Latest news with #identitypolitics
Fox News
a day ago
- General
- Fox News
Identity Politics Disappears
As seen on Gutfeld!, Greg's wisecracks on former president Bill Clinton's health. Also, identity politics disappear when a terrorist appears. Greg explains. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit James Laverty
Irish Times
4 days ago
- General
- Irish Times
Wokeness is on the wane almost everywhere
Some say there's no such thing as wokeness. Others accept there might be such a thing but it's just an abusive right-wing jibe at those who have a sincere commitment to social justice. Others again say wokeness does exist and that it's a rigidly moralising form of left-wing identity politics. And there are those who believe that the word accurately describes everything irritating in modern life, from cycle lanes to health warnings on wine bottles. Lately there have been signs that, whatever your stand on wokeness, it's on the wane. Centre-left parties in different countries are wondering why they've lost the support of the working class, with many blaming an undue deference to a set of esoteric ideas about gender and race that those voters often find alienating or irrelevant. Even in Ireland, a place in thrall to extreme wokeness if you believe the right-wing UK and US media, last year's defeat of the family and care referendums suggested the alleged fever might indeed be breaking. Most critics define wokeness as a postmodern form of left-wing politics that rejects traditional Enlightenment values as being imperialist, patriarchal and Eurocentric. Now, though, a new phenomenon has emerged: the 'woke right' mimics many of the tactics of the 'woke left' that it claims to oppose. Its emergence offers a new perspective on the original idea of wokeness: if its methods and mindset can be so easily mirrored by those with opposite political aims, then perhaps the approach itself is fundamentally flawed. READ MORE [ 'Woke' keeps coming up in elections but it is a meaningless insult Opens in new window ] Like its progressive alter ego, the woke right claims that words are dangerous, and that vulnerable groups must be protected from them. Like its opponents, it deploys the language of psychotherapy to justify itself. In Florida, under a 2022 law written using terminology that uncannily recalls words previously used to justify 'safe spaces' on college campuses, schools are now banned from teaching anything about historical racism in the US that could make students 'feel guilt, anguish or other forms of psychological distress'. This in a former slave state where legal segregation continued until the late 1960s. Meanwhile, since coming to power, the Trump administration has shown more enthusiasm for enforcing language codes than the most radical cultural-studies theorist, running word searches through every official document and excising blasphemies such as 'diversity' and 'inclusion' wherever they occur, often with ludicrous results. And mobilisation tactics usually associated with left-wing activism such as boycotts and cancellations have been enthusiastically taken up by protesters objecting to LGBT-friendly messaging by brands such as Bud Light and Target. The woke right defines itself as an oppressed minority, subjugated and silenced by an elite liberal consensus. But its supposed commitment to free speech is skin-deep and its hypocrisy knows no bounds. JD Vance lectures Europeans about US tech companies' right to free speech in their countries, while his own government runs ideologically driven checks on the social-media accounts of US visa applicants. Unlike their left-wing counterparts, woke right-wingers don't have the intellectual ballast of decades of unreadable doctoral theses to bolster their claims. Some of their actions, such as bringing Afrikaner farmers as refugees to the US – are simply provocations designed to troll the libs. But others take the successful activist playbook of the past 10 years and put it to their own use. And both movements share a postmodern antipathy to the idea that there can be any such a thing as empirical truth. Rather than embracing free inquiry and institutional neutrality, both sides now use institutional power as a weapon in culture war battles. In doing so they validate the idea that might makes right, rejecting liberal democratic ideals. [ The Irish Times view on Trump's war on woke: an unwarranted interference Opens in new window ] Some on the left will argue that drawing such parallels is unfair or downright false because progressives are motivated by admirable humanitarian goals while the reactionary right clearly is not. As a letter writer to The Irish Times put it recently , 'progressive values are not censorship,' seemingly oblivious to the fact that they can be and it just depends on how they're applied. The idea that if your ends are justified (which in itself should be open to debate) then your means will be too does not have a happy history. One reason the ideological extreme right is in a position to instrumentalise these tactics so effectively is because the institutions it attacks had already ceded the high ground. Consider the disastrous performances of the heads of some of America's most prestigious universities when brought before a hostile congressional committee last year to defend themselves against accusations of tolerating anti-Semitism on their campuses. Their wan attempts to defend the speech rights of pro-Palestinian demonstrators were fatally undermined by their colleges' long records of failing to do the same for perspectives that had been deemed unacceptably heterodox by students and faculty alike. An early casualty of the emergence of the woke right is likely to be the marriage of convenience that had developed in recent years between some anti-woke conservatives and anti-woke liberals concerned about the rise of intolerant groupthink in universities, the media and the wider culture. Australian journalist Claire Lehman, for example, whose magazine Quillete was a flagship of this uneasy coalition for its dissections of the excesses of the progressive establishment, now finds herself disowned by part of it for her criticism of Trumpism. Both critiques are grounded in exactly the same principles. At its worst, woke leftism demands conformity to an ever-evolving set of progressive values. Those who question or fall short of these values, even inadvertently, are often publicly shamed or ostracised as racists or bigots. The woke right has adopted a nearly identical posture: conservatives who do not conform to its own orthodoxies on gender and race are dismissed as traitors, RINOs (Republicans in name only) or globalist shills. This growing trend of ideological absolutism across the spectrum undermines reasoned debate. Both the woke left and right encourage in-group loyalty and out-group hostility, fostering a culture of mutual suspicion and self-censorship. When disagreement becomes synonymous with moral failure, democracy suffers, and open discourse retreats.
