How eerie and unsettling it can be when people change their minds

I’ve suffered with a case of farleftitis for most of my adult life, but I went all-in for Hillary; I think most of us on the left had sympathy for Bernie’s politics but didn’t think they could win. They/we were proven wrong, so it’s a basic act of face-saving reconstruction to pretend we were always at the meeting, but standing by the door where we couldn’t be clearly seen.

Intellectuals are probably not that different from anyone else in this regard, but they do like to take and defend positions as if they were emanations of pure reason.
This is how phrenology gets born again under the title “I.Q. science.” That not even people trained to stand outside their human contexts and attempt to delineate The Facts are immune from trying to use those tools to express the basest of their flaws would be charming, if they didn’t turn out to be crazy so often.

But this one isn’t bad! I’m all for an extremely large leftist in-group where we actually have the solidarity Republicans accuse us of secretly leveraging against them in all their nightmares.

The first part, though, definitely.

I supported Hillary’s campaign, and I now rejoice in A O-C’s primary victory.

Do I then exemplify the phenomenon that you open with, or not?

As far as I can tell, I am simply continuing with my policy of using any stick to beat the devil. Trump is a uniquely perilous evil, for America and for the world, and we must fight him with every means at hand. When Plan A fails, I reach for Plan B. No deep change here, just different means to the same end.

There is another sort of change, still not deep, when I come to espouse publicly what I had previously only wished for in private. People who aim to make change must consider what is feasible in any given climate, at any given moment. As the climate of public opinion changes–as our own resources increase, or the opposition weakens–what we can reasonably hope to accomplish also changes. I have not undergone some sort of Mann-like conversion when I now advocate openly what once seemed desirable but unattainable.

A case in point: I would love to see Trump impeached. I also think it would be foolish for anyone to run on that platform in 2018. Even if we take the House and Senate both, we will certainly not get 2/3s of the Senate needed for conviction. Agitating for impeachment during these mid-terms will only distract us from what is achievable, and stiffen the opposition.

But if some unforeseeable event occurred to make impeachment an achievable goal in 2019 (what? 20 sitting Republican senators change party?) , and I began to advocate for it openly, would I have changed my mind in some eerie and unsettling way? I do not think so. I would simply now be espousing as a public goal what had always been a private desire.

Changes of instrumentality, or changes that reflects changes in what is feasible. These are changes that are highly responsive to surrounding events, including shifts in the opinions of others, without reflecting any deep changes in the individual’s convictions.

I don’t know what actually goes on in people’s heads, but let me attempt a normative defence of the practice of changing your opinion in response to other people’s opinions changing.

First, let’s straighten some terminology out. We think our beliefs ought to change according to the facts in the world. usually, these are facts like whether a particular policy has brought about or relieved immense suffering, or facts about the morphological structures of living and extinct creatures etc. Let’s call these sorts of facts first order evidence.

Other people’s opinions on X are not first order evidence for X (except in the self referential case). However, they are higher order evidence about X. There are two kinds of higher order evidence that I am concerned with here. First, when other people disagree with you, that might be evidence that they have different first order evidence than you do and their first order evidence is such that if you added it to your first order evidence, you would have reason to move your opinion in their direction. However, if you know in advance that there is some unspecified body of first order evidence which would require you to change your beliefs, not changing your beliefs until after you acquire the evidence seems silly. Its a plausible epistemic principle that we believe now what we know we will have reason to believe if we acquire new evidence.

The second kind of higher order evidence is about whether the first order evidence you have really supports your beliefs to the extent it does. When other people’s opinions are different from yours even though they have the same evidence, that is evidence that your evidence does not support your belief as strongly as you think. And that too should similarly affect what your object level beliefs are.

Traditionally in the literature on epistemology of disagreement, the people who disagree with you are taken to be epistemic peers. They may be just as competent at evaluating evidence as you, have the same evidence as you, or maybe have as good evidence as you do or just generally be antecedently as likely as you to get it right for some reason or another. Actual epistemic peerhood need not actually obtain. Even if we weaken the assumption, that does not license us to ignore other people’s opinions. More plausibly, we weigh other people’s opinions more strongly if they are experts relative to us and we weigh them less if we are experts relative to them on this issue.

Now, I don’t know the extent to which this normative defence counts as an explanation of why people actually adjust their opinions in response to disagreement from others. But it does shift your question from being a call for the explanation of this crazy/irrational pattern of belief formation to the call for the explanation of a defensible/rational pattern of belief formation. For pragmatic reasons, the need for the latter kind of explanation is less urgent.

The political science literature states that people look for elite signals as to what their positions should be. This looks like astonishing hypocrisy to outsiders, and I suppose it actually is – but people want to be part of a team to win power and are willing to change (or pretend to change) their beliefs to join one. This is related to the ‘Shibboleths’ post from last month.

That said, I don’t think Clinton supporters and Ocasio-Cortez supporters are really so different. The latter seems fairly mainstream. I don’t get a Jill Stein vibe from her, which is good.

After the invasion of Iraq in 2003, a survey found, of course, that those whose primary news source was Fox were the worst informed, but those who relied on CNN were scarcely better; in general, consumers of TV news, including the BBC, were more likely to espouse erroneous views than readers of print media. The most knowledgeable got their news from PBS and NPR.

It’s easy to conclude from this that some media do a better job than others, and that might not be wrong, but in this instance reality had a well-known liberal bias, so perhaps pure partisanship accounts for the appearance of liberal perspicacity.

People who were lambasting that kind of politics in 2016 are now embracing it—without remarking upon the change, without explaining it, leaving the impression that this is what they believed all along.

Amusingly, and for essentially the same reasons, a symmetric movement has taken place in France, with many people self-identifying as socialist (at least nominally) two years ago now fully behind flat taxes on capital gains, detention of minors up to 90 days if their parents are undocumented and privatization of passenger trains (three ideas that have historically been considered outside of the spectrum of reasonnable political opinion, even by the former mainstream right-wing party).

But coincidentally, I was re-reading Bourdieu’s On the State these last weeks so I’m not so surprised, especially as I don’t think that believe is quite the right word to describe how political and social positions are embraced (and in that respect, I believe that intellectuals are different only in their vociferous protestations to the contrary, and their somewhat superior ability to identify with the domineering side).

“In modern societies, the State makes a decisive contribution towards the production and reproduction of the instruments of construction of social reality. […] The State thereby creates the conditions for an immediate orches­tration of habitus which is itself the foundation for a consensus on this set of shared self-evidences which constitute common sense.”

So when shifts and breaks in the structure of the field of State power happen, it is perhaps not so surprising that schemes of perceptions also quickly change so that single-payer universal health care/the suppression of a capital gain tax can move in a couple of months from worthy to mention only to summarily dismiss as absurd to common sense.

Well, to go all Quantum Mechanics on this, our views are based on assumptions that are probabilities. We can go on holding these views for a while until measurements of our assumptions are performed, and at that point we have more information about the assumptions on which our views are based and may have to readjust them.

Everyone will have their own particular sphere of interest, but here in the UK we performed a measurement of what power and influence the UK actually had in the EU when Cameron asked Merkel if he could, please, have a break on migration in to the UK and she replied No. Once we had concrete evidence that the amount of power and influence the UK had in the EU was precisely and exactly zero many people, myself included, changed their view on whether being in the EU was a good thing for the UK.

“gender is so hard wired that if someone is identified with the wrong gender it is a great evil”

Your transphobia is showing.

