Why this surge of interest in campus life, especially as fodder for ridicule? What have college students come to represent to those who presume to inhabit the “real world” that awaits them? These reports and reactions arrive at a moment of heightened scrutiny concerning the usefulness of college itself, in an era of astoundingly high tuitions and fees, and some of them have a whiff of intergenerational condescension, that enduring sense that youth (and critical theory) is wasted on the young. Compared to the scenes of sixties protest that remain most romantically legible in the American imagination, contemporary activism strikes many as low stakes and unfocussed.
.. But it’s worth asking why the politics of everyday college life, from calls for more inclusive curricula to questions about whether campus buildings should continue honoring racist forefathers, have become so important to people spending their lives far from the classroom.
.. Consider the trajectory of the typical twenty-something, born in the early nineties, a product of the test-oriented No Child Left Behind educational model. This hypothetical student came of age during the Obama era, with a new understanding of America’s future demographics, at a moment when the narrative of a red and blue America was firm orthodoxy. This student’s first Presidential election may involve Donald Trump. Identity politics, in the world this student knows, are no longer solely the province of minorities who have been pushed to the margins. The same ideas about inclusivity and belonging that spark campus revolt also underlie the narratives of grievance and decline animating supporters of Trump and the Tea Party.
.. the reason that college stories have garnered so much attention this year is our general suspicion, within the real world, that the system no longer works. Their cries for justice sound out of step to those who can no longer imagine it. Maybe we’re troubled by these students’ attempts to imagine change on so microscopic a level.
Identity politics and the death of the individual.
Today, individuals identify as something. ‘I identify as working class.’ ‘I identify as non-binary.’ Or, in the notorious case of Rachel Dolezal, the American white woman who effectively blacked-up as she rose up the ranks of the NAACP, ‘I identify as black’. The rise of the i-word in our definition of ourselves, the ascendancy of what is called ‘self-identification’, is one of the most notable developments of the 21st century so far. It speaks to a shift from being to passing through; from a clear sense of presence in the world to a feeling of transience; from identities that were rooted to identities that are tentative, insecure, questionable.
.. Many have observed, often critically, that Western campuses in particular have become hotbeds of identity politics, or what is sometimes referred to as the ‘identitarian left’, which now defines itself, and engages with others, through the prism of identity rather than on the basis of ideas or shared or conflicting material and political interests.
.. The individual with conviction has given way to the insecure possessor of an identity, whose primary concern is with the protection of his or her identity from ridicule or assault.
.. But the truly notable thing about today is not so much the obsession with identity – it’s the instability of identity. Humans have been hunting for identity for centuries. The instinct to define ourselves, to project ourselves into the world, is strong. And there’s nothing wrong with it. What’s new today is that identity has become an incredibly subjective phenomenon.
.. The NYT doesn’t ask ‘What are you?’ or ‘Who are you?’, which would speak to a strong sense of being something; it asks what ‘aspect of your being’ is most important to ‘your idea of yourself’. ‘Being’ is treated almost as something external to the individual, a thing to be mined for ‘traits’ we might identify with. Identity is not something we are or we experience; it is a technically cultivated category, built from ‘traits’ and ‘aspects’ to give ‘an idea of yourself’.
.. Today, to feel something is to be something.
.. At Scripps College, a women’s university in Southern California, students are now given 10 pronoun options to choose from. They can be he, she, e, per, zi, ze, they, hu, hum or hus. Here we have the construction of an entire new way of speaking, an alien, bizarre, elitist way of speaking, to satisfy the self-identity of small groups. Today, saying ‘I identify as’ doesn’t only mean you can change sex on your passport or masquerade as black when you’re white – it has also led to the reorganisation of university life and the emergence of new words, new grammar. The objective must bow to the subjective. Everything must be bent to the whims of the person who has said: ‘I identify as…’
.. the new ‘obsession with identity’ – and that is the profound and historic crisis of public life; of meaning; of the Enlightenment ideals of reason and objective understanding; of the very idea of what it is to be human.
.. morally, too, the idea of work has transformed, and now tends to be seen less as a provider of comradeship and identity than merely a means to make ends meet.
.. Few would now say, ‘I’m a lathe operator at a factory’, as an expression of identity, of self, as they might have done in the past; rather, it would be merely a description of how they make money.
.. the disarray of institutional life did not free the individual to discover his ‘real self’, as the hippies claimed it would, but rather gave rise to a new generation with a very weakened sense of self.