Telegraph
26-05-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
SNP spending on ‘woke' civil servants rises by nearly 50pc in two years
SNP ministers have been accused of focusing on woke 'identity politics' after the number of their civil servants working on equalities and human rights surged by almost 50 per cent in two years. Scottish Government figures released under Freedom of Information (FoI) showed the costs of its Equalities and Human Rights Directorate has risen sharply after a huge increase in staffing and salary levels. The number of full-time equivalent (FTE) civil servants on the department's payroll rose from 105.6 in 2022/23 to 152.7 in 2024/25 – an increase of 44.6 per cent. The median average salaries surged by more than 70 per cent in only three years, from £28,236 in 2021/22 to £48,638 in 2024/25. This meant that the taxpayer-funded budget for the directorate also rose by more than 60 per cent, from £32.2 million in 2021/22 to £51.9 million in 2024/25. The period of the increase coincided with Nicola Sturgeon's government tabling the Gender Recognition Reform (GRR) Bill, which would have allowed biological men to change legal gender by simply signing a declaration. The legislation was passed at Holyrood in Dec 2022 but vetoed by the UK Government over concerns it undermined women's safe spaces. However, swathes of the public sector have adopted self-ID anyway. The huge increase in manpower also coincided with Ms Sturgeon offering an apology in March 2022 to women accused of witchcraft between the 16th and 18th centuries. 'Gravy train' Stephen Kerr, the Scottish Tory MSP who obtained the figures, said: 'This is the SNP's warped priorities laid bare — while Scots are struggling with collapsing local services, spiralling waiting lists, and high taxes, the SNP is quietly pouring tens of millions into an unaccountable bureaucracy pushing identity politics from behind a desk.' He added: 'This is not about protecting rights or advancing equality - it's about empire-building, feather-bedding, and creating jobs for the boys and girls of the SNP's activist class. 'They're more interested in lecturing Scots on pronouns and power structures than delivering basic services. It's a gravy train, and it's off the rails.' The FoI said the directorate was responsible for the 'successful delivery' of the Scottish Government's aim of promoting 'greater equality and inclusion and respect for human rights.' Among its specific policy areas were promoting LGBT+ equality and trans and non-binary 'inclusion', and overseeing controversial proposals to ban conversion practices. Earlier this month SNP ministers kicked into the long grass a ban on conversion therapy, which aims to change or suppress a person's sexual orientation or identity. The directorate's civil servants were also responsible for overseeing the Gender Representations Public Boards Scotland Act, which intended to increase the proportion of women serving on the boards. SNP ministers included trans women in this quota but feminist campaign group For Women Scotland launched legal action arguing it should be limited to biological women. This culminated in the group's landmark victory last month at the Supreme Court, which ruled that trans women are not women. The directorate has also worked on the development of a 'new statutory framework for human rights in Scotland' and implementing an action plan for the 'Gypsy / Traveller' community. Its other responsibilities included promoting race equality, implementing policies that tackle 'social isolation and loneliness' among the elderly and supporting delivery of a 'New Scots refugee integration strategy'. The figures disclosed that the number of FTE staff on the directorate's payroll increased slightly from 101.6 to 112.4 between 2021/22 and 2023/24, before jumping to 152.7 the following year.