“People who were lambasting that kind of politics in 2016 are now embracing it—without remarking upon the change, without explaining it, leaving the impression that this is what they believed all along.”

a) The stakes are clearly much higher in a presidential election in a year when the Democrats are at a slight structural disadvantage than they are in a mid-term election to an extremely safe congressional seat. There’s no contradiction in supporting different candidates in different elections based on the perceived preferences of a particular electorate. Indeed, the right figured this out early on with Buckley’s maxim on supporting the right-most viable candidate, emphasis on the viable.

b) Ocasio-Cortez has released extremely detailed policy proposals on a key policy platform (climate change). She has done her homework, come up with a solid plan, and is deservedly getting plaudits for it. By contrast, Sanders dealt in broad generalities, and when challenged about the structural impediments to his policy goals, hand-waved them away with bullsh*t about a ‘political revolution’.

YMV, but for me personally it is the latter point that pushed me from basically sympathetic to utterly dismissive of Sanders, even if his political vision for the US is one I find preferable to Clinton’s. In addition to his refusal to sully himself by actually JOINING the party he wants to lead (which I don’t think is a trivial matter), his failure to consider the ‘how’ of his plans, beyond an explanation that is deeply insulting to the intelligence of anyone with a passing familiarity of how the US Congress works smacks of political con-artistry. Similarly, Melenchon’s pledge to abolish inequality by passing a law against inequality (his 100% tax on incomes over €400k) did not signal to me that he was a radical crusader for social justice, but that he was actively harmful to genuine left-wing politics and should be treated with contempt. Subsequent statements from him and France Insoumise officials make me think this was the right call.

The TL:DR – if someone doesn’t support a politician who promises to enact policy A and fund it with ivory sales from a new network of nationalised unicorn farms, and then subsequently support a politician who promises to enact policy A, and has a realistic plan for doing so, that someone hasn’t actually shifted their position. If anything, the initial supporters of policy A are the ones who have shifted, if subtly, to the position that the talk needs to be backed up with some walk.

Sebastian H @3 – You’re confusing gender with biological sex.

Kind of true st the international level too (we somehow seem to have gone from ‘Americans aren’t interested in socialism’ to ‘Americans dominate Anglophone discussion about socialism’ in the space of a decade).

11, relstprof :Sara Ahmed’s notion of circulating cultural affects (that are themselves economies).

Thank you for this, she looks terrific. I am reminded of Randall Collins and the social construction of cultural reality.

I don’t disagree with anything in 9 Philliskirk and 11, but can only add that I think Mann (in his work) was unusually self-aware and self-critical about his bourgeois cosmopolitanism and its contradictions with German Patriotism. I think he saw it as tragic, a deal with the devil.

As I am reminded almost everyday by my more radical companions when I retain meager hopes in Democratic politics.

Picked an old book by Judith Marcus on Mann and Lukacs. Thanks to CR for a temp direction. Apparently there was a kind of unrequited affection that Lukacs found amusing. Mann deliberately kept a distance*, as if close contact would be dangerous or distasteful. These people all knew each other.

*According to Marcus, the intellectual relationship was fully formed before H&CC and the turn to Marxism, and it was Soul and Form that Mann found something disturbing.

I enjoyed the OP primarily because Corey writes from the heart.

American liberals aren’t. The American left isn’t. O-C might be a socialist, but spent most of her young life among the elite in Westchester. She’s well-spoken and photogenic, which makes her exactly the kind of ‘community organizer’ American ‘liberals’ and ‘progressives’ can rally around – a veritable cookie-cutter copy of Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard educated community organizer and now 400k per speech former president Obama. Little wonder, then, that Perez sees her as the future of the party.

As far as Mann goes, I agree with Ben @9. Circumstances change as much as opinions. I don’t frankly see how any ‘progressive’ can support war in any form. Peace and peaceful resolution of problems would seem to be a given. The right to unilateral self defense need not be sacrificed.

What we are living through in real time is the realization by many that Democratic leaders are every bit as corrupt and self-serving as Republicans. Few/none are going to openly support Trump, or migrate to the Greens/Libertarians, so a new tune and identity-branding is required. What we might call socialist policies – national health care, and the nationalization of key industries is most definitely not part of the ‘liberal-socialist’ mix. The post-2016 liberal socialist still desperately hopes piss-gate will magically permit the world to return to the time when the upwardly mobile (think Elizabeth Warren) can flip houses and earn six figures. Until then one does what one must, as long as there’s no real price to pay beyond being rude to Trump supporters and living with the indignity of supporting America’s first female president TM. If O-C is the future of the Democratic party then liberals are in more trouble than they imagine.

The current view – that Trump can’t govern, is a carbon copy of Trump can’t win and very likely to produce the same results. O-C’s socialism is a magical unicorn free of substance, or deep roots, which is exactly how American liberal socialists like their socialism.

I’m not a “leftist” but a “left-liberal” (or possibly, in a world where words had fixed meanings, a “social democrat”) and I certainly find it disconcerting when a publication or writer swings wildly from one side of me on an issue to the other side, or from “you must compromise with group X” to “you must take a strong position on group X.” I suppose different people react to such things in different ways.

Sebastian H @3: You might be too young for it, but in the last 20 years the center of feminism has gone from “gender is almost entirely a social construct of the patriarchy” to “gender is so hard wired that if someone is identified with the wrong gender it is a great evil”

I want to both disagree with how this is framed and support and underline part of it that’s sound–rather than simply beg the question as a number of response posts have.

I don’t think, at heart, the claim of “great evil” is really about a factual mistake–someone has correctly or incorrectly identified some fact about me. The evil at issue is the reasonable belief that this either indifference to a person’s identity claims or inexplicable hostility to it implies a lack of respect, a refusal to see someone as an equal, or even hatred of them for the way they are. So, yes, that’s a great evil.

From the very same argument it follows, however, that transphobia isn’t really about whether trans-identity claims are correct or incorrect. And so it is a mistake to assume that someone being mistaken–or honestly disagreeing about the nature of sex and gender–entails they’re transphobic.

Having said that, it is at least reasonable to suspect bigotry, since why else would anyone feel very strongly about whether they have to call someone him or her?

Well, there is one reason, and that’s where Sebastian H’s point–if questionably put in its implied dismissal of the evil of transphobia–is correct and needs to be addressed rather than ignored. Namely, when we critique transphobia using a new version of gender essentialism, we damage a way of thinking–anti-essentialism about gender–that has historically been very useful for critiquing sexism.

Ironically, Daragh’s criticism of Sebastian H @18 simply reaffirms his point. He is not “confusing gender with biological sex.” On the contrary, he’s pointing out that that claim is the heart of the old feminist critique of essentialism. Now, that is NOT the same as saying that view is correct. But, it is a reason for worrying about too quickly assuming it’s false.

That critique said that biological sex is a fixed, but gender is entirely socially produced–consequently, one has no “real” or “true” gender in a natural sense–only in a developmental one, since a socially produced gender can still become a deep, fixed part of one’s identity.

Sebastian’s point is that this once accepted view seems to be incompatible with a common use of language of the transgender rights movement, which suggests a difference between, for example, “really” being a woman and not being one. Ironically, one of the side effects of this is to reactivate essentialism among some feminists, who then–also against their own critical tradition–start claiming people are “not really” women. When, of course, the whole point of the anti-essentialist critique was that no one is in this deep, morally weighted sense “really” either a man or a woman.

Now, I’ve heard some say this is only an apparent problem–either there is a way to clearly harmonize traditional anti-essentialism with transgender theory or the language of the transgender rights movement is being misinterpreted in an essentialist way.

That seems plausible to me, but I’ve yet to see a good explanation, so I think it make sense that many are confused by it and want to understand it better. They can’t get past what looks like the same people asserting contradictory world views–and are understandably a bit offended when they assert both of them with equally righteous moralism.

That’s the question that Sebastian’s critics are begging. He has pointed out a move in the left between two incompatible views: gender anti-essentialism and gender essentialism. Ironically, to reply “sex is not gender” is to side with the former, when the transgender rights movement appears to tend to the latter.

