Posts Tagged ‘identity politics’

I went on the Washington DC Women’s March. It wasn’t pointless

25/01/2017, 07:37:02 AM

by Samuel Dale

I’m not really one for marching or protests but last Saturday I made an exception and joined the Women’s march in Washington DC.

I have always thought street protests were basically pointless and potentially even counter-productive by hardening views on both sides.

I also felt slightly embarrassed about it. As though marching was a slightly vulgar activity as opposed to writing raging polemics or voting.

I attended my first ever proper protest on 9 November in Manhattan after Trump’s election but felt like it was pointless. I left after five minutes.

Protesting a newly elected president seems particularly futile and possibly even makes me a sore loser.
I’m also concerned about the growth of divisive identity politics and think the Women’s March should have been the more inclusive People’s March.

Women’s issues were a key part but really it was a carnival of anti-Trump issues from climate change to trade polices.

And the protest was also full of the usual collection of fruitcakes from extreme socialist parties to extreme identity politics and overly aggressive signs, costumes and chants. There were thousands of people I would rather not be associated with, although that is the nature of a wide coalition.

In some ways it was hundreds of thousands of angry “snowflakes” who were “virtue signalling” our views in the parlance of today’s sneering right.

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Identity politics and snobbery are destroying liberalism

11/11/2016, 04:57:20 PM

by Samuel Dale

On Wednesday I marched down Broadway in Manhattan to protest Donald Trump’s election.
Thousands of millennials walked in the rain while chanting ‘Not my president’, ‘pussies grab back’ and ‘end rape culture’. I lasted two minutes before walking off in despondence.

This was the complete embodiment of the failure of American liberalism. An impotent march in a bastion of liberalism shouting about fringe issues among ourselves. Completely and utterly pointless. Sixty million people had just voted for Trump.

The American left is in the worst shape in the history of the American Union.

Barack Obama will leave a presidency, Congress, more than 30 state governorships and many Supreme Court picks in Republican hands.

His entire domestic policy agenda can and will be quickly dismantled from Obamacare to tax and financial reform.

After painstaking years rebuilding US reputation abroad, it has been shattered by the election of an unhinged bigot.

It is a dreadful legacy and he must own his failure.

It is not just America. Liberalism is clearly in crisis around the world from Brexit to Le Pen and Orban. Here are three reasons why.

Firstly, the toxic failure of identity politics. The Hillary Clinton campaign began with a colourful mosaic of American life in April 2015.

Black, brown, gay, Muslim, Latino, female. The new American progressive coalition.

For 18 months, Clinton signalled this was the future. If you were a white man then you were the past and didn’t belong in her American Dream.

And it wasn’t subtle either. Ramming it down their throats in advert after advert.

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Ten hard truths for Labour

23/07/2015, 05:28:13 PM

Following Tristram Hunt’s call for “a summer of hard truths” Labour Uncut is running a short series laying them out. After that bombshell poll, here are some about the party itself from Rob Marchant.

1. The Labour Party has not merely just lost an election after five years of drift; it has been getting worse since. It has now fallen deep into an existential crisis of purpose, with a large portion of its membership worryingly in denial about what the British public will actually vote for.

2. The current leadership election is symptomatic of that crisis. Like in the early 80s with Healey and Benn, many in the party are no longer expecting to get the best candidate, merely looking to avoid a disastrous one.

3. For those who believe Liz Kendall was over-egging the pudding in saying that Labour has “no God-given right to exist”, and that it has earned a permanent place in the British Top Two of political parties, some reading about the Liberal Party in the 1920s is required.

4. A Corbyn win would immediately present such an existential threat to the party. In short, the situation is far worse than the leftward drift that led to the Foot years, because (a) the country has moved right since then and hence less sympathetic, (b) Foot was a principled man who did not apologise for fanatics and (c) we hadn’t just been wiped out in our Scottish heartlands just before he was elected.

5. Labour needs to wake up and realise that Unite already represents an existential threat to it and does not have the party’s best interests at heart. It will at some point destroy itself through its increasing irrelevance to both Labour and its own members, but it could well take Labour down with it. It must not be allowed to.

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