The Guardian
20-05-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Democrats have a historic chance to pry back the working class: ‘We shouldn't blow this'
Donald Trump's second election to the presidency sparked soul-searching among Democrats about why the party has continued to lose a range of traditional Democratic constituencies, especially voters without college degrees. In a new book released this week, Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back, Joan C Williams argues that the left fundamentally misunderstands working-class voters. Williams is a law professor and social scientist who has spent decades studying the relationships between class, gender, labor and politics. Her previous book, 2017's White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America, argued that working-class Americans felt abandoned by the political establishment. Her new book argues that the Democratic party and the cultural left face an uphill – but not impossible – battle to win back the many Americans who have been drawn to Trump's rightwing populism. She spoke to the Guardian about why she rejects the idea that the left must renounce 'identity politics', why she thinks Trump has accidentally created a 'generational opportunity' for the left, and how to tell if you live in a 'class bubble'. What was the genesis of your book? When Trump won in 2016 there was a pretty robust conversation about class in the United States, and I was completely amazed, because it's something Americans tend to be allergic to acknowledging. But then around 2018 there crystallized an interpretation that Trump's election was just about racism. This was based on regression analysis that showed that racism is, in fact, the strongest predictor of Trump voting. But that's not why Trump won [in 2016]. Trump won because a much larger group of voters – whose attitudes didn't really differ on race from non-Trump voters – voted for him [in addition to markedly racist voters]. That distinction was kind of a technical point until 2024, when all of a sudden in the US we saw this sharp trend of working-class voters, non-college-educated voters of color, move to Trump. Since around 2012, non-college-educated people of color have shifted 35 points away from Democrats. And the shift is even larger for younger voters of color. What are Democrats missing or getting wrong? The left used to be focused on achieving a stable life for middle-class people, blue-collar people. And then in the 70s, my generation of hippies came up and changed that focus to things such as environmentalism, racism, sexism. Those, in retrospect, were things of more concern to college-educated elites. The left moved away from emphasizing a stable economic future for blue-collar and middle-class voters at just the time when their economic future was being gutted by neoliberalism and globalization. The left also adopted a style that was more a college grad's style, à la Rachel Maddow, 'I'm a smart person talking to you, a smart person,' and 'I have a plan for that,' to quote Elizabeth Warren, as opposed to a more working-class style, which Fox and much of the far-right media adopted: direct, blunt, very plain-spoken and often enacting a certain kind of blustering masculinity. All of this has not been a winning combination for the left. Your book doesn't focus on the lowest-income voters, but rather the 'missing middle' – the middle 50% of Americans by income. Why is that? That's a term from the political scientist Theda Skocpol – middle-status people in routine blue-, white- and pink-collar [traditionally female] jobs. When I speak of the 'missing middle', I'm thinking of the plumber, the tire salesman or even the cashier at Walmart, if she's married to somebody that brings that income into the middle 50%. Studies show that this missing middle is the group that has veered towards the far right, both in the US and Europe. The way I define the 'elite' is the top 20% by household income, with at least one college grad in the household. Many people, when they think of class, think of economics. But class is often expressed through cultural differences, because our values reflect our lives, and our lives reflect our privilege or lack of it. Your book talks about the ways that race, class and gender overlap, or don't. There was a big debate about this after 2016, and some people criticized Democrats for leaning too much into 'identity politics' – social justice for specific racial and gender and other groups. How should progressives think about identity? One of the chief tools that the far right uses to [appeal to the] missing middle is a certain truculent masculinity of, like, 'I don't suffer fools lightly,' 'I'm a real man,' 'I value real men,' whether I'm a man or a woman. That form of masculinity is very salient among working-class households, and probably among the fragile and failing middle class, because research shows that men who have been threatened tend to ramp up on masculinity. That's true across class, but a lot of men's masculinity in this middle group has been threatened for the simple reason that their jobs have been threatened. These used to be stable middle-class jobs where the father supported the household, and now those jobs are a dying breed. When it comes to race, the easiest way to explain it is: if you are a racist, you will very likely be voting for Trump. But, blessedly, that's not enough people to win in the United States. And so what we, the left, really have to focus on is prying away the people who aren't racist. When I hear well-meaning people say we need to abandon identity politics – I mean, I've literally done 10 years of studies that analyze racial and gender bias in professional organizations, and [those biases] are very strong. So I am not very interested in having [concerns about discrimination] dismissed