It is very frustrating that sincere, well-meaning inquiry on this apparent theoretical inconsistency is often shut down as transphobia and never really explained, responded to, or answered. Especially when many who ask are well-motivated by the worry that anti-essentialism has done a lot of political good, so abandoning it could do harm. There’s been interesting discussion about the hermetic, question-begging nature of this discourse in the philosophical community, and I’d recommend some of the writings liked here:
http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2018/05/more-reflections-on-whether-transgender-women-are-women.html

At the end of the day, however, remember what’s really important in this debate. To refuse to accept someone’s self-characterization and preferred pronoun when it does no harm to anyone and shows you care about how they feel is just being a jerk.

There was a similar change of wind around Occupy Wall Street. A week before, the ‘national conversation’ was about Grand Bargaining up to the point of mutilating Social Security. A few weeks after, it was about the 1% versus the 99% and SS was safe from the predator set for another few years. However, most people’s opinions (most people including the proles) had not changed at all, so for them there would have been nothing to explain, if anybody had cared to ask them.

American culture is terrifyingly guilty of this. The inability for an empire’s people to understand the concept of blowback when their nation’s military incursions into the surrounding world create deep sources of instability and trauma is one marker of empire in decline.

That being said, the fact that free will is tenuous at best and humans are so easily manipulated en masse gives me hope that the species might pull off long-term survival if it finds the right balance between setting up mutually reinforcing beneficial mechanisms to guide most human psyches and cultures into generally sustainable behavior and the chaos of a free reality without socially enforced categorizations or narratives.

But I would be less than honest if I didn’t say that I was sometimes unsettled by it. Particularly when it’s unacknowledged.

I wish I knew whom you’re talking about here. Sanders certainly won important parts of the political debate among liberals, but if we’re going to talk about the changes that individuals have made, we’d need to know who has changed “in the media, on social media, among politicians, activists, and citizens.”

But right at the outset, this seems incorrect to me: “In the wake of the primary victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, there’s been a dramatic shift in mainstream liberal opinion …”

That shift occurred before Ocasio-Cortez, in my perception. But maybe I’m missing something.

– and as ”intellectuals” have been mentioned and the theory ”that Intellectuals are probably not that different from anyone else in this regard, but they do like to take and defend positions as if they were emanations of pure reason. Or the products of an unblinkered empiricism. The proverbial “When the facts change, I change my mind”.
AND the confession ”I’m always suspicious of these “when the facts change” types”.

Me too –
In part because the most pressing fact that seems to change people’s opinions is…not other people’s opinions – but ”ones own emotions” – and in a country where Presidents mainly get… erected by emotions -(and NOT by some Thomas Mann-like ”reasoning”) –
or wait??! –

It might be Thomas Mann-like emotions – which makes one have a change of heart? –
just the way Mann ”felt” leaving the US and moving to Switzerland – because some of US F…faces called him something he really wasn’t?

“gender is so hard wired that if someone is identified with the wrong gender it is a great evil”

Your transphobia is showing.”

No. Ive always thought that a big part of gender was hard wired, and understood that wrong identification could be a great wrong before it entered mainstream feminism. So no need to go on a rant against the evils of my free speech in this particular instance. Also, everyone’s comments go into moderation, so no need to feel personally singled out on that regard either.

“A couple of comments reprimanded me about how Thomas had moved to the right in the 1950s, on a path similar to Thomas Mann’s. […] The pressure exerted during McCarthyism was immense and it took almost superhuman strength to resist it”

I recently read a biography of Bayard Rustin, partially in the hope of getting some insight into how to integrate civil rights / racial justice and comprehensive social-democratic reform into one program. One might object: Rustin drifted towards the neoconservative right in his later years — did his theoretical framework already carry the germ of accommodation in the 1960s/70s? But: how easy was it to resist the neoliberal/Reaganite tide?

Seb@3:

I guardedly agree with J-D that I’m not 100% sure of precisely what brand of feminism you take as the new orthodoxy. However, it seems like it may be possible to engage some of what you say despite that.

From what I have seen, the shift in orthodoxy you refer to is broader than just feminism and encompasses progressive social justice activism in fairly sweeping terms, and it really is not surprising to me. Such disciplines get their theoretical underpinnings from academic theory, and academic theory is an elite pursuit. In the early ’00s, intersectionalism was making inroads into academia as an insurgent critique of limited elite orthodox perspectives… and quite tellingly, one of the most commonly cited intersecting identities was “poor”. Now, intersectionalism is orthodoxy, but essentialism is also orthodoxy… and poor is necessarily not a prominent consideration. You’re born with your hard-wired race/gender/orientation… but poverty? No, that’s a secondary matter that only arises from institutional oppression of the former categories (or choice, you DFH). It is entirely unsurprising that critical theory rejected non-essentialist modalities when intersectionalism threatened the orthodox elite.

The shift in position is only really disconcerting if you ignore the Iron Law of Institutions.

Yes, I agree the phenomenon is really interesting.

On the other hand, what other people think can be one of the facts that changed. This is particularly true of variants of the “lesser evil argument” which were very much in evidence before the last UK general election and the US presidential election.

If someone was saying, “Look, I know the left of the Democrats prefer Sander’s policies, but the important thing is defeating Trump, and Clinton has the best chance of doing that”, then they can in good faith claim that new facts — we now know that Clinton didn’t win against Trump — has caused them to have changed tactics, but their overall objective — supporting anyone who looks like they could defeat Trump — is basically unchanged.

The Guardian newspaper became significantly less anti-Corbyn once the general election results were out (although it still regularly features attack pieces), which looks like another instance of this.

The Krugman piece is kind of back-handed though (‘not crazy like the Tea Party’ is hardly a ringing endorsement).

Has it shifted? This feels a bit anecdotal to me – Kevin Drum made a similar point. It mostly seems like a greater willingness among news liberal types to talk about this stuff, while the Democratic establishment has been cautious in response.

Maybe it has a bigger impact in the New York state politics.

“I voted for Bernie enthusiastically. Then I was delighted at the opportunity to vote for Hillary. I am really pleased with the direction that Ocasio-Cortez’s victory will push the Democratic Party.”

I voted for Bernie enthusiastically, for Clinton as the prowar lesser evil (less dangerous than Trump, but still bad) and am enthusiastic about Ocasio- Cortez, who is a female Hispanic Bernie supporter. She worked for his campaign, I think. If you listen to her she is clearly in sympathy with Sanders critique of money in politics, which puts her at odds with what Clinton practiced. She is one of the few politicians ( Sanders is another) who criticized the Israeli massacre in Gaza recently. I don’t expect that position to become the mainstream Democratic one quite yet, but if it does it will be funny if people say this is what most Democrats thought all along. Similarly, I think it was just a few years ago that Clinton said single payer will never ever happen. I don’t think Medicare for all is quite the mainstream Democratic position at this point, but if it becomes so that seems to me to be a switch from the idea that we should treat it as forever unattainable.

Also, since the Republicans are the party of the far right, obviously there are going to be so called moderates and center right types in the Democratic Party, where they can do the bidding of their corporate donors while throwing a few bones to liberal voters. You can make a lot of money this way if you rise high enough. It would be remarkable if such people didn’t exist. Clearly they do and they have been running the Democratic Party.

PH, your reading of OC is a bit off, in my opinion. The mainstream utterly ignored her until she won and if you read some of the mainstream commentary, as in a NYT editorial recently, they downplay her leftwing positions and stress her youth and identity. They want her to be what you say she is— that doesn’t make it true.

