As we've learned in earlier posts in this series, the left began and embraced the anti-reason collectivism of identity politics, using it as a lever by which to grasp power. But as this post points out, the grotesqueries of tribalism work both ways.
Written soon after the Christchurch mosque murders, the post argues that the tribalism of identity politics has been picked up by what passes for the right of the political spectrum -- picked up, and turned into something savage and wholly odious ...
The right adopts the left’s love child
"The [Christchurch murderer] is ideologically on the same side as the
Jihadists: he's moved by the idea that people are essentially parts of
tribes, defined by ancestry & tradition, that are vying to 'replace' or
repress one another. This idea must be opposed in all its forms."
~ Greg Salmieri
IDENTITY POLITICS IS TRIBAL. We are tribalised by others by gender, by race, by sexuality, or by “privilege.” (Or by all of the above!) Our “tribe” is how the progressive left now defines each of us and, if necessary silences us as well.
While this modern tribalism emerged on the left, it has now been fully embraced by the right – in another, but equally destructive form.
The left’s impugning of the white, the middle-class, the so-called privileged was bound to lead to a reaction from those being so labelled. But rather than argue against this flagrantly irrational collectivism on the basis of reason and of rational ethical standards, the reaction of some on the right has instead been to embrace it -- to embrace it on behalf of “whiteness” and “privilege.”
"Proud to be white!" say their T-shirts and bumper-stickers, unaware they're allowing their alleged adversaries to define them.
If the left, as a policy, had adopted so called “reverse racism,” then this new movement, calling themselves the
Alt-Right, was willing to openly adopt its adverse:
real and original racism. "If they're going to call us 'racists'," goes the (non) thinking, "then let's go balls deep."
That in a nutshell is what the Alt-Right represents: the politics of race, reversed. And with it we’re back to the very racism that the right originally opposed. Because the Republican Party, as representative of the Old Right, was formed before the US Civil War to
explicitly oppose black slavery.
“There can be no denial of rights on account of colour” declared Radical Republican leader Charles Sumner when eulogising Lincoln at his burial. This is how the "right" spoke then. Not now. Not any more. In recent times they've been slamming immigrants, spewing anti-semitism, talking about so-called "race realism," and scaremongering about so-called "white genocide."
With this discussion of the Alt-Right, you might notice that we’re also right back to the gunman with whom we began this seven-part series. The “race realism” his tract upholds is a demand that the only realistic racial policy that governments should enforce is separatism. This is the so-called “replacement theory” for which he killed 51 people, the misbegotten notion that white people are being "replaced" by an “invasion” of more fertile coloured immigrants. After this and similarly-motivated massacres in El Paso and in Pittsburgh,
Spiked’s Brendan O’Neill described these animals as “the armed wing of identity politics.”
They are armed. And they are barbarians. But this is identity politics taken to its logical conclusion.
And this -- all of this -- is very far from the reason, individualism and individual rights on which western civilisation was born and grew up (values which the right were once said to embrace). It is simply the violent flip side of the left’s own version of tribalism – a flipping of the
intersectionalist’s diagram with the “strong” tribe on top, and very well armed.
If you can smell Nietzsche hovering around at this point, you would not be mistaken.
THE WORLD WOKE UP to this odious movement after an explicitly
Nazi march in Charlottesville, Virginia, just five years back. But it had been incubating for some time, and was emboldened by the populist revolt of Donald Trump’s election, and his pandering to the movement that had helped put him there. ("Very fine people on both sides," he
famously said when asked.)
But they had been around
much, much longer than that.
The two “sides” exposed themselves four or five years ago in an online “call to arms” over four women of colour in the US House of Representatives, including Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, which was known as “The Squad.” Trump set off another small eruption heard around the world by tweeting that these women should “go home.” His supporters then began unthinkingly chanting “Send them home!” (oblivious to the fact that three of the four women were born in America). In response to this, many supporters of The Squad began reflexively chanting “Racist,” “Racist,” “Racist.” And on Twitter, almost immediately, two hashtags began trending: #IStandWithIlhan and #IStandWithPresTrump – the call going out for both sides to “pick a team.”
