelthebern.org/bernie-sanders-on-racial-justice/

[2]: https://feelthebern.org/bernie-sanders-on-womens-rights/

The right has plenty of criticism for Sanders but they don’t criticize him for being an identitarian because he largely isn’t. There’s nothing wrong with gendered language, but that wasn’t how I was using “cheerleading” and if we want to lob accusations it seems pretty sexist to imply that men oughtn’t be cheerleaders.

Weird. I used the edit button to add a sentence and HN converted it into a second comment.

Just an FYI, you and the person that's responding to you are talking about the same people but use two different words for them. A real leftist ideological group doesn't exist in the US; progressives are not that for certain. To the right, however, a leftist is a US progressive.

Progressives and leftists are approximately the same thing in US politics, not just among the right (the American right doesn’t even distinguish between liberals and progressives—it just calls everyone left of center “liberals”).

Not at all; talk to any global leftist and they'll tell you US progressive policy and values don't match up with theirs at all.

Anecdotally, I've known these kinds of folks for a while through FOSS and IRC. I'm also dating an actual leftist.

You’re observing that political labels vary semantically between political systems. “liberal” in the UK has a different meaning than in the US. Similarly, “leftist” means something different in an American context than it does in your “global” context (although I suspect “global” here is really only accurate for Europe, but that’s a debate for another day).

> “liberal” in the UK has a different meaning than in the US.

Liberal doesn't have any consistent meaning in the US. (Like, nearly every point on the spectrum uses it differently

> Similarly, “leftist” means something different in an American context than it does in your “global” context

Not particularly. Except in the propaganda of the American Right, where it is one of a pile of indistinct labels like Marxist, liberal, Communist, woke, critical race theory, etc., applied indiscriminately to everything they disagree with.

It's a word salad all around. Folks on the US left exhibit similar symptoms when talking about the right. I responded initially because I think distinctualizing US progressives and global progressives is important. I don't want to see US progressives, their policy, or their values gain more traction; I am on board for a party that reflects global progressivism, it's policies, and it's values.

It does seem like there's a split on this thread about

- whether the US progressives relate to global progressives in any way except by name

- how the right views the political spectrum by name of everything to the left of it

> It's a word salad all around.

Exactly.

> Folks on the US left exhibit similar symptoms when talking about the right.

Yeah, for a good while there, everyone who wasn't a staunch progressive was described as uniformly "far-right".

> I responded initially because I think distinctualizing US progressives and global progressives is important. I don't want to see US progressives, their policy, or their values gain more traction; I am on board for a party that reflects global progressivism, it's policies, and it's values.

I disagree with your politics, but I agree on the importance of this distinction.

> whether the US progressives relate to global progressives in any way except by name

I think US progressives are roughly "global progressives" plus identity stuff. Some US progressives care more about identity than economics, but there aren't any US progressives who flat-out reject left-wing economics even if they don't care as much about it, and there are relatively few US progressives who flat-out reject left-wing identity doctrine even if they don't think it's terribly important (e.g., Sanders).

> how the right views the political spectrum by name of everything to the left of it

The right generally doesn't distinguish between different "bands" (in the sense of a frequency band in a frequency spectrum) on the left of the spectrum any more than the left distinguishes between different "bands" on the right of the spectrum. Some right-wingers use "leftist" for everyone left of center and others use "liberal" for left-of-center, but in both cases they're using a single term for "left-of-center" and thus failing to distinguish. You see the same thing with people on the left referring to the right homogeneously as "conservative" or "right-wing" or "far-right". Few on either side recognize the nuanced beliefs on the other side.

imo, being so caught up in identity is what makes US progressives so toxic. Once you go deep into identity it becomes an abstraction that replaces the root cause, which is class distinctions. Identity is useful in solving specific problems, like systemic racism, but US progressives are practically blind to class problems which makes them especially problematic when they can't recognize how rural areas have class overlaps and alienate those constituents and problems. Hence, US progressives are so volatile and wildly different from the global landscape. Whether or not you believe the basis of global progressivism starts with class distinctions or not and how the US perspective based on identity erodes that is likely where we differ. I'll admit that my bias doesn't favor US progressives because I belong to an identity that's frequently ignored, if not mocked in various ways, by progressives (I'm a vet) and there's little in the way of a future reckoning for that.

I agree with the last paragraph. Anyone that does not understand the various striations of politics but attempts to speak on broad groups negatively without that understanding does immeasurable damage to discourse.

> Whether or not you believe the basis of global progressivism starts with class distinctions or not and how the US perspective based on identity erodes that is likely where we differ.

I think we agree here. Most "progressives" outside of the US are a lot more likely to focus on class distinctions while US progressives are preoccupied by identity.

> A real leftist ideological group doesn't exist in the US

Yes, it does.