Donald @50 “Similarly, I think it was just a few years ago that Clinton said single payer will never ever happen. ”

She did indeed make that argument, which may very likely prove to be correct given the high institutional barriers towards enacting a national single payer system, primarily the federal system and the Roberts court.

More to the point – no matter what way you slice it, a single-payer policy instituted under current conditions constitutes a fundamental reorganisation of a massive chunk of the economy, with a big impact on tens, if not hundreds of thousands of workers. It may be objectively true that much of the US high per capita healthcare costs are due to economically useless administrative bloat, but a significant chunk of the 99% put food on their tables thanks to that bloat.

This isn’t to say that a shift to single payer wouldn’t be worth it if that were the only path to universality. It isn’t. In fact, its arguably non-existent in Europe, where most states nevertheless manage to provide high quality universal healthcare.

Which brings us back to the problem of Sanders, who has whether by design or by accident made support for ‘single payer’ something of a Democratic litmus test, rather than support for ‘universality.’ As a result, instead of a policy discussion on how effective universality can be provided within the constraints of the US political system as it exists, Democratic candidates are having to sign on to a single, dubiously viable policy position, because it was an effective slogan for the Sanders campaign. This goes back to Bernie’s lack of interest in how he can actually achieve the goals he proposes, for which Clinton rightly lambasted him.

As an aside – in the 2008 primaries Clinton was significantly better on healthcare than Obama, insisting that the individual mandate was vital for healthcare reform as envisioned to function properly, while Obama was doing a bit of unicorn promising. Not a lot of her critics seem keen on remembering that.

@engels. Offhand, I can’t think of a good reference. But the implied theory behind what many people say about transgender is that gender identity is (a) hard-wired, i.e. not changeable after some developmental stage that is really early, possibly even occurring before birth; and (b) what a person’s gender is hardwired to isn’t always the same as what you might expect based on their genitals etc.. presumably due to some biological factor whose exact nature is (in most cases) currently unknown.

(In cases where the person has a known intersex condition, the biological factor has been identified … but that still leaves a lot of cases where the mechanism is as yet unknown).

Susan, yes, that’s my impression of the online left consensus, I just wondered if there was a scientific defence of it anywhere.

This entire piece seems to be about big changes in attitude and opinion, leaving me a little puzzled by the remark about “micro-shifts”. But I guess the general drift is this:

… the subtle coercions of new opinion, the ever-finer movements we all make to keep up with the flow, so as not to be left behind.

You want to be engaged with the world, to be part of the conversation, which means you can be influenced by the conversation, which means you may very well be exposed to some pressures to conform.

Much like the later Thomas Mann, I have difficulty talking about the left without quotations (though I’m more likely to use the adjective “lefty”). The present-day right is certainly a mess, it may indeed have always been a mess (which as I take it is Corey Robin’s main theme) but there were times in the past when the left was also decidedly a mess (and in some respects it still is [1])–

Why would you be shocked at the lack of intellectual integrity of someone who was a Stalinist on into the 1940s? Myself, I have a lot of respect from someone like Chomsky who’s managed to be left-wing his entire life without indulging in apologies for Stalin or Mao.

These days, periodically you see someone try to do a i-was-a-righty-until-trump piece but many people seem to view these with suspicion and regard them as phony ploys for attention of some sort. We pay lip service to the idea that people should be open to intellectual change– who could forget the genre where the author demonstrates open-mindedness with ritual lists of “things I’ve changed my mind about” (um… I see John Quiggin went there)– but when actually confronted with someone who has changed their mind, the reaction is often not very positive.

I have a tendency to use the Iraq war as a pundit-litmus test: In principle I’m willing to continue reading a pro-invasion pundit, but I want to see them recant, and I want to read their excuses– but really there isn’t anything they can say that’s going to impress me. If they’re blowing in the wind this badly, if they can ignore the obvious for the sake of fitting in with the pack, it’s unlikely they’ve got anything of value to add on anything.

[1] my standard example of present-day left-wing madness is the anti-nuclear power stance: if Jerry Brown were really serious about global warming, he would not have had the Diablo Canyon plant closed. I would feel happier about Ocasio-Cortez if she were in favor of clean energy, rather than just “renewable”.

Yan @39: I don’t know Daou and that link isn’t helpful, but I do follow Krugman pretty closely, and I don’t see any change at all in him. Engels @46 gets it right: Krugman compares O-C favorably to the Republicans. Certainly he preferred Bernie to Trump. There’s no change there.

The context was different for his comments about Bernie and those about O-C, that’s all. In both cases, his approach to the underlying policies and ideas is pretty much identical.

A lot of Bernie people (and Hillary people, too) weren’t really interested in policy the way that Krugman is — their political preference was invested in the candidates themselves, rather than the policy positions of the candidates. So if Krugman criticizes Bernie on a policy matter, if he later talks up Bernie-types while continuing to disagree on policy, that’s going to seem inconsistent. But it’s not.

I’d really like to see a response to Drum, liked by Brett@48.

Politicalfootball@60: “Krugman compares O-C favorably to the Republicans. Certainly he preferred Bernie to Trump. There’s no change there.”

Going by my admittedly faulty memory of a period I’m anxious to forget, it was not at all clear to me that Krugman saw Bernie favorably compared to the Republicans or Trump. As I recall, in the later stages of the election you could almost wrong the froth from his mouth from the electronic pages of his articles whenever he talked about Bernie. No doubt if Sanders had one the primary he’d have officially declared for the lesser evil, but he was rabid and frequent in his criticisms.

I think this gets to an issue in the post. What is strange is not always or necessarily a change in position or belief but in emotional charge and tone. People who were sputtering and puffing and raving with scorn and contempt for the left while officially agreeing on key points are now acting calm and reasonable in their modest agreement and disagreement as if that were always the case. It has something of a gaslighting element to it.

As to whether it’s orthodox to view race as biologically ordained… I refer you to l’affaire Dolezal. Activist orthodoxy now supports essentialism in this area.

Iirc the Dolezal controversy wasn’t about ‘essentialism’ (~biological determinism) but whether she could self-identity as black.

Politicalfootball #37: “Hillary’s objection to Sanders on healthcare was that his view was politically unrealistic.”

I remember this midway through the primaries and that’s when her balloon deflated for me. Why any politician would squelch idealism is inexplicable.

And it isn’t politically unrealistic: if there is a public option, the whole system would evolve fairly quickly into a two-tier system with a mass-based single-payer for standard medical coverage and a smaller upper tier of private add-on coverage for elective procedures and rhinestone-encrusted concierge service.

Re: trans politics and its supposedly inherent gender essentialism

I have found this article, from Red & Black Leeds, to be a helpful exploration of the issue.

But to lay out my own position further, there is a version of trans politics that takes seriously the analysis of gender as performance, rather than gender as an inherent property, and that complements gender nihilist or gender abolitionist positions. In this politics, trans (and cis) people who say that they “feel” they are gender x or y or z, with this gender as an inherent property of themselves, are engaging in a conservative, perhaps even reactionary, affirmation of gender essentialism. This should be unsurprising: we all, after all, live in a world rife with gendered expectations, and, like in all attempts to break out into the unknown, our grasping at liberation of all kinds often carries with it the remnants of the old world.

In this politics, trans is not something one “is”, as an ahistoric and pre-political property, but a political condition inflicted on some one because of the continued identification of sex with gender as well as gender and sex essentialism. A person is trans if they express outside the range of gendered expectations assigned to them, including how acts and what one’s body looks like or want one’s body to look like. This is something society does. Presumably, in a world after the end of gender, or at least after the end of assignment of gender and gendered expectations, there is no trans. What someone’s body looks like and what terms someone uses to talk about themselves, whatever those terms will be in this yet unknown future, will be matters of merely personal preference.