.. He noted that ‘apparent freedom from family ties and institutional constraints does not free [us] to stand along or to glory in our individuality’. Instead, it ‘contributes to [our] insecurity’. It leads the individual to ‘depend on others to validate his self-esteem’, until he ‘cannot live without an admiring audience’.
.. Where the strong individual of the past realised himself through engagement with the world around him, the new minimal individual merely wants to be consoled by the world, flattered by it. In Lasch’s words, ‘For the narcissist, the world is a mirror, whereas the rugged individual saw it as an empty wilderness to be shaped to his own design’.
.. Lasch’s work also helps us to see how phoney is the freedom claimed by those who ‘identify as’. They frequently insist that they’re liberating themselves from outdated structures and social expectations. They pose as harbingers of a new and daring way of life, overturning everything about the old order, from gender to language, family life to social attitudes. This is false for two reasons. First, because what they present as their self-willed rebellion against and undermining of the old social, moral and sexual order is in fact a long drawn-out process of capitalist and institutional decay that has called into question almost everything Western societies once took for granted. And it was authored not by them but by various profound historical events and developments. They are really prettifying social and moral crises, standing on the rubble of the West’s decayed sense of itself and declaring: ‘We did this.’ And secondly, the freedom promised by the new narrow self-cultivation of identity is shallow indeed; in fact, it is not freedom at all.
.. They need validation, and they seek it everywhere.
.. It demands nothing less than the reconstruction of public life, and the rediscovery of our faith in the strong individual who both makes and is made by the world, rather than simply needing to be consoled by it. It requires that we refuse to acquiesce to alienated, subjective identity-making, and instead recreate the conditions in which people can develop their identity through the exercise of moral autonomy, and through creating and engaging in new institutions, new ideas and new societies.
Are Republicans For Freedom Or White Identity Politics?
For decades, Republicans have held to the idea that they are unified by a fusionist ideological coalition with a shared belief in limited government, while the Democratic Party was animated by identity politics for the various member groups of its coalition.
.. What Trump represents is the potential for a significant shift in the Republican Party toward white identity politics for the American right, and toward a coalition more in keeping with the European right than with the American.
.. When a government that has pledged to do everything can’t do anything, otherwise sensible people turn to the strongman. This is how the autocrat, the popular dictator, gains power. We are seduced by his success and strength.
.. For those who believe Barack Obama has ruled like an Emperor, Trump offers them their own replacement who has the appeal of a traitor to his class, dispensing entirely with the politeness of the politically correct elites and telling it always and forever like it is. If the president is to be an autocrat, let him be our kind of autocrat, these supporters say. It’s our turn now, and we want a golden-headed billionaire with the restraint of the bar fly and the tastes of Caligula, gliding his helicopter down to the Iowa cornfields like a boss. He’ll show Putin what for.
.. The normal grievance-based white identity politics platform that promises protectionism, tariffs, infrastructure, subsidies, entitlements, and always blames the presence of immigrants for the creative destruction of the global marketplace, has consistently performed best in the GOP prior to any actual Republicans voting. But should his ideas prevail and win – or if, in the most extreme scenario, Trump were to sustain his path and take the Republican nomination – it would set America’s political path on a direction along the lines of what we have seen in democracies in Europe.
.. There is a slim possibility that what’s happening in the GOP primary campaign this summer is actually healthy and salutary, as conservative intellectual Yuval Levin argues here. But it is also possible that it represents one more way America is becoming more European. A classically liberal right is actually fairly uncommon in western democracies, requiring as it does a coalition that synthesizes populist tendencies and directs such frustrations toward the cause of limited government.
Nebraska Rallies against TransCanada Pipeline
Kleeb had spent the last 15 years looking for dramatic, visual stories to advance political agendas, working on the principle that the best way to convert people was to show them others who were affected by an issue.
.. One of Kleeb’s tenets of organizing is that if you want to reach a specific group of people, you have to use someone from that group to help you make your case. “One thing the climate organizations don’t get is that the scientific numbers don’t move people,” she said. “People here care about their neighbors. So we were looking for a face.”
.. He knew people in the area and was at ease talking publicly. (During an appearance on “The Ed Show” on MSNBC this year, in reference to TransCanada’s claims about the pipeline’s safety, he asked dryly, “What was the safest ship that was ever built?”)