Anyone complaining about some big "left" collusion is essentially bashing a straw man. The actual truth is that there are more than two groups of political interests. Corporate interests are biased towards corporate interests, period. They're basically indifferent on social issues, and so from the right they appear "left" because they echo the broadest appeal as a marketing technique. Shoehorning everything that you disagree with into a single category and then thinking the whole world is ganging up on you is a completely broken model, but it is unfortunately lucrative.
The article is, in fact, doing the opposite of "complaining about some big 'left' collusion." It's an explanation of how a vocal minority can produce similar results without any sort of conspiracy.
> They're basically indifferent on social issues, and so from the right they appear "left" because they echo the broadest appeal as a marketing technique.
The notion that this stuff has the "broadest appeal as a marketing technique" doesn't hold water. Why are Hispanics suddenly "Latinx" now, when virtually no Hispanics identify with that term? https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in.... Last year, they had "Black Trans" posters at our local mall. My county is half Republicans, and a lot of the Democrats are middle class Black people who definitely do not have socially progressive views on gender identity.
The article explores some mechanics while still focused on this idea that corporations are inescapably left.
I'd say the larger difference is left activism is pro-social, or hyper-social in the extreme. "Black Trans" is promoting one specific identity, but not at the expense of others (apart from dilution). Whereas what is perceived as right activism has to rise to the level of being anti-social - a simple picture a happy heteronormative traditional family does not suffice (since it is taken for granted as the norm). Rather it defines itself by explicitly opposing left activism, and such overt conflict is a commercial non-starter.
> I'd say the larger difference is left activism is pro-social, or hyper-social in the extreme. "Black Trans" is promoting one specific identity, but not at the expense of others (apart from dilution).
Left activism is anti-social: it elevates the sovereign individual to primacy. It rejects the legitimacy of the majority to impose norms and demand conformity—even when it comes to socialization of children. It replaces that with the right of small minorities to impose norms on everyone else. For example, whereas in Asian countries you have norms that demand you address elders by formal titles, in left activism you have norms that require everyone to exchange pronouns for the sake of a small minority. The insistence on social affirmation, moreover, makes modern left activism different than the old liberal pluralism.
In the form of intersectionality, left activism is also appropriative. It uses the political capital of Black people, for example, to advance a number of other ideological positions which most Black people and Muslims don’t support and don’t agree with.
While you've made valid points for consideration about the blue tribe's blindspots, you're riffing off a different definition of anti-social than I used. You're talking about larger appreciation of social conformity, where I'm talking about creating immediate conflict.
Furthermore, US society is deeply rooted in individualism and so professing individualism is not leftist. In fact I'd say your framing does well to illustrate the disconnect - by attempting the claim that individualism is a leftist thing, despite it being overwhelmingly ingrained in mainstream US society, you're not really arguing for conservatism but rather something well to the right of conservatism. From that perspective, of course most everything appears to be leftist including conservatism itself.
> While you've made valid points for consideration about the blue tribe's blindspots, you're riffing off a different definition of anti-social than I used.
I know—my point is that you’re using a quite liberal sense of what’s “anti-social.”
> You're talking about larger appreciation of social conformity, where I'm talking about creating immediate conflict.
During her confirmation hearing, Judge Ketanji Jackson Brown claimed that she “wasn’t aware” that the Christian school where she was a board member espoused traditional views on gender and abortion. Why did a Black woman feel the need to not only clarify her own views, but actively disassociate herself from an organization that is completely normal for a Black woman to be associated with? Why did she need to imply that she might have acted differently had she known that a Christian school affiliated with a Black baptist church taught traditional Christian doctrine (as if that was a surprise?) You don’t think it was because of the threat of conflict from the activist left?
> Furthermore, US society is deeply rooted in individualism and so professing individualism is not leftist.
The US is more individualist than say China, sure. But most of the US, from the Puritan-descended WASP northeast, to the Midwest, to the South, never struck me as especially individualist. The west coast, sure, and maybe Colorado or Arizona. Recall, the US is the most religious developed country in the world—in terms of how many people pray daily, it ranks up there with Iran. The rhetoric of rugged pioneer individualism yields to communalism pretty readily in most of the country. In the small Iowa town where my wife went to high school, sports practices were all scheduled to allow kids to also attend church youth groups.
> Why did [Judge Ketanji Jackson Brown] need to imply that she might have acted differently [during her confirmation hearing]
Because she was looking for approval from the Democratic Party? Are you asking why the Democratic Party cares about the opinions of the "activist left" ?
> But most of the US, from the Puritan-descended WASP northeast, to the Midwest, to the South, never struck me as especially individualist
Religion in the Northeast seems more like a token thing rather than a way of life (eg "Christmas and Easter Catholic"), and despite communal structures the entire US is still steeped in individualism. One of the current major political issues of the political right, anti-mask / anti-vaccine, rests mainly on appeals to individual freedom! It's front and center in the founding documents - "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness".
The article is, in fact, doing the opposite of "complaining about some big 'left' collusion." It's an explanation of how a vocal minority can produce similar results without any sort of conspiracy.
> They're basically indifferent on social issues, and so from the right they appear "left" because they echo the broadest appeal as a marketing technique.
The notion that this stuff has the "broadest appeal as a marketing technique" doesn't hold water. Why are Hispanics suddenly "Latinx" now, when virtually no Hispanics identify with that term? https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in...
Last year, they had "Black Trans" posters at our local mall. My county is half Republicans, and a lot of the Democrats are middle class Black people who definitely do not have socially progressive views on gender identity.
Okay, so you are the first person to discover that corporations are not politically motivated but only financially motivated, and they manufacture the appearance of political concern to pursue their financial interests. Nice, cool.
Now explain to me what is wrong with political factions publicly criticizing corporations under the guise of wanting political and moral change at the corporation, when in reality, they are attacking the corporation's financial interests, and their goal is to render their own brand of politics the one that commercial interests bend the knee to.
You have made the empiricist's error: conflating what he discovers to be, with what ought to be.
It's worse than that. It's that right-wing conspiracists already vote for everything that they support, so there's absolutely no need to pander to them. In fact, you can fund them while pushing woke PR. It's the potentially class-conscious who should be pushed to see the world as a bunch of benevolent corporations pushing fairness against the "white working class" forces of darkness.