Because of the electoral system’s strong pressure to duopoly, there isn’t a substantial real leftist party in the US, but there is a real leftist ideological group.

> progressives are not that for certain

US progressives overlap with, but are not the same as, the left.

> To the right, however, a leftist is a US progressive.

To the American Right, a leftist is a Democrat, including a center -right neoliberal corporate capitalist democrat.

This is basically correct, apart from the “center-right neoliberal corporate capitalist” babble. :)

I disagree from extensive experience. Unadorned, “privilege” refers to some identity privilege 99% of the time. For example, “check your privilege” virtually always refers to some identity privilege.

Moreover, the salient point wasn’t “the left doesn’t believe in wealth privilege” as much as “no one disputes wealth privilege and thus Henderson isn’t being hypocritical here as you imply”.

I think the left gets caricatured heavily by the right (there's a "both sides" counterargument here, but my view is that the right is very easy to caricature because it's mostly absurd, and my arguments are gay marriage, gun laws, climate change, immigration, and fiscal/monetary policy) into an image of a huge Twitter mob canceling people for saying the wrong words and miscounting the number of genders. I'm very unsympathetic to people coming from this view of the left; it feels lazy and motivated entirely by insecurity and animus. Even if it's true, compared with the problems caused by Republican policies (Iraq/Afghanistan wars, gutting of regulatory state and scientific research leading to opioid crisis, deregulation, tax cuts, attacks on unions leading to the total collapse of the middle class, active lobbying against climate science leading to... Armageddon?) it carries no weight.

Or TLDR, yeah sometimes we get carried away on Twitter. But at least we're not roasting the planet.

I agree that the right has a lot of problems and I disagree with them on most issues. I even agree that the problems on the right are worse than those on the left in a certain sense. I also agree that the right-wing view of the left is a caricature like you describe, but I think that caricature is rooted in some truth. For example, while there are other concerns on the left, identity has become a hugely popular issue on the American left in the last decade. To that end, it's disingenuous to portray this as "a right-wing concern" when lots of liberals are concerned about it as well. Moreover, many people (myself included) think that this identity politics stuff is tearing at our social fabric, not only by fostering racial divides, but also because Americans of all stripes are losing trust in institutions which have increasingly rejected aspirational neutrality and objectivity in favor of progressive activism. I don't know how to compare this to certain Republican policies which are more immediately damaging.

> Even if it's true, compared with the problems caused by Republican policies (Iraq/Afghanistan wars, gutting of regulatory state and scientific research leading to opioid crisis, deregulation, tax cuts, attacks on unions leading to the total collapse of the middle class, active lobbying against climate science leading to... Armageddon?) it carries no weight.

I have plenty of bad things to say about Republican policies, but the Iraq/Afghan wars were bipartisan and I don't think deregulation is a clear and universal evil nor are unions an unmitigated good. Agreed that climate inaction is prevalent among Republicans, but I consider Democrats' empty words and gestures (as they pertain to climate) to be just another kind of inaction. Democrats will get bragging rights when they rally around a serious climate pricing policy--if you believe (as I do) that the world is really burning, why don't Democrats offer a budget proposal which reflects that? Why don't they rally around any of the annually-proposed carbon pricing bills? Why did they allow themselves to be completely and wholly fixated on an obviously fake crisis of racist police killings for the better part of the last decade? Why do we allocate so much of our national debate bandwidth to pronouns and bathroom policies if we believe we're veering toward mass extinction?

That said, I think it's super destructive to use Republican behavior (or in many cases, a caricature thereof) to excuse every criticism of Democratic behavior. That's a recipe for racing to the bottom IMO. Instead of responding to "Democrats aren't taking climate seriously enough" with "well, Republicans are worse ergo Democrat climate inaction is fine" it would be great if we could focus on ways to improve Democratic climate policy.

I wrote a lot, which believe it or not I try not to do, so to summarize I'll just say this: your argument, essentially, is that given a stat like "Black Americans represent 12.7% of Americans, but make up between 30-40% of police killings", the people causing the problem are the ones saying it's unacceptable, not those responsible for a system that kills ~3x more Black Americans than White Americans. I find that to be absurd.

---

> identity has become a hugely popular issue on the American left in the last decade

I know we're sparring on this in another thread, but it really gets to me when people dismiss the concerns of Black Americans, LGBTQ Americans, Women, Native Americans, etc. as "identity" issues. It's undeniable that people in these groups have an entirely different, objectively worse experience than straight cis White men. My arguments here are slavery, forced incarceration and sterilization, and genocide, to say nothing of ongoing discrimination and prejudice and institutional problems today. This country hasn't been dealing with "identity" for a decade, it's been dealing with it from before the time its 1st president was a slaver. The idea that this has only been a problem roughly since Obama was president is... the nicest thing I can say here is naive.