This may mean that, now, a person may still fit within a range of gendered expectations whether they are or are not those of the one assigned to them, and if they fit a masculine or feminine gender expression they might use that language for themselves as a matter of expediency, but this doesn’t yet immediately mean an affirmation of gender essentialism. It’s not until the politics and the story shifts to something like “I have always been x (or y or z), these categories are natural and inherent properties of me and other humans, pre-social and pre-political” or something like that that it then takes on its conservative nature. It is not something I am inclined to hardball, necessarily, given the worse politics of TERFs and others, but that’s what it is.

In this politics, trans politics are a part of and an affirmation of the feminist political project, to critically analyze and explode concepts of gender and gendered expectations. It goes without saying that TERF-y sex essentialism and sex and gender identification is not the way forward; but I would say that picking up gender essentialism as a way to defend trans politics, even if it is more immediately palatable for a society of gendered expectations (though, even then, not more palatable by much) is a political and strategic mistake.

As an aside – in the 2008 primaries Clinton was significantly better on healthcare than Obama, insisting that the individual mandate was vital for healthcare reform as envisioned to function properly, while Obama was doing a bit of unicorn promising. Not a lot of her critics seem keen on remembering that.

Opposition to promises of unicorns played a key role in the intelligent opposition to Bernie, as we see with Daragh@52 and Tamara@61. Probably the single most important reason that I supported Bernie, however, is that I am pro-unicorn.

People like the august David Frum, or the somewhat less than august Arianna Huffington, may very well be sincere, but there’s more than a whiff of opportunism and worse yet, Besserwisser-ism about most of them. Often enough political coalitions with people one instinctively doesn’t trust do indeed prove useful, but one must be vigilant.

If it were up to me to decide, I’d be glad to let such folks grab an oar if they really felt they had to, but I’d never let them near the tiller, which unfortunately is the place most of them feel is most suited to their skills and experience.

This seems more about American definitions of the left than any significant change of mind by liberals.

Unless she comes out of the closet as a wild-eyed tankie, AOC is a standard social democrat. That’s the default preference of normie liberals, so it’s unsurprising that they’re just shrugging and accepting it as their new politics now that, as Evans_TN said, they have permission to do so.

It’s more interesting to look at why liberals supported right-wing politics for so long.

For thirty years, the media said the left and right are equally extreme, Democrats said that the political centre is the only sensible and progressive position, and Republicans said that Democrats are radical bomb-throwing radical leftists. Liberals absorbed it all, and came to believe that the Democratic Party is leftist and defines the left, even as it moved steadily right.

For liberals it came as a shock, therefore, to wake up after Trump’s election and find a burgeoning political movement that is not only to their left, but does not consider Democratic politics leftist nor regard centrist liberals as revolutionary heroes.

AOC has arrived just as many liberals are getting over denial and recalibrating their political identity, and is presenting social democracy in a charismatic and unthreatening package.

Of course libs are all “socialists” now. They thought they always were.

A position which I affirm is this:
an individual’s identification as a member of a gender category is a subject on which that individual is authoritative, and other people shouldn’t (and can’t accurately) deny or invalidate the individual’s self-identity solely on the basis of anatomical, physiological, or genetic evidence.

A position which I reject is this:
an individual’s identification as a member of a gender category can be determined directly from anatomical, physiological, or genetic evidence even when that involves denying or invalidating the individual’s personal sense of gender identity.

In theory the tags ‘essentialism’ and ‘hard-wiring’ could be associated with both of those positions but in practice their use has the potential to confuse and not clarify what’s at issue in the active conflict between their adherents.

Liberal pundits are twisting themselves into pretzels trying to explain away Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s victory.
https://jacobinmag.com/2018/07/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-liberal-pundits

Yan: “Going by my admittedly faulty memory of a period I’m anxious to forget, it was not at all clear to me that Krugman saw Bernie favorably compared to the Republicans or Trump.”

I think the charitable thing to do with this is agree that it’s down to faulty memory, and leave it at that.

Ramshackle

In a society in which gender categories did not exist, it would obviously be true by definition that individuals would not use gender categories to identify themselves; but aspiring to the creation of such a society can’t change the fact that it is equally obviously true by definition that in societies in which gender categories do exist people do use gender categories to identify themselves.

…As for the argument on here about feminism, gender and sex: Where to start. I’ll just say this. Every reasonably educated person knows that gender orientation is neither down to biology nor socialisation. It’s a combination of the two working together. The “arguments” on here do no-one any favours.
Read Cordelia Fine, please.
When I hear the words “hard wired”, I reach for my gun. (Disclaimer for jumpy USians: this is a misquote of a popular quote, not a statement of intention.)

The OP and most of this thread seem to be a massive exercise in sub-tweeting, and I think it would be helpful if some examples were provided. Is Corey Robin actually talking about leftists, or is he referring to what LGM calls the “reactionary centrists” who aren’t actually left wing at all? I think there were lots of left wing people who thought Sanders couldn’t win or thought that his politics wouldn’t be popular with a lot of Americans, but I would say that 0% of those left wing people would have suggested not voting for him if he did win. The same I think applies to Corbyn. So the OP seems misdirected somehow.

The problem a lot of people had with BernieBros and the post-primary behavior of the left in America has nothing to do with Sanders’ policy positions and everything to do with the way they slandered Clinton continuously and openly argued for not voting or voting for Stein. Those people – the people who repeated Russian lies and the people who argued Clinton was worse than Trump (and we are still hearing this e.g. from Susan Sarandon) have a lot to apologize for. But I don’t think those people are the ones who are suddenly changing their views and joining the “far left” that Ocasio-Cortez represents (haha, as if she would be considered anything more than mainstream left in any other country).

Perhaps there is some mainstream pundit who is left wing (unlikely), who robustly attacked Sanders from the right, who claimed that Sanders’s politics was so terrible that if he won the nomination they wouldn’t vote for him, and who is now all aboard the Ocasio-Cortez train? If so I’d like to see who this strange and contradictory creature is. Stop sub-tweeting them and give me an example!

i appreciate mr. robin’s thoughtful piece above. as someone who has seen the left-liberal realm of politics as the best hope for humanity and as someone who started left of center and has only gotten more progressive over time i am tempted to use that old bromide “the church always loves to see converts but we don’t make them pope the next day.” perhaps that’s too glib.

another possibility regarding the shifts in democrats’ thinking is that because of the legislative and judicial work of the republicans over the past 18 months those structural factors which allowed 45 to be elected with a minority of the popular vote have only gotten more entrenched. this makes it vital for everyone to start rowing together. for the leadership– intellectual, legislative, etc– of the democratic party to start rowing in the direction of undeniably popular positions should be a matter of supreme self-interest.

For many of us lifetime radicals (much preferable to leftist since it’s about action) the big change unmentioned here is from national to local, without any significant shift in goals. I give money to the furthest left candidates I can find nationally, but my work on the ground is all within 20 miles of here. There are many like me.

How did the hipster burn his mouth?

He drank his coffee… before it was cool.

Yes you can argue for trans rights from a gender abolitionist perspective but ime the vast majority don’t. The mainstream view appears to be as Susan says: everyone has a gender, to which they have privileged epistemic access, and which does not necessarily match the body they were born with or the socialisation they were given. That doesn’t seem consistent with the view that gender is a patriarchally imposed fiction.

Layman @80

Yes, Layman is always the first name that comes to mind whenever I hear the word “charitable.” Well, second only to the name Faustusnotes.

Helen @84: “Every reasonably educated person knows that gender orientation is neither down to biology nor socialisation. It’s a combination of the two working together.”

While I agree with this view, I think the claim that every reasonably educated person believes or knows it is questionable.

“The “arguments” on here do no-one any favours. Read Cordelia Fine, please.”

