Category: Identity Politics

are millennials left-wing?

1/15/2023

1523 words: 8-minute read

It´s a well-known maxim that people grow more right-wing as they get older and there´s plenty of evidence for this. In a recent article, though, Guardian journalist Owen Jones claimed that millennials are bucking the trend: ´No other generation in recorded political history has retained such an entrenched rejection of rightwing politics as they’ve grown older´, he writes.

The unspoken assumption here is that millennials are left-wing and of course there´s a case to be made that they are; Jones refers to millennial commitments to anti-racism and LGBTQ+ rights for example. Most of us would agree that these are indeed progressive commitments and that they have their origins to the left of the political spectrum.

But what is striking about anti-racism and LGBTQ+ rights is how relatively readily they can be taken up by the right. Thinking only of the UK for now, David Cameron´s Conservative Party had little difficulty in adopting these causes, discursively at least, and much has been made of current Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak´s Afro-Indian descent and Hindu religion. This suggests that the progressive values and causes that Owen Jones deploys as evidence for his claim that millennials are hanging onto their left-wing identity are not so exclusively left-wing after all.

Of course there are elements of the right that continue to fight these practices tooth-and-nail (Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz in Hungary is an example) but this doesn´t detract from the fact that mainstream right-wing parties have had relatively little trouble adopting what Jones implies are left-wing values and practices. So we must conclude either that mainstream right-wing parties are more left-wing that we thought they were, or that Jones´s criterion for ´left-wing-ism´ is less helpful than it might be. Let´s assume that today´s right-wing parties are indeed right-wing, and explore, instead, the thought that we need a better determinant of what it is to be left-wing than being anti-racist or pro-LGBTQ+.

Another possible litmus test would be to check the extent to which millennials cleave to a another left-wing value and objective: collective universalism. Ever since Enlightenment thinking tore into the apparently unassailable legitimacy of hereditary particularism - that there is a class ´born to rule´ - the left in all its guises has maintained a commitment to collective solutions rooted in universal values.

So how are millennials doing on the left-right spectrum if the touchstone is less a commitment to anti-racism, LGBTQ+ rights etc, and more to collective universalism? Millennials’ politics is driven by the idea of identity, which, however it is understood in any particular case, is inescapably a subset of the universal. It is true that identity-based demands are often expressed in terms of universal human rights, but there is an inevitable tension between the universalism of human rights and the particularism of identity-based claims.

At root this is because such claims are prone to what philosophers would call ‘epistemological solipsism’. This is the idea that knowledge of what it is like inhabit a given identity, a gay woman for example, is only available to possessors of that identity. As identities multiply and become more refined and fractured, knowledges of subjection and oppression follow suit and the possibility of expressing that knowledge in universal terms becomes more and more remote.

Identity-based politics has always been suspicious of universalism, and with good reason. This mistrust is rooted in the observation that universalism often masks a particularism, usually one that benefits those with economic, political and cultural power. A quotidian and telling example of this is the use of the word ‘man’ to denote ‘humanity’. This apparently innocuous linguistic turn can have profound real-world consequences, as Caroline Criado-Pérez documents in her book Invisible Women where she shows how using men as the stand-in for humanity, and therefore for women too, has had a pervasive - and sometimes disastrous - effect on women’s wellbeing.

Does this mean that millennials are right to double down on political particularism? One detrimental effect of doing so is that their campaigns can only ever be driven by particular interests, thereby missing the point that the injustices suffered by one identity might well be shared with others (men and women’s carceration is a good example). Particularism creates blind spots: as the trees come sharply into focus the wood goes missing.

Collective solutions - another hallmark of left-wing thinking and action - are hard to articulate under conditions of estrangement and separation. In addition, these very conditions militate against developing an over-arching programme that might bring fissiparous identities together in a common programme. I have written elsewhere about how ‘identity-based politics needs criteria drawn from outside any already-existing identity if the aspiration to ¨be human¨ is to be fulfilled’.

But where are these universal criteria to come from? Can we avoid falling into the universals-are-really-particulars trap described by identitarians and discussed above? Well yes, actually, and pretty easily too - in principle at least.

Try a thought experiment. Imagine you’re designing criteria for a society you want to live in. Imagine, further, that you’re thinking about these criteria without knowing who or what you are going to be in that society. You don’t know your gender, race, your social status, intelligence, wealth, religion, sexuality, or physical strength. There is a possibility, therefore, that you could end up as one the poorest, most discriminated -against members of society. So the rational thing for you to do is to design criteria that cater for that eventuality.

What you definitely won’t do is draw up criteria that systematically favour wealthy, white, middle-aged men. In other words we have avoided the universals-are-really-particulars trap.

Of course this is none other than American philosopher John Rawls’ ‘veil of ignorance’, a way of taking out all the contingent factors that could bias us when we think about the principles for a just and fair society. Over the past 50 years his ideas have come in for criticism from across the political spectrum, often with good reason. But the idea of a ‘veil of ignorance’ in an ‘original position’ when devising principles for the just society remains a powerfully suggestive way of avoiding the universals-are-really-particulars trap. And note: we arrive at universal principles by avoiding all knowledge of exactly the thing that animates much millennial politics: our particular identity.

Given that the veil of ignorance produces the kind of non-discriminatory outcomes that millennial politics supports, is there anything to stop millennials supporting the more economic egalitarian principles that can be derived from behind the veil? After all, if it’s possible that you’d end up at or near the bottom of the socio-economic pile you’d surely want, as a minimum, welfare measures to ensure the greatest possible security for yourself. You might even want principles that would establish a formal economic equality in society through, say, 20-to-1 pay ratios.

The key point is that Conservative or Christian Democrat parties would find these principles much harder to adopt than the identitarian ones that drive Owen Jones’s argument. Such a move would change these parties so radically that they’d no longer be the same right-wing parties.

There is indeed nothing to stop millennials endorsing socio-economic principles like this and no doubt many of them do. But, crucially, there is no necessary link between identitarian politics and economic egalitarianism. Indeed, data shows that while there has been a general improvement in LGBTI acceptance in 38 OECD countries over the past 40 years, the GINI coefficient in those same countries has gone up in a majority of them, indicating an increase in economic inequality*.

Without much more sophisticated work it is impossible to know if there is a causal link between the increase in equality for discriminated groups in OECD countries and a general decrease in economic equality in the same countries, but what is clear is the contrasting direction of these two trends. Anecdotal evidence is just that - anecdotal - but it is perhaps significant in this context to note two icons of gay rights, Martina Navratilova (tennis) and Megan Rapinoe (soccer), arguing forcefully - and successfully - for equal pay for men and women in their sports, without questioning whether the large sums men are earning (and with which women want parity) are themselves justifiable. It is hard to imagine Navratilova and Rapinoe behind the veil of ignorance arguing for special treatment for tennis and soccer players. After all, they might have ended up as ball girls or boot cleaners.

The upshot is that diversity is not the same thing as equality. As American academic Walter Benn Michaels has observed, 'a diversified elite is not made any less elite by its diversity'. For example, the then Prime Minister Boris Johnson appointed the most ethnically diverse Cabinet ever in 2019, with Sajid Javid as Chancellor of the Exchequer; Priti Patel as Home Secretary, Alok Sharma as International Development Secretary, Rishi Sunak as Chief Secretary to Treasury, James Cleverley as Party chairman and Kwasi Kwarteng as Minister for business, energy and industrial strategy. Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) Ministers represented 18% of that cabinet - more than the 14% of the population in England and Wales that came from ethnic minority backgrounds according to the 2011 census.

We'd be hard-pressed, though, to describe these cabinet appointments as a clarion call for greater equality. One of its members, Rishi Sunak, is now Prime Minister. He is the richest man in the House of Commons, owner of 4 houses worth £15m, and whose net worth is around £730m. His new swimming pool is said to cost £13,000 a year to heat while the local municipal pool in his constituency of Richmond is threatened with closure over soaring energy bills. This is the kind of cabinet whose members who can 'carelessly' forget to pay a £5m tax bill.

So is Owen Jones right to say that millennials are bucking the generational trend and sticking to left-wing politics rather than heading rightwards? If we’re happy to say that anti-racism and LGBTQ+ rights (for example) are exclusively left-wing then the answer may be yes. But I’ve argued that right-wing political formations find it relatively easy to to adopt these policies, discursively at least. A stiffer and more unequivocal test would be to ask for commitment to a collective universalism giving rise to a more equal distribution of income and wealth in society. Until and unless that happens, only two left-wing cheers for Owen Jones’s millennials.
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* GINI data is taken from either from Our World in Data (changes in income distribution 1990-2015) or Index Mundi (1986-2019), and LGBTI data from the Global Acceptance Index (GAI) for LGBTI people 1981-2020. GAI improved in 30 countries, stayed the same in 7, and got worse in one (Turkey). GINI showed increased economic inequality in 24 countries, increased equality in 11, and the same level of inequality in 3.

decarceration, men and women

3/1/2021

742 words; 6-minute read

The UK government is planning on creating 500 more places for women in prison. In response, Sonia Sodha, chief leader writer at the Observer and a Guardian/Observer columnist, has written a powerful piece recommending the phasing out of women’s prisons altogether.

This is absolutely the right objective. The record regarding women and prisons is appalling: the number of women in UK prisons has doubled since 1993 (as if women are twice as bad as they were 27 years ago!); the use of community sentences has halved in a decade; 62% of women serve sentences of less than 6 months (up from 30% in 1993) causing massive disruption to their lives and those of their dependants. The government’s mindless response to this last point is to allow more children to sleep with their mothers in prison.

So yes, for a host of reasons women’s prisons should be done away with.

Interestingly, there is no suggestion in Sodha’s piece that men’s prisons should be done away with too. The reason why women’s prisons should be eliminated while men’s are retained is, she says, because ‘female offenders are very different from their male counterparts’.

How are they different?

First, says Sodha, men are ‘far more violent than women, and always have been’. This is absolutely true. ‘Prison sentences are most appropriate for dangerous and violent crime’, she continues. So because men commit the ‘vast majority’ of violent crime, men’s prisons must be retained.

But a 2019 report by the Prison Reform Trust shows that 69% of the 59,000 people sent to prison in 2018 had committed a non-violent offence. Some of these will have been women, but given that ‘only’ 5% of the people in prison in the UK are women, the vast majority of these non-violent offences will have been carried out by men.

So on Sodha’s criterion that prison should be reserved for violent criminals, two-thirds of men’s prisons should be closed down too.

A second reason she gives for why female offenders are different to their male counterparts is that ‘two-thirds of women in prison are survivors of domestic abuse’, and that while ‘not every female criminal is a victim … coercive abusive relationships can serve to draw women into crime’. This is also absolutely true and it’s a chilling reminder that behind many crimes lie stories of damaged lives.

But if a history of damage and disadvantage is a reason for an offender’s decarceration then perhaps this applies to histories other than those of abusive relationships too?

For example, 62% of people entering prison have a reading age of 11 or lower (four times greater than the general population). Similarly, a third of people (34%) assessed in prison in 2017–18 reported that they had a learning disability or difficulty. Low literacy leads to non/underemployment and a potential turn to crime for survival. And these statistics are themselves a reflection of profound structural disadvantage.

Just as not every female criminal is a victim, as Sodha says, not everyone with a low reading age or learning disability ends up in prison. But in both cases the chances of eventual imprisonment are increased. So once again, if a history of harm leads us to conclude that women’s prisons should be shut down, should not the same criterion be applied to men’s?

While Sodha is right about the specifics of the differences between female and male offenders (the former’s non-violent crimes are different to those of the latter, as is the nature of the harm they suffer that predisposes them to imprisonment), they share the key features that Sodha says should lead to the phase out - or at least a reduction in the number - of prisons: non-violent crime and a history of harm.

I very much hope that women’s prisons are phased out, or at the very least that the government’s plans to increase the number of places for women are abandoned, never to return.

And once that happens I look forward to Sodha turning her fire on incarceration in general, for there is more in the arguments that unite the genders against imprisonment than keeps them apart.

identity politics and economic inequality

2/13/2021

348 words; 3-minute read

Yesterday I pointed out the coincidence between the rise in acceptance of the equality claims of discriminated identitarian groups and the increase in levels of economic inequality in OECD nations. I didn’t argue for either correlation or causation between these two phenomena. The possibilities range from them being completely unrelated to strict causality.

In a recent London Review of Books article William Davies asks ‘why, in an age when inequality has been rising, have work and wealth ceased to provide the grounds of political identity?’ By way of an answer he’s right to point out the structural obstacles: ‘The relationship between class and voting behaviour grows progressively weaker as society becomes economically, culturally and morally more individualistic’. But maybe there’s more to it than that.

Davies also refers to the classic Marxist distinction between a class ‘in itself’ which has objective interests as a class, and a class ‘for-itself’ where that class becomes self-conscious of these interests and acts to get them realised. The progress from ‘in-itself’ to ‘for-itself’ is rocky and unpredictable and it depends on a combination of (shared) lived experience and intellectual work (‘consciousness-raising’). So another way of putting Davies’ question is why is it proving increasingly difficult for the economically dispossessed to realise its ‘for-itself’ identity?

All politics is identity politics in the sense of collectives coming to be aware of shared interests rooted in a shared identity. But it seems to be easier to mobilise collectives grounded in ethnicity, gender, and religion than those with shared interests as a social class. Members of the former collectives seem to ‘know’ and recognise each other more readily than members of the latter.

Is it fair to say that it’s harder work to ground political identity in economic inequality than in ethnicity, gender and religion? More particularly does it require different work? If so, what is that work and have we forgotten how to do it?

Hate speech, democracy and economic equality

2/12/2021

444 words; 4-minute read

‘One of the principal problems of democratic co-existence is the proliferation of so-called ‘hate speech’”. So begins a recent Serge Champeau and Daniel Innerarity article in El País (7 February 2021), reproduced here.

There’s certainly plenty of hate speech about and social media have made it a lot easier to dispense it. There’s also no doubt that hate speech does real damage to individuals and - this is Champeau’s and Innerarity’s point - it can have a corrosive effect on the ties that bind democracies together.

But there’s more to be said about hate speech and democracy. The clue is here: ‘This debate is less about classic ideological confrontation and more at the level of the personal’. The suggestion is that where we used to argue about issues that divide left and right, issues around poverty and economic equality, now we dish out and - and take - personal offence instead.

Lots of political capital has gone into combating hate speech because it’s not just personal: it’s directed at individuals by virtue of their race, religion, disability, sexual orientation or gender identity. Progress has been made, at least as far as law-making goes, in regard to protecting these identities and the people who wear them.

Whether all this has damped down the centrifugal forces threatening democratic cohesion or exacerbated them by shining the bright light of the law on what separates us, is a matter for conjecture. More to the point here is whether this attention to the personal has crowded out the political in the traditional, ideological, sense of the word.

Three observations on this:

1. At the same time as there’s been huge progress in recognising the equality claims of discriminated identities, income inequality has risen across all OECD countries
2. Right-wing parties (though not all of them) have found it easier to ‘modernise’ and accept LGBT equality claims (for example), than claims for economic equality. The UK Conservative Party is a good example.
3. I have no idea if there is a causal link between the increase in equality for discriminated groups in OECD countries and a decrease in economic equality in the same countries.

However (3) turns out, economic inequality is surely as much a threat to democratic co-existence as hate speech. In fact, if there was less of the former we might see less of the latter, a strategy that seems not to have occurred to the French government as it pursues its laicité agenda while leaving the Muslim banlieues to their economically marginalised fate.

whose identity?

6/24/2020

(717 words - 6 minute read)

In a recent article in the London Review of Books surveying feminist manifestos, Joanna Biggs says that it’s always been clear what women want: ‘girls just wanna be human, not other’.

Indeed, but what does being human mean?

It’s been pointed out ad nauseam that ‘human’ all too often means ‘man’, so the question ‘what do women want’ is frequently answered with, ‘what men have.’ This is a bad answer. It’s bad not only because it’s wrong to define a generic term (human) in terms of a particular (man), but also because a) ‘man’ is itself a generic term, and b) what men have isn’t always good anyway.

The same might be said of the movement against racism. What do BAME people want? It’s surely not enough to answer, ‘what non-BAME people already have’. Again ‘non-BAME’ covers a multitude of different conditions, and even if we could identify some representative non-BAME person, who’s to say that that person’s life is the model on which to base BAME demands?

Let’s take a specific example of what happens if we model identity-based demands on the experiences of the dominant identity.

In a review of the BAME experience of the criminal justice system Labour MP David Lammy found that ‘between 2006 and 2014, 41% of black defendants pleaded not guilty in crown courts compared with 31% of white defendants. Consequently, black defendants lose the opportunity of reduced sentences through early guilty pleas and distrust in the system is reinforced.’

This looks unfair. It looks as though equity demands that the same proportion of blacks as whites should be able to plead guilty so as to get a reduced sentence.

But what Lammy doesn’t point out is that solicitors will often advise defendants to plead guilty to crimes with which they’ve been charged but haven’t committed, so as to be sure of a reduced tariff.

In what sense, exactly, would giving more black defendants a longer sentence than they deserve be an improvement? But that’s where Lammy’s version of fairness takes us in the absence of non-identity based criteria for fairness.

It looks as though identity-based politics needs criteria drawn from outside any already-existing identity if the aspiration to ‘be human’ is to be fulfilled.

Where is this ‘outside? One possibility is that one identity can speak for all the others. If the most downtrodden identity can be emancipated won’t that entail the emancipation of everyone?

I’m not sure any identity can claim special privileges in this regard. Marx thought that the proletariat was the universal class, so once it was freed everyone would be freed. Maybe, but might not proletarian freedom always be proletarian freedom?

The black feminists of the 1974 Combahee River Collective similarly argued that black women are the carriers of a universalist freedom on the grounds that ‘If black women were free it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all systems of oppression’.

Perhaps. But first, there will always be someone lower down the pecking order who will argue that their particular form of oppression has been left out. Second, and linked, because as long as our understanding of freedom is tied to any identity’s interests it can’t and won’t be universal.

So if the ‘outside’, the universal, can’t be the property of any particular identity, where is it? Currently the best bet is ‘intersectionality’ where it’s recognised that different forms of oppression - race, class, sexual orientation, nationality, religion, gender - intersect and overlap. But intersectionality has yet to show that a movement that multiplies difference can point us towards the universal.

And that is surely what we need, because the choice is clear: ‘Feminism can ask for the things men have,’ writes Biggs, ‘or it can ask for the world to be organised differently’.

Notes from a cliff-edge

are millennials left-wing?

decarceration, men and women

identity politics and economic inequality

Hate speech, democracy and economic equality

whose identity?

Andrew Dobson

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