> Moreover, many people (myself included) think that this identity politics stuff is tearing at our social fabric, not only by fostering racial divides, but also because Americans of all stripes are losing trust in institutions which have increasingly rejected aspirational neutrality and objectivity in favor of progressive activism.

It's true that there are more voices at the table, voices protesting police violence (a real problem), the wage gap (a real problem), the epidemic of domestic violence and sexual assault (a real problem), mass incarceration (a real problem). Addressing these problems is gonna be pretty hard, and accountability has to be a part of it. That means when White dudes sexually harass women at work, or when White women threaten to bring down state violence against Black birdwatchers minding their own business, or when cops murder people, they're gonna face consequences (hopefully, anyway). It's easy to see how that creates resentment amongst those currently in power: the rules are changing and mostly not in their favor.

So if you think the problem is that people are talking about this stuff, then I guess a reasonable solution is for them to shut up about it. But if you think the problems are the problems themselves, then shutting up is actively harmful. Hence slogans like "silence is violence", etc.

> the Iraq/Afghan wars were bipartisan

Nah, Bush/Cheney lied [0]. A lot.

> I don't think deregulation is a clear and universal evil

Totally agree, for example before Carter deregulated airlines they were a hilarious mess. But like, rolling back EPA standards is an obvious bad idea, unless you're a company that's only profitable by ignoring climate destruction externalities.

I think loss of faith in institutions is less that they're moving in the direction of progressive activism (honestly can't come up with any examples here, regardless my counterexample is SCOTUS) and more that they're blatantly partisan and corrupt: like the widely panned CDC halving of quarantine times right around peak holiday travel time. I think we've been frog boiled so long in corruption we don't even notice it anymore. My partner was listening to NPR the other morning and they had the exchange at the end:

> INSKEEP: Oh, that's right. Trump was not happy with Kemp because Kemp told the truth about the 2020 election. Is it possible, though, that Greene could actually be thrown off the ballot?

> FOWLER: Well, the short answer is no. A federal judge did rule that this complaint process could continue, but it'll be a high bar to meet to remove Greene. Also, remember; the final decision rests with the secretary of state. That's Brad Raffensperger, who's facing a Trump-backed primary challenge next month, too.

Great, public servants not doing their job because of party affiliation. After decades (centuries?) of this, how could Americans not be cynical about public institutions?

> I consider Democrats' empty words and gestures (as they pertain to climate) to be just another kind of inaction

Democrats have tried again and again to get something going, but Republicans continue to block it. And hey guess what, fossil fuel energy companies are huge Republican donors and essentially run many State parties. I'll give you Joe Manchin though, I guess he is technically a Democrat?

Re: carbon pricing, it's a little involved but basically it's very politically unviable: businesses tend to push these costs onto consumers and these kinds of policies can fail under misinformation campaigns [1]. The fossil fuel industry knows this, which is why their lobbyists push it [2], because they know it will never pass, because they're very able to launch an intense misinformation campaign against it.

> if you believe (as I do) that the world is really burning, why don't Democrats offer a budget proposal which reflects that

Because of Republicans (corrupted by the fossil fuel industry) and the filibuster. Remember that one time the Obama administration invested in green energy companies? The right refers to it as the Solyndra scandal, the left refers to it as "the policies that gave us Tesla".

> Why did they allow themselves to be completely and wholly fixated on an obviously fake crisis of racist police killings for the better part of the last decade?

It is extremely not fake. The stats are totally off balance [3]. Black Americans represent 12.7% of Americans, but make up between 30-40% of police killings.

> Why do we allocate so much of our national debate bandwidth to pronouns and bathroom policies if we believe we're veering toward mass extinction?

This is a wedge issue pushed by Republicans to try and get Democrats to defend "icky" trans people in competitive elections. Democrats aren't the ones pushing this. We'd love it if conservatives were just polite and used people's preferred pronouns and stayed out of our private lives (bathrooms, bedrooms, and doctors' offices, for example).

> That said, I think it's super destructive to use Republican behavior (or in many cases, a caricature thereof) to excuse every criticism of Democratic behavior.

Oh I hate whataboutism, but that's not what I'm doing here. You were making an argument about Democrats tearing our country apart with identity politics in the last decade, and I counterargued that identity polities are extremely important, and not new. I'm also assailing a false equivalency between Democrats' identity policies (stipulating they're bad, which they're not) with Republicans'... all other policies. There's not a "both sides" to be had here. The Republican party is bankrupt, policy-wise, and the way they win elections is through wedge issues and fake (Fox) news to get their voters frothed up with rage and resentment. It works, sure, but it's Faustian, and we're seeing the effects of decades of that kind of politics.

[0]: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2016/02/hillary-clinton-...

[1]: https://earth.org/carbon-tax-pros-and-cons/

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5v1Yg6XejyE&t=85s

[3]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...