Maybe I missed it, but I haven’t seen any posts purporting to make arguments for a particular view of gender. The main argument has been whether a segment of the left has historically held two incompatible views.

Ironically, after criticizing others arguments, you offer an appeal to authority: read so and so.

This is, after all, part of the problem with the left’s discourse on gender. I believe we have generally the correct view, but we do a very poor job of selling it, because both the early strong anti-essentialist view and the currently view, sometimes essentialist-seeming, sometimes more of a synthesis of the two, have been 1) asserted as matters of scientific fact by questionable appeal to authority rather than charitably explained and argued and 2) usually by appeal not to the sciences but the humanities.

A major influence in the anti-essentialism of 2nd wave feminism is, for example, Beauvoir, who gets it from existentialism. A major influence in 3rd wave feminism’s variation on anti-essentialism is Foucault and Butler.

Cordelia Fine is at least a psychologist, but what most skeptics need are arguments from experts in the hard sciences.

It’s true that the humanities have rightly critiqued the harder sciences’ pretense to epistemic neutrality, but to simply let people who are experts in social science at best, and Derrida, Shakespeare, or Husserl at worst, dictate scientific truths as settled, unquestionable matters is absurd.

One result of this is that some who are suspicious of Theory become reactionary scientific reductionists who fall back on antiquated, scientifically dubious biological theories of gender. It’s not helpful.

We need a real cooperative, comparative, and synthetic philosophical, psychological, biological, and neurological theory of sex and gender if we are to make progress on this.

Ramshackle @68, from the linked article:
“In this politics, trans is not something one “is”, as an ahistoric and pre-political property, but a political condition inflicted on some one because of the continued identification of sex with gender as well as gender and sex essentialism…. in a world after the end of gender, or at least after the end of assignment of gender and gendered expectations, there is no trans. ”

This article is very helpful–exactly what I had in mind by a synthesis between the older and newer left discourses on gender.

I’d add that I think that on the one hand, the fact that many don’t explicitly put the point the way that article does leads to some confusion. On the other hand, it may well be politically strategic to nevertheless allow for that confusion.

Given that many of the people we want to persuade tend to think about gender in an essentialist way, giving them the impression that transgender just is a newly discovered instance of the essentialist genders they’ve assumed exist may be the most effective way to change their moral attitudes.

I think a good analogy here is to the political strategy of arguing against homophobia that being gay isn’t a lifestyle choice but a way one is born and fundamentally is. That’s true, but it misleadingly implies that it’s only justified *because one can’t help it*. Being gay is okay, simply, period, not because it’s unchangeable. But that argument was politically effective because it made gay rights continuous with civil rights and feminism, so it was worth that misleading implication.

Btw of you want another example of the kind of thing Sebastian is talking about moral relativism might be it (meaning the idea that moral judgments are vary according to the culture and historical time in which they’re made). Two decades ago it was a shibboleth of the American campus left which American conservatives staunchly opposed. Now the sides in that culture war have flipped.

I don’t think people are changing their minds in most cases. I think they just hold contradictory beliefs and don’t realize it or maybe don’t care.

I think conservatives simultaneously believe that they’re enlightened economic minded people who recognize the utility of free trade unlike those liberals who want to muck up the economic order to save some blue collar jobs that are going extinct due to forces beyond our ken, and also that China is screwing us and we should have a trade war with them.

I think liberals simultaneously believe that gender is a spooky, undefined, but definitely inherent attribute that doesn’t necessarily meet biological sex, but also that no real world outcomes are attributable to gender, and that this is so obvious that anyone who suggests otherwise is a monster.

I could go on like this for some time.

I think people just pull out whatever belief fits the needs of the moment and apply it.

Everything is apologetics.

Except my beliefs and values, of course. Obviously this human universal doesn’t apply to me.

in a world after the end of gender, or at least after the end of assignment of gender and gendered expectations, there is no trans

In which case what is the term for people who have a right to public resources like eg facial laser hair removal to make their bodies conform better with their self-understanding of their gender? Or are you stipulating that they will no longer demand them?

I am honestly waiting for the idiocy surrounding current trans politics to die down, for the exact reasons stated: gender is a construct, and the current batch of politics surrounding trans folks is gender essentialism in different form. It all needs to come down.

Dysphorias are real, and we’ve learned that they are sometimes best treated by changing the body to match the mind’s self-conception. It’s a thing we have learned and can now do, due to our improved technologies. I don’t see that as something which will or should change.

But gender is still a construct, no matter how desperately attached to performing their preferred gender a given person is. That’s where people go off the rails. We’ll get back there fairly soon, I’m sure. There are far too many cis men who want to be nice to their kids and cis women who have ambition toward their careers for us to put up with this gender role nonsense much longer.

Engels @104

I want to be flippant and stipulate that they’ll be called “people who want laser hair removal” because by the time we’ve gotten over gender we’ll also all be godless communists, so if anybody wants lasers pointed at any part of their body then we can just fire away.

But on the underlying question about things like e.g. healthcare and health insurance, it’s the case now that, in our gendered society, it is more or less required of trans people to identify with a one of the binary genders in order to gain access to those services, where that’s an option in the first place anyway. That’s a practical matter of expediency and I have no problems with it.

– and I really don’t want to belabor the Apfelstrudel – but it really could be a fitting metaphor for this idea that basically everybody who is on the left is on the same side and so these funny fits about some who think they are ”leftier” than others – or not – and thusly invented the ”Bro” – even as some of US didn’t have any ”Bro” equipment – was so… so… cute? – and I liked them anywhoo and I even thought that Kate was such a great Hillary and Hillary probably would have been such an acceptable Kate – or even a ”Bernie” -(after a sex change?) – that I forgive them all – even my friend Paul – as he might have been a lot like Thomas Mann too – sometimes having his Strudel with Sahne and sometimes not?

Lobsterman @106,

But gender is still a construct, no matter how desperately attached to performing their preferred gender a given person is. That’s where people go off the rails. We’ll get back there fairly soon, I’m sure. There are far too many cis men who want to be nice to their kids and cis women who have ambition toward their careers for us to put up with this gender role nonsense much longer.

If you pardon me – how do you suggest we negotiate who gets to get pregnant and/or breast feed?

That “role nonsense” you so attack has reasons to exist. It’s not just a whim of the folks that just happened to be around recently on the planet. A political project that does not acknowledge that is just plain misanthropy.

engels

The mainstream view appears to be as Susan says: everyone has a gender, to which they have privileged epistemic access, and which does not necessarily match the body they were born with or the socialisation they were given. That doesn’t seem consistent with the view that gender is a patriarchally imposed fiction.

To me those positions don’t seem inconsistent. What inconsistency is apparent to you?

What inconsistency is apparent to you?

In the common pro-trans view gender is a cognition; in the radfem view it’s a choice (presently made under duress).

Over 100 comments in and noone is naming names or giving examples. This is an epic subtweet but it’s also useless. I can think of some Bernie Bros who attacked Clinton with lies taken from Russian operatives (the young Turks) and I’m happy to name names. I would like to see Corey (or anyone else really) do the same for these supposed leftists who attacked Bernie from the right and then converted to his cause recently. The idea it was Krugman has been comprehensively debunked up above. So who is it?

As usual Mario is waffling. The left is the stuck with just morals and principles, they have a definite and popular program – uhc, gun control, enhanced democracy etc. It’s a good program and it has concrete plans. Mario is just attempting to pretend the left is a movement of nothing more than safe spaces and trigger warnings. Boring!!