Such is the level to which public debate has descended in the United States of America.
OF COURSE, AS SOMEONE who thinks for themselves, one should choose neither “side.” As an independent thinker, one would recognise the implicit tribalism for what it is. As an individualist, you would reject the implicit demand from the drones that you pick a tribe and stick with it, no matter what.
The right's
adoption of this tribalist "identitarian" race-based politics however, in answer to the left's
introduction of identity politics is wrong. Dangerously wrong. Irredeemably wrong. "Crushing the left" by adopting their tactics, strategies, and identity politics is not any kind of "winning" -- it's being captured whole. Most particularly,
killing people in the name of your racial identity is a throwback to a kind of barbarism that should have been, but still hasn't, been buried.
The politics of race is as vile when imposed by the left as it when spat out by the right; it has no place in civilisation.
For folk sympathetic to the Alt-Right, the Christchurch mosque murders should have been a wake-up call. For many of them, subscribing to Alt-Right identity politics however is simply their way of "owning the Libtards." Trolling them. They apparently don't realise that it's them being "owned" by the very irrational collectivism they (sometimes) claim to oppose, while releasing this barbarism from the crypt where it was deservedly buried.
They apparently don't realise that the opposite of Leftist identity politics is not the Alt-Right and its own politics of white supremacy. That these are
both forms of the same thing: both forms of collectivism, both of which must be shunned.
That the opposite of identity politics is not the creation of an identity politics of your own: the opposite of identity politics is individualism.In the
slogan of Quilliam's Maajid Nawaz (fig. 5, above), the controlling left and the Alt-Right must
both be damned to hell
[3] -- their shared identity politics condemned altogether as being the politics of the group, of the tribe, of the race. Racism, as Ayn Rand
identified, being "the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism," a "barnyard" form of collectivism appropriate only to a mentality "that differentiates between various breeds of animals, but not between animals and men."
[4]
Because, like every form of
determinism, it removes the thing that makes us truly human: our ability to think and to
choose.
AND POST-CHRISTCHURCH? The political reaction worldwide to the Christchurch shooting was as swift as it was self-destructive, ramping up threats to free speech with an across-the-board call for massive online censorship—social media platforms and governments "voluntarily" teaming up to ban "violent extremist content." As Reason’s Nick Gillespie wondered out loud: “What could possibly go wrong?”
What the New Zealand government did in the wake of the Christchurch, New Zealand, mass shooting, should disturb anyone who believes in free speech. The government went so far as to ban the manifesto of the shooter and video of the shooting… “possession of either the video or the manifesto by unauthorised individuals is punishable by up to 10 years in prison and NZ$50,000, while distribution can get you 14 years behind bars.”
That's simply terrifying and positively dystopian. Do people really think that possessing a book or a text or a video means the owner is enslaved by it or even agrees with its messages? …
This sort of response makes me think of Stetson Kennedy, who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the 1940s and revealed just how banal and childish many of their rituals, titles, and activities were in his 1954 blockbuster ‘I Rode with the Ku Klux Klan.’ The level of ridicule he brought to bear on the Klan helped destroy its credibility and power. Something similar happened to Scientology when its secret documents were made public via the internet in the early 1990s ... On a pragmatic level, the idea that hiding details and suppressing information about extremists will reduce their power seems wrong.
More fundamentally, though, it should be deeply worrying to anyone who believes in free expression that governments and corporations are openly working together to decide what is and is not acceptable speech…
Between threatened crackdowns by Republicans and Democrats and European Union bureaucrats and cave-ins by tech giants trying to preserve market positions, it's right to fear that the era of the open internet is almost certainly over.
Practitioners of politics exploit every opportunity, however grotesque. Post-Christchurch, their motive wasn't primarily empathy, it was "never let a good crisis go to waste." And the focus of their attack was (and still is) on our right to speak freely ...
PART 6 in a series explaining "identity politics," excerpted from one of my chapters in the 2019 book Free Speech Under Attack.
