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Comment by moomin | Hacker News Reader

Did you actually read it, though? He says "there is nothing wrong with identity politics as such; it is a natural and inevitable response to injustice. But the tendency of identity politics to focus on cultural issues has diverted energy and attention away from serious thinking on the part of progressives about how to reverse the 30-year trend in most liberal democracies toward greater socioeconomic inequality."

> But the tendency of identity politics to focus on cultural issues has diverted energy and attention away from serious thinking on the part of progressives about how to reverse the 30-year trend in most liberal democracies toward greater socioeconomic inequality.

This is demonstrably untrue though. There's no conspiracy, intersectionality is growing, because it's a useful framework for finding similarity and solidarity across boundaries that used to be sharper like race, language, disability, religion.

The claim makes no sense, this is not how attention works. If more people are thinking and talking about something there will be more energy and attention on it for that time, not less.

That's really not what it says. The essay is very explicit about calling Trumpism a form of white identity politics.

(That's why the title is terrible: It dissuades anyone left of Joe Biden from reading.)

Trumpism is white identity politics. That Trump's base is rural white voters who feel alienated and disenfranchised by the loss of white demographic majority and the encroachment of multiculturalism into their communities is a thesis they themselves have put forth. This isn't even controversial, the relationship between Trumpist populism and the alt-right/white supremacist communities has been thoroughly discussed and well documented at this point.

Note that the presence of non-white Trump supporters doesn't invalidate the premise. No one is claiming Trumpism is only and exclusively white identity politics, but that is certainly a core motivating factor behind the movement.

- “ Trumpism is white identity politics” - What happens if you replace the word “white” with say non-college educated working people?

> non-college educated working people?

Lots of Hispanics and Blacks in that group, who surprisingly aren't that keen on Trump

Hispanics are not a homogenous group like you portray them to be. For example Republicans won Hispanics in Virginia this year [1]. There is a balance between more conservative leaning Hispanics from Central/South America, wealthier 3rd+ generation Hispanics who lean conservative, and more liberal recent Mexican demographics. All evidence from the past 2 elections in 2020 and 2021 indicate that Hispanics as a whole are shifting towards the GOP (even if Democrats currently have a solid majority among Hispanics as a whole).

[1]: https://www.politico.com/news/2021/11/04/latino-poll-virgini...

for democrats blacks or hispanics are like a hivemind. and for the ones that publicly state they are republican, they will call them uncle tom and ostracise them. this is the real racism ive seen in usa more so than the white identitarian politics

Not entirely true. Larger percentage of Hispanics and Blacks voted for Trump than any other republican presidential candidate.

Trump got 30% of the Latino vote in 2020, more than republicans get historically.

so you agree that most are not keen

That's still a huge disparity.

From my point of view identity politics is just standard issue divide and conquer Marxism. This ideology is meant to split people and nations into oppressor and oppressed categories with the sole purpose to facilitate utopian revolution(s).

What? Precisely the opposite, Marx thought the only fundamental differences were class differences. Does "proletarians of the world, unite!" seem like a nationalist/identitarian slogan?

Not “unite”, unite in fight against oppression. Unite against your countrymen, the opposite of nationalism. Once proletariat in developed countries was deemed unsuitable as engine for revolution new ideologies aimed at urban blacks and college students were developed.

This is the "frankfurt school tried to invent a new communism" conspiracy theory. In actuality, "identity politics" is a big bracket of civil rights issues, some applications of which are good and some of which (the obvious example being cancel culture) are bad. But the whole point is to try to move towards an egalitarian society for queer, trans, ethnic, female etc people who have historically had the short end of the stick in the West in various different ways. The whole "if you're white then you're an oppressor" angle is a gross misapplication of the theory by people who don't understand the difference between individual and systemic effects.

- “ This is the "frankfurt school tried to invent a new communism" conspiracy theory” - I am sure I could google exact quotes from I think Marcuse that states the opposite. Maybe his utopia wasn’t called communism, does it make any difference? Having said that, what I find more interesting is how Marxism is the only theory adopted by all of western humanities, because it is the only theory that defines what social progress should look like. I feel we desperately need some alternative view of what progress is, because what we use now clearly isn’t working

Marxism isn't even an ideology though - Marx didn't concretely define what socialism and communism would look like outside of "collective control of the means of production", which really just means "factories are used for public rather than private benefit" (oversimplified but that's the gist). There's so many flavours of leftism that are completely mutually incompatible.

There are also alternatives positions: anarchism of many flavours, the singularity people (post-scarity ideology, effectively - I like Manna [1] for a practical example - it's functionally equivalent to "fully automated luxury communism"), the degrowthers, the urbanists, the social democrats, the solarpunk types, probably a bunch of others I've left out. There's no limit to the number of futures being imagined on the left. There's lots of future-imagining on the right too, but the qualifying trait of the right is that their future is the same as the past.

If you mean that western humanities have adopted Marxism as in the Soviet or Maoist visions of Marx - they haven't, by and large. They're mostly onto critical theory now, which is really interesting because it's a systems analysis of societal structures. Marx did a systems analysis of capital, so many critical theorists are also Marxists, but that's about as far as it goes in terms of their direct relation.

As far as "not working" goes - trade unionism brought us many workers' rights, the 40 hour work week, and is the only thing big businesses are really afraid of. Marxism-Leninism was a massive failure, but the anarchists called that one in the 1920s.

[1] https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

> This is the "frankfurt school tried to invent a new communism" conspiracy theory.

Who said anything about the Frankfurt School? Mao Zedong quite literally tried to invent a new communism, and his Mao Zedong Thought was subverted by Lin Biao and the criminal Gang of Four to launch the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution", which called on educated youth to "destroy everything that's old and bourgeois and counter-revolutionary" in Chinese culture and society. These ideas were quite impactful among Western lefist radicals in the late-1960s and 1970s, and a zombie version of that Western-Maoist ideology is what survives today as "wokeness".

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