I think the terf vs trans activist battle needs to be recast as a right vs. left battle rather than an internecine squabble. Radical Feminism is a conservative and misogynist movement based on the worst kind of reductive gender esssentialism with anti liberal goals and strong sympathies for religious and political conservatives. They hate sex workers, treating them as quislings, and they exclude young women and anyone who doesn’t fit their narrow sexual and social morals from their movement. Recently they aligned with the Republicans to pass sesta/fosta, which does nothing to protect vulnerable women and everything to harm sex workers. The struggle for trans rights against this branch of feminism is not an internecine squabble but a battle against an illiberal and weird arm of conservatism.

@117
Good to know that I’m not the last human on Earth who took introductory Cultural Anthropology.

After several attempts to identify the specific differences distinguishing Sanders from other politicians who either self-identify as socialists, or are labeled as socialists (none of which made it through moderation), let’s try with a more general observation – namely that not all politicians are alike, irrespective of the political label.

Misunderstanding the mood of the electorate has real consequences.

Support for charter schools is high among African-American young adults. Most Americans support strong borders and want more legal immigration. Bernie Sanders is regarded negatively by many Democrats and some Republicans, but for different reasons.

Running against Trump means running against the master of this tactic – low-energy Jeb was just the first of his many victims. That said, if the stakes are high enough, and they were in 2016, many anti-Trump voters would have ignored the long-standing American antipathy towards ‘socialism’ and pulled the lever for Bernie – in large part because Bernie has an long track record of taking principled stands while usually voting with the Democratic party.

Calling a known factor like Bernie a name would not have scared off voters rightly concerned about a Trump-Pence partnership controlling the Supreme Court picks up to 2020, and perhaps for another decade. Those were the stakes then and those are the stakes now.

I supported Bernie because I believed and believe could have won, and that he was the best candidate. I’m equally confident Biden might have held Wisconsin and rust-belt areas the Democratic candidate chose to largely ignore.

A large number of Americans support policies that once looked and sounded socialist – such as Medicare, Social Security, and the right-to-collective bargaining, but that are at the core of modern American life today. These projects were enacted from the grass roots up, not by ‘messaging machines’ and photogenic candidates.

Tell an American you’re a socialist and expect the conversation to end 7 times out of ten. The right will pick apart any individual who stands in opposition. Bernie and his track record can withstand that scrutiny. Bernie might have some skeletons, but the only one we heard of was his ‘possible atheism’ and ‘difficulties connecting the black voters.’

I supported Bernie in 2016, given the choices. That would be a tougher call today with Biden in the race. Democrats are in still in shock. Believing that yesterday’s battle plan will win today’s messaging war seems an extremely poor strategy given the stakes.

Biden was the principal target of the DNC’s successful effort to rig the Democratic primary. (Sanders wasn’t even on their radar.) After Trump it’s a fairly safe bet that safe hands will be an important factor in selecting the next president. In the short term, the mid-terms, running ‘socialist’ blue candidates in races that are blue is a strategy that requires some thought. Socialism remains a dirty word in America, like it or not.

As this will be my last post for a while, one way or the other, I’ll link to an article that includes links to two polls: one that confirms Americans don’t respond well to the word ‘socialist’ and another that shows support for Democrats dropping among young white voters, a ten-point lead now indicating dead even. (Apologies if there are problems with the link. Should be easy enough for the curious to fix.)

https://spectator.org/beware-the-red-wave/

Sebastian I didn’t say the Dems weren’t conservative and misogynist! (Though actually in this case I think they were partially misled as were the stupid celebrities who supported it. Anti sex work activists can use quite illiberal means to win their goals).

Donald, at last someone makes an effort to identify the people involved, though again only by invoking Krugman, whose contribution was more thoroughly investigated uptread. The problem with your Iraq war deal-breaker is that Sanders hasn’t exactly been a saint on Iraq. He voted for sanctions and defended his vote even when the (now shown to be erroneous) claims of half a million ddead children were being broadcast. It also seems irrelevant since the people Corey is describing probably aren’t coming back to the fold via an acknowledgement of their error on Iraq. We don’t know if course because 120 comments in and we still don’t have a single concrete example of who these terrible people were.

engels

In an earlier comment you suggested there was an inconsistency between two positions, the first of which held (I hope this paraphrase does not distort your meaning but perhaps you’ll let me know if it does) that each individual has a gender and ‘privileged epistemic access’ to that gender (you suggested this one was ‘mainstream’) and the second of which held that gender is a ‘gender is a patriarchally imposed fiction’. Now you suggest that there is an inconsistency between the view that gender is a cognition (which you call the ‘common pro-trans view’) and the view that gender is a choice (which you call the ‘radfem view’).

I get how the view that each individual has privileged epistemic access to ‘uns own gender can be summarised as ‘gender is a cognition’; but I’m not clear on the supposed relationship between the view that gender is a patriarchally imposed fiction and the view that it’s a choice.

In any case, I don’t think there’s a necessary inconsistency between supposing that gender is a cognition and supposing that it is a choice; and I also don’t think there’s any necessary inconsistency between supposing that gender is a cognition (the ‘privileged epistemic access’ view) and supposing that it is a patriarchally imposed fiction.

I don’t think any of those forms of words (which I’m trying just to quote from you) are the clearest way of expressing the way I perceive the issue; please let me know if you think it would help for me to try to spell out my own position more thoroughly.

Mario:

“Back in the day there was a realistic alternative political project, which, in principle, had something for everyone.”
…
“As a consequence, the left has, in practice, accepted capitalism as the baseline scenario and is playing by its rules while pretending something else.”

I for one think you should say more about this. What was this realistic alternative political project, the one that didn’t accept capitalism as the baseline scenario and which had, in principle, something for everyone? Who espoused it, and when and where? What happened to it, and to those glorious people who carried it out? I’m intrigued, because it sounds quite nice, really, but I’m buggered if I can recall anything about that golden time at all.

(It strikes me that you could replace the word ‘left’ with the word ‘right’ in your analysis and the explanatory value would not be altered one bit. The right is not what it was. The right has no realistic project with something for everyone. The right only has its principles and morals. The right plays by the rules of capitalism while pretending something else. The right can’t offer anything to the working class. The right uses their principles and morals as branding tokens. All bland, broadly applicable generalities. It’s just an exercise in reading palms, or tea leaves.)

Tell an American you’re a socialist and expect the conversation to end 7 times out of ten.

Nearly 45 percent of millennials polled said that they would prefer to live in a socialist country compared to the 42 percent who said they preferred a capitalist one. Another 7 percent said that the preferred living in a communist country above all.
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/11/03/millennials-think-socialism-would-create-great-safe-space-study-finds.html

Tell an American you’re a socialist and expect the conversation to end 7 times out of ten.

When I tried to register to vote in Wyoming as a democratic socialist, the person registering me shot me a very puzzled look and asked “is that ‘Independent’?” I just chuckled and said “alright, let’s go with that”.

politicalfootball: “People need to use the restrooms and locker rooms that they are comfortable using.”

Amen to that. I can tell you that, whenever I find myself in the situation of having to use a public restroom, of all the things I worry about, the gender of the last person who used it doesn’t register.

“In the wake of the primary victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, there’s been a dramatic shift in mainstream liberal opinion—in the media, on social media, among politicians, activists, and citizens—toward Sanders-style positions.”

I’m not seeing this myself, but perhaps I’m looking in the wrong places. What I have seen is that Sanders-endorsed or -inspired candidates overall haven’t been doing that well, despite the occasional upset win like that of Kara Eastman of Nebraska. Sanders hasn’t done as much as he might to capitalize on the infrastructure he built in 2016. (If Ben Jealous wins the governorship of Maryland, however, that would be a really big win for Bernie.)

I’m delighted for Ocasio-Cortez, BTW. Good for her.

I don’t think any of those forms of words (which I’m trying just to quote from you) are the clearest way of expressing the way I perceive the issue

No doubt. Feel free to use your own. I still think there’s a clear and fundamental difference between discovering a fact and making a decision and I can’t see that you’ve provided any argument to the contrary.

