On the left, appeals to identity and structural oppression have become increasingly mainstream, while on the right, criticisms of these appeals have become similarly popular.
Harris suggests that this is the primary political division going forward, and this places the Intellectual Dark Web squarely on the right. He says it like it’s a bad thing.
Any chance we could structurally oppress people who appeal to identity?
On the left, appeals to identity and structural oppression have become increasingly mainstream, while on the right, criticisms of these appeals have become similarly popular.
I would have agreed a lot more with this analysis in 2012 but not after Trump 2016. Please roll back the tapes and listen to the campaign speeches that focus 50% of the time on illegal immigration and bad trade deals. And these bad trades that outsource was completely the fault of the Clintons and the Government not the private sector.
Because the reality in 2019 is the groups of people that going to struggle the most are the white working classes not urban minorities.
(Otherwise IDW reads like Ted talks that complain minority problems.)
To add this point, remember Trump called Rubio “Mark Zuckerberg’s Personal Senator” in the Primary campaign because Rubio high support for ‘tech employers to have access to more H-1B visas’
And most of the Paloconservatives (led by Pat Buchanan) are very much against Tech Company diversity.
With respect to why Reps like the IDW folk, Harris seems correct:
when Rubin and Shapiro get together to do a show, are they bridging the political divide between left and right in order to find common ground, despite disagreeing on fundamental issues, or rather, are they simply setting aside their disagreements on things like gay marriage and abortion in order to focus on what truly matters to them politically: defeating the new left? I find the second description far more convincing, and indeed, it seems to me to apply to virtually all the IDW members.
Reps are looking for intellectuals who are against the PC-Klan, the twitter mob eLynchings, and the demand that trans guy-girls play, and win, in girl sports. The “new left” that Harris implicitly likes is full of false ideas. The IDW has liberals against those false ideas. So they’re being ex-communicated from the “liberal” Dem platforms.
See also Rod Dreher of The Benedict Option
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/bethany-surrenders-religious-liberty-christian-dalits/
Christian agencies are being forced/ pressured to conform to the LGBT agendas.
BYU was excluded from a Classics meeting because of “fear” of the LBGT folk.
The dominant Dems are actively trying to make Christians inferiors.
Oh for petes sake.
Y’know, the thing is that white evangelicals are inferior human beings in many cases.
“In a 2011 poll from PRRI and the Religion News Service, 60% of white evangelicals surveyed said that a public official who “commits an immoral act in their personal life” cannot still “behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life.”
But in October 2016, right after The Washington Post published an “Access Hollywood” recording of Trump making lewd comments about sexual assault, the number of white evangelicals who weren’t willing to give politicians a pass for immoral behavior dropped to 20%. On the other hand, 72% of the religious group claimed an elected official who commits an immoral act in their personal life can still behave ethically in their professional life, according to a PRRI and Brookings Institution poll conducted at the time.
Campbell and Layman used 2018 post-midterm election data from the CCES, a nationally representative study, to see how white evangelicals felt about the question today. Their research was previously reported in The Washington Post.
“Our motivation was to see if anything had changed since 2016, since that poll was done in the immediate aftermath of the ‘Access Hollywood’ tape,” Campbell told HuffPost. “It might have been the case that, as time passes, opinion would shift back to what we saw in 2011.”
But that’s not what happened. In fact, the CCES found that white evangelicals were even less likely in late 2018 to connect politicians’ private and public lives in this way. Only 16.5% said they believed privately immoral behavior translates to unethical professional conduct.”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/white-evangelicals-trump-morality_n_5cc20d6de4b031dc07efb940
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/alberta-a-cautionary-tale-bernie-sanders/
Alberta, Canada, a very conservative place. Voted in a socialist; just now voted them out after one term.
The idea that fiscal policy concerns would drive voters more than emotional concerns was a gross miscalculation, and a generally conservative group of people was willing to forsake that because of anger, a desire to see things fundamentally shaken up, and frustration at the perceived out of touch nature of our elites.
Strong confirmation that Uri Harris is more relevantly correct, because it’s more emotional, than Sam’s list of positions. Rod is the leader on writing about this paradigm shift into a post-Christian OECD world.
are they simply setting aside their disagreements on things like gay marriage and abortion in order to focus on what truly matters to them politically: defeating the new left?
Every significant political movement works that way. The evangelical right and the financial right never had much in common except for a grudge against godless communism, and white union workers never had much common interest with inner-city African-Americans although both have long been key parts of the Democratic coalition. There are similar faultlines on the left, which is why they have concepts like TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminist).
Sure, but you hope to have some kind of unifying vision behind it all.
Evangelicals and capital never had a ton in common, but they emphasized personal responsibility as a kind of overarching narrative.
White union workers and inner city Africans don’t have much in common, but the Old Left kept it all under the banner of class struggle and the rights and dignity of the working man.
What is the narrative holding the New Left together? It seems to be Sailer’s KKKrazy Glue. That is whatever your beef, the great oppressor did it. It’s spinning out of control. The fact that people who really really want to be on the left can’t find a toehold over even the most minor deviations from orthodoxy is a sign of that, but I think it’s just an inherent feature of the KKKrazy narrative.
Keep thinking that white union workers vote democratic. Been changing since the Civil Rights Act was passed.
” In one formulation of the latter, union members, we have data from exit polling. In union households (that is, households in which someone was a union member), Trump trailed Hillary Clinton by only 8 points, a substantial improvement from how Mitt Romney did in 2012.
In fact, it was the best margin for a Republican since … 1984, the election that gave Reagan his second term.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/10/donald-trump-got-reagan-like-support-from-union-households/?utm_term=.6d4fa3798474
So in a world where 60% of whites vote R, white union households favored Hillary by 8 points and its the best R showing in years?
