Last fall, I met former BC NDP MLA Harry Lali for the first time. My friend and campaign manager Tom Ewasiuk introduced us. I didn’t think I would get along with Harry but, whatever our differences, we were men who had been around BC politics too long and both felt like ambassadors from another time.
Our interactions soon became shaped by one of the weirder anecdotes of the NDP’s successful 2017 election campaign. The riding of Columbia River-Revelstoke was one of the handful of seats the NDP had retained in the BC interior, due to high levels of precipitation (until 2013, NDP voting in the rural mainland of BC, outside of Harry’s riding, strongly correlated to annual precipitation levels and overcast days) but it was in play because of the party’s poor fortunes in the rural mainland generally and because the popular incumbent was stepping down. Because a white man was resigning his seat, new party rules made it an “equity mandate” riding, one in which only a person who was either not male, not straight, not able-bodied and/or not white could seek the party’s nomination.
Parenthetically, it is interesting to note that while the BC NDP recognizes gender, race and sexuality as sites of discrimination it does not recognize class. Or rather it does, but in the opposite way. It prohibits poor people from seeking party nominations by slapping on a punitive $5000 vetting fee because, as the party president explained to me, people who can’t easily get hold of $5000 are not serious people.
In any case, the only candidate eligible and willing to seek the nomination was a disabled woman who was unpopular with party members so, at the last minute, a person who appeared to be a straight white man was suddenly vetted as an equity mandate candidate. But the party would not disclose to the media what minority identity he represented. Harry’s and my mind went to the same place: the guy had been induced to claim he slept with other men. Where Harry and I differed was on whether the candidate, whom I rather liked, would have felt duty-bound to engage in some same-sex activity so as to engage “honestly” with the process. My feeling was that if this guy was willing to make the sacrifices he had already lined up for to help the party, what was a little fellatio? Harry disagreed.
The voters were unimpressed and the NDP lost Columbia River-Revelstoke, in part, no doubt because voters were split, as Harry and I were, on the ethical way to approach identity politics in our age.
There is a lot to unpack in this story and I will return to it a few times but now, I’m stepping way back and enlarging the optic because this is the first part of a series I really hope to do a better job of completing than my other article series because I feel that I have no collected my thoughts well enough to make a significant intellectual intervention on the subject of identity.
Liberalism and Progressivism
Liberalism, the philosophical description of the system of relationships that undergird capitalism, has, until recently, enjoyed long-term intellectual hegemony in the most powerful empires that have shaped global history. With few exceptions, most philosophical and political debates in a society like Canada’s have been among different schools of liberal thought. Since the mid nineteenth century, our major debates have been about what kind of liberal society to be, what kind of liberal economy to have, what theory of liberalism will win the day.
Today, neo-Keynesians debate monetarists; progressives debate libertarians; it is only at the edges of these debates that we see other horizons of possibility, and those are not pretty. It now appears that the American religious right, while retaining certain elements of the liberal worldview is now sufficiently divergent in some key areas like epistemology that we can see the emergence of alternatives outside the liberal consensus that has shaped our thought for the past two centuries.
He feels powerless with price tadalafil tablets the situation. The bulk of this market is controlled by Generic variants of tadalafil 100mg. levitra is greatly useful for men suffering from erectile dysfunction issues. In creating these oral and topical formulations, has created a online cialis mastercard surplus of counterfeit, fake and diluted hoodia products. Try to find out a local online community. levitra 100mg But it is precisely because the challenges to liberal hegemony have moved, since 1991, from the political left to the political right, those of us on the left find ourselves under unprecedented pressure to defend the liberal legacy and, indeed, to become part of a permanent locked alliance between leftists and liberals. The name for this alliance is, of course, “progressive.” To be progressive is to identify with a twofold political project:
- to slow the dismantling of the Cold War welfare state and to ensure that new forms of state intervention to ameliorate social problems are piecemeal, non-universal and reliant on partnerships with private corporations and the non-profit sector for delivery. The Affordable Care Act and the post-2015 BC, Ontario and Alberta provincial childcare programs exemplify progressive programs.
- to accelerate and intensify a politics of minority non-economic rights and high-level representation, enforced through piecemeal high-level affirmative action like cabinet, corporate board membership and candidate nomination de facto quotas so that various disadvantaged identity groups can experience “representation” and through changes to social etiquette. Most etiquette changes, like labeling gender-neutral restrooms, prohibiting offensive Hallowe’en costumes, etc. are enforced simply through social pressure and offense politics but a growing number are mandated either by statute or through the pursuit of civil and criminal prosecutions for hate speech and exclusionary behaviour.
The progressive project, then, typically entails increasingly “representative” elites presiding over a system that typically further economically impoverishes and politically marginalizes patronized groups, while, at the same time, building and reinforcing systems of patronage that allow people to benefit from non-material ideas of representation. Black Americans strongly identified with the successes of Barack Obama as US president even though a consequence of this was an increase in white resentment and anti-black racism and the further impoverishment of black relative to white America due to Obama’s lack of political capital needed to defend black gains that slipped away under his watch.
This political formula transcends the liberal order and was probably practiced best not by the US Democratic Party but the Ottoman Empire which created a complex system of self-government known as the milet system that saw every major religious identity group in the empire represented at the elite level and offered some degree of self-government, even if that was inextricable from the legal and economic inferiority non-Muslims on which it depended.
Because of the monstrosity of the forces that have emerged to challenge the progressive project, many on the left, I among them, have often been frightened back into the progressive alliance and find ourselves defending various aspects of liberalism because of our fear of the rising tide of the extreme right or our desire to preserve some cherished aspect of the twentieth-century welfare state.
I am making my second effort at a significant intellectual intervention (since I wrote Age of Authenticity in 2012) because I believe that the time for this politics is behind us. The progressive movement will collapse—and soon. Furthermore, progressive movements’ tolerance for climate nihilism means that continuing to support the broad progressive project will simply serve to alter which political movements preside over frying the planet.
In my last major intervention, I feel as though I wrote something that, while not especially enjoyable to read, had significant descriptive and predictive power in observing the rise of Trump and an understanding of the social forces that created and maintain his movement. This intervention will not be an epistemological one but instead one about identity, and, in particular, the fraught and much abused term “identity politics.” More broadly, it will examine the link between identity that the theory of the self, just as Age of Authenticity examined the relationship between epistemology and the theory of the self.
Early in the Marxist corpus, there was significant interest in the nature of the self and an understanding that, central to the capitalist project, was the creation of a certain kind of self, and atomized, isolated self, defined by its desires and aspirations. If we are to survive, we must create new-non-capitalist selves and that will mean addressing head-on the politics and phenomenology of identity. This means asking simple but very serious questions like “Am I what I do or am I what I like?” “Do I decide if I am white or do other people?” “What, if any, aspects of identity are biologically determined?” “Is there a difference between an identity one aspires to have and the identity one does have?”
Stay tuned for part two.