Mario: “it was Communism, of course.”

So your critique of the left is that it’s no longer trying to sell its good program, communism, and therefore has nothing good left to sell? You should be sure to add to that “…and I am absolutely not a crank.”

“It would have been nice to have lived in a world where the last clause of your sentence actually happened. Instead the cranky old guy did, indeed, point out her weaknesses (some real, some not) on a variety of OTHER issues, but on foreign policy was mostly silent, and when he did speak offered some vague critiques but mostly supported the liberal interventionist consensus.”

Sanders voted against the Iraq War when Clinton voted for it. This teensy little difference should mean something all by itself. After some pushing from the left during the Gaza War in 2014, and yes, I saw a video of him yelling at pro Palestinian demonstrators, he started criticizing Israel.

I know his weaknesses— I have read the criticisms of people to his left, but the difference between Sanders and Clinton is that he shifted to the anti interventionist side a lot more easily than she ever would. Clinton is by reflex an interventionist— for far too long Sanders was one out of inertia, but again, he changed. I remember him criticizing ( and overstating the death toll by confusing it with casualties) Israel’s war in Gaza during the New York primary. There was a clear difference between Sanders and Clinton. He even made the point that she was friends with Kissinger, and yes, that friendship does tell you something about Clinton.

We Sanders voters are sometimes accused of purism and not being able to see very real differences between candidates because we want perfection. This is only true of a minority. However, you are arguing in exactly that way.

“even when the (now shown to be erroneous) claims of half a million ddead children were being broadcast. ”

This is a side note. I have seen the claim that the half million figure is discredited and tentatively accept it. At the same time, I find it impossible to believe that we could have bombed water treatment facilities and imposed draconian sanctions on a country without causing a rise in mortality rates. I suspect tens of thousands of dead wouldn’t show up in the various surveys conducted a decade later.

As for Sanders, his record is far from perfect as I just wrote in a different reply. But you don’t need to be anywhere close to perfect to be significantly better than Clinton. I obviously am not a Clinton fan, but it wasn’t hard to see her as better than Trump.

Thanks, Corey! And as the perfect-on-topic parting gift –

Hillary will be the Democratic nominee in 2020, only this time ‘fair and square.’

So, you all can have a do-over and relive that happy time once more. Is she done? Her majesty make that decision for you all.

I see her beating Trump in 2020. For real.

https://nypost.com/2018/07/07/is-hillary-clinton-secretly-planning-to-run-in-2020/

Call it a welcome return to normality.

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– and the following might be really worth repeating:

”Ever-increasing rates of technological change will result in people constantly moving around the country to new jobs, work will shift from manufacturing to knowledge work, industries will die off and constantly be replaced by new ones, the U.S. will offload its manufacturing to 3rd world countries and move to high-profit knowledge work that will vastly increase the income of the average U.S. worker, and so on. All completely wrong”.

Mobility of workers in the USA has dropped to record lows because the interior of the USA is now depopulating and mired in poverty and chronic drug addiction due to the destruction of the middle class by shipping all the high-paid blue collar jobs overseas. Meanwhile, the areas with high-paying jobs are on both coasts, where housing and everything else has become so expensive average people can’t afford to live there”.

Yes?

”Converting the USA to knowledge work seemed like a good economic model”.

Not – for anybody who know how few jobs ”knowledge work” creates.

”So ‘globalization sounded completely reasonable and sensible when it was proposed in the 1970s”.

It’s still ”completely reasonable” for any ”Producing Country” – where well paying manufacturing jobs were kept.

”Only in retrospect does it become clear what a gigantic trainwreck it turned out to be, and why”.

Only in ”Consuming Countries” -(like the US) – where the inequality of high paying ”knowledge work” and ”Finance” and poor paying ”service jobs” let to the trainwreck and the funny idea that it is the fault of ”trade” – while trade created million an million of better and better paying jobs in ”Producing Countries” – which could lead us to Mario and @135

”For example, while it is mostly an illusion, the right offers jobs”

Yes –
it’s mostly a illusion – as only ”Producing Countries” offer jobs – while ”Consuming Countries” -(with their right wing idiots) – don’t – or better said they NEVER-EVER will offer enough ”good” jobs to make our workers happy -(again)- and that’s why we need politicians like AOC!

And that IS – because we actually DON’T live in a fog of uncertainty??!
-(saying: Nearly everybody on CT knows how well ”Social-Democratic Producing Countries” work)

– and furthermore – and as Paul Krugman’s name was mentioned a few times – let’s wonder if he in the meantime changed his mind since he wrote in 1999:

Well, here’s my theory: The real divide between currently successful economies, like the U.S., and currently troubled ones, like X , is not political but philosophical; it’s not Karl Marx vs. Adam Smith, it’s Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative vs. William James’ pragmatism. What X really want is a clear set of principles: rules that specify the nature of truth, the basis of morality…. Americans, by contrast, are philosophically and personally sloppy: They go with whatever seems more or less to work….

Now, the American way doesn’t always work better. Even today, Detroit can’t or won’t make luxury cars to X standards; Amtrak can’t or won’t provide the precision scheduling that X take for granted. America remains remarkably bad at exporting; the sheer quality of some X products, the virtuosity of X engineering, have allowed X to remain a powerful exporter despite having the world’s highest labor costs.

But the world has changed in a way that seems to favor flexibility over discipline. With technology and markets in flux, not everything worth doing is worth doing well”.

-”not everything worth doing is worth doing well”????!
-(he as a so called ”economist” really wrote that!)

AND in order NOT to distract I took the freedom to use X for the name of ”a” Producing Country – any ”Producing” Country –
and did I mention – that’s why WE should support AOC?
-(without ever having to change our minds)

Gender is not a performance. Many people perform the gender they have but the gender itself is not a performance. This idea of gender vs sex, gender as script – it’s a deeply misogynist and backwards idea. There is a bees dick of difference between the PUA douchebag who says all women wear makeup to trap men and can’t be trusted, and the radfem who says all women are performing feminity to confirm to a patriarchal standard. It’s based in evil Christian ideas about women as the cause of the fall. Expunge these ideas, you don’t believe them because they have compelling evidence in their support, but because your Christian heritage is polluting your view of sex.

Mario says communism had an appeal to workers because it had a program. To paraphrase Stalin, how many electoral districts does he have? Communism’s popularity was never tested at the ballot box, it was enacted by a vanguard. Decent political programs don’t have that luxury. So the comparison is dumb. As for the idea that workers won’t get what they want under left wing policies until trans rights are complete – why don’t you ask Obama’s NLRB picks whether they’re waiting for the trans utopia before they protect workers.

Still noone has identified anyone who confirms to Corey’s model. Anybody? Anybody?…. Bueller?

I love the reference to Thomas Mann, particularly as the German government has bought Mann’s house in Pacific Palisades and is turning it into an institute. Cause, uh, the German government actually spends money on culture.
So I like that.
Myself, I think a better comparison on changing minds is that between Thomas and his brother, Heinrich. In the Observations of a Non-Political Man, Thomas was after his brother – his brother, who during the war, provocatively published a book on Emile Zola. To my mind, at least, changing one’s mind has to take into account Thomas Mann’s irony – that was at the center of his politics as well as his art. It was an irony that Mann took from a liberal tradition that he was attacking in the Non-Political Man book – a tradition which bets a lot on the idea of unexpected consequences, which can be traced back a long way to, say, the Greeks, but for the moderns goes back, I think, to the philosophes. In the note he devoted to the Regency in his Precis of the Reign of Louis XV, Voltaire marveled at the consequences of the rise and fall of John Law