Yeah, solid republican constituency there.
“During the research I started noticing some weird stuff about this supposedly hateful IDW group of Harris, Weinstein, Rubin, and Shapiro. Namely, they’re all Jewish.”
Hmm.
Culturally, many Jewish people (certainly my family, including my Talmudic scholar brother) love debate (are we still allowed to say that?) more than many other cultures (my observation from a mixed marriage). Not just as a way to learn/persuade, but for fun! A parlor game of reading, reasoning, speaking.
Is it possible that the IDW key actors object to the Left’s shutdown of debate in part for a less “noble” reason….which is a group subtracting something fun, like alcohol?
I think there is something to this. These are all very high verbal IQ people who make a living in this sphere essentially getting their wings clipped by a new orthodoxy. You don’t need to be particularly skilled at argument to drone on about oppression.
Paraguay, the happiest country in the world, provides a useful lesson on a way forward for a United States locked in misery and hate. The people there elect a socialist one term, a capitalist the next, without any of the trauma you see in the USA. Of course, unlike the USA, the have something of a professional news media and are not burdened with the clown show news afflicting the USA. But more importantly the country is 95 percent mestizo. This is because, with great wisdom and foresight, in 1814, the leader of the newly independent nation issued a proclamation banning whites from marrying each other. http://www.tierraviva.org.py/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Digesto_Normativo_sobre_Pueblos_Indigenas_en_el_Paraguay_1811-20031.pdf It would be a simple thing for the USA to amend its constitution to similarly end the generational recreation of hate and grievance community populations. Simply ban procreation between members of the same identity hate groups, ie no sex between a white man and a white woman, black man and black woman, Hispanics, Asians, Alaska Natives and Native Americans… This would be a very small price to pay, indeed the very least we should do, to end the curse of structural racism that has so horribly crippled the USA.
Progressivism is a closed loop orthodox system. It only allows as few unprincipled exceptions as it has to at a given moment. Due to demographics it no longer needs to allow as many exceptions. Eventually, all politics will be progressivism vs anyone who isn’t progressive.
That sounds kind of Soviet.
Bioleninism is a natural evolution from Leninism. Much stronger stuff.
I had previously read Uri Harris’ Quillette article, and remain unconvinced. His point was (is) that the IDW is ‘conservative’ or ‘right wing’ despite their (or the majority of their) views on things like abortion or same-sex marriage being “liberal.” Harris opined that politics have ‘realigned’ such that identity politics, and not those other issues, are the new left-right divide.
But I would object to the idea of a ‘realignment’ in that it implies that the older issues have become unimportant. They haven’t: liberals have not become more welcoming of (say) pro-life or ‘traditional marriage’ views. Rather, they have won on those issues so completely that they can push on to other things. It’s not a realignment so much as pushing further on the spectrum such that the terrain occupied by IDW–which would have been marked ‘moderate liberal’ twenty years ago, is not deemed on the right. Certainly I would never have thought in the ‘oughts that Sam Harris, pride of the New Atheists, would end up on the ‘right,”–and it isn’t Sam Harris who has changed.
Mike–you’re right that some people and cultures (on net) love debate more than others. But I would think those people and cultures have contributed disproportionately to scientific and other advancement. A world where debate is shut down will be a more stagnant world.
Correction–“not deemed on the right” should be “now deemed on the right.” The point is that most of the IDW would have been classed as among the left–by themselves and others–not so long ago.
I am lost, need a primer.
I do largely agree that the IDW is a loose confederation of thinkers whose main commonality is a rejection of the new left. I’m a bit boggled when Harris indicates that what “truly matters” to the IDW is defeating the new left, and in the next paragraph says that “it needs to open itself up to new left people and ideas.” So it needs to do exactly the opposite of the thing that truly matters to it?
By essentially handwaving away everyone to the right of the IDW – and to some degree to the (hard labor) left of the mainstream – Harris has made the IDW the true and only right-wing camp.
He doesn’t satisfyingly distinguish between descriptive (IDW, for formally educated people living in major blue tribe cities like me, is just a reactionary online force in a world wherein political economy and god don’t matter anymore) and prescriptive (that anyone of this ought to be considered the end of the discussion, especially if you’re worldly and historically informed about political philosophy).
What the IDW folks have in common is agreement on the importance of countering the crazy, harmful, and false over-extensions of progressive (I.e., leftist, egalitarian absolutist) ideology. That certainly makes them counter-new-left, but there is no cohesive, coherent ‘right’ movement or stable alliance at the moment, just a bunch of individuals and groups opposed to different aspects of progressivism for different reasons, including plenty of old-left liberals who can’t stand to be lumped in with conservatives or any other anti-progressive groups.
I think the IDW is united by the following features:
* Free speech as a fundamental value. This frequently comes into conflict with the new left which regards some speech as an unconscionable assault on human dignity.
* Truth seeking, including empiricism, as a fundamental value. This frequently comes into conflict with the new left which regards (some) science as a politically heretical. Major areas of conflict include IQ differences among groups, biological sex differences in behavior, and the extent to which Islamic and Chinese cultures are compatible with our own.
* A realist, even deconstructionist, take on equality. I think IDW types mostly agree that people should be considered alike in human dignity and equal in the eyes of the law*, but are generally skeptical of claims that a functioning society could be much more egalitarian than the one we have now.
Aside from those commonalities, IDW types have a variety of other ideas and interests. Sam Harris has his atheism, Jordan Peterson tries to create meaning for young men, etc.
*Within the usual caveats. One’s situation under the law can change upon election to office, conviction of a crime, getting a driver’s license, etc. but such changes should be as just as possible.