as 'identity politics'. But quite apart from that, that argument just strikes me as not a great solution for the left, because the left needs not only to appeal to the two-thirds of Americans who don't have college degrees. It also needs to appeal to me and my friends. I mean, I'm a San Francisco progressive, and we aren't going to shut up about race and about gender. What is it about Democrats' rhetoric or style of progressive politics that is losing voters? I think that unconsciously the Democratic party thinks of its audience as college grads, and that's very clear to the people who are listening who are not college grads. The party is just not talking their language. To give you one example, when Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, who's a representative from Washington state, talks about the climate crisis, she says: 'My family owns an auto body shop, and we can't work when it's 116 degrees outside.' That is a way to talk about climate change that is going to connect with different people than if you talk about polar bears, which just associates the climate crisis with elite tastes in travel. But this isn't just about messaging. I think the model here is the fight for gay marriage. The stunning success of gay marriage's legalization happened because the gay liberation movement didn't just change messaging, they changed priorities. Many early leaders of the movement thought marriage was, by and large, lame. They were not interested in marriage. But they came to see that ordinary, average gay people were. They wanted to finally be able to say: 'Mom, yeah, I got married.' They wanted to join hegemony, not completely trash it. And if the movement was to connect with those people, it was going to have to change priorities and embrace the language of [romantic] commitment. And it worked. Working-class Americans raise their kids and inculcate in themselves self-discipline, and they highly value institutions that anchor self-discipline – religion, the military, 'traditional' and 'family' values. And those institutions also give their lives honor and dignity. And for the left to deride these institutions just fuels the right. It is not working for us. Progressive elites have to develop cultural competence, but that idea also threatens our own identity – our sense that we already know everything. It certainly threatens our identity that we're very attuned to social inequality, because many of us worked very hard to be attuned to racial and gender inequality. I would just like to suggest that we also need to be attuned to class inequality. There are always these questions about language. In your book, you use the term 'LGBTQIA+', and at times use the phrase 'Latinx', which is a phrase that very few Hispanic people actually use … Yes. I only use it among our crowd. I fully understand why we invented some of these specialized terms. I helped invent some myself. But we have to understand that once you put on a class lens, this kind of language is not seen as admirably feminist. This is seen as elite people telling other people they don't know how to talk, that unless you talk as if you're in a college seminar, you're not important, you're not smart. That is the way these terms are heard. One of the most interesting parts of your book talks about the difference between 'redistributive' policies, which use taxpayer money to fund social programs for poor people, and 'predistributive' policies, which instead try to provide well-paid and dignified blue-collar jobs through job guarantees, minimum wage laws, protectionist trade policies, and pro-union policies. According to your research, many Americans are more supportive of 'predistribution.' You cite one study that estimated that Democrats' emphasis on redistribution rather than predistribution since the 1970s has coincided with the party losing roughly half of its less-educated voters. To speak broadly, the poor love redistribution for obvious reasons – they've gotten screwed, and wish they weren't. [And elites] like redistribution because it basically says, 'I got where I am by merit. Sadly, some other people lack it or didn't get here for other reasons. Let's give them a little help.' The middle does not like redistribution, and the reason is because they have to get up every day to go to an often not-very-fulfilling job, and they don't understand why they have to do that and other people should get money without doing that. What they endorse at much higher rates is something technically called pre-distribution, and that just means they believe that there should be a fair labor market. They believe the rich are paid too much and that everybody else is paid too little. And that is literally true. Wages used to rise when productivity did, in the decades after world war two. If that had continued, wages would be 43% higher now than they are. And that is the predistribution message: that hard work should pay off in America, and it used to, and now it doesn't. Thanks for talking. Was there anything you wanted to add? I have invented something called The New Class Bubble Quiz. It's only 10 questions. It will tell you whether you're culturally elite or non-elite, and whether you're economically elite or non-elite. And it could help with the central project of getting people to understand when they're culturally elite. One final point: Trump has created a generational opportunity for the left. The tariffs are driving small businesses out of business. That's a key Republican constituency. And the tariffs are taking away from workers really the only thing they got from globalization, cheap Nikes. At the same time, Doge is targeting social security, Medicare, Medicaid that provides crucial funding to rural hospitals. If we blow this one – well, we shouldn't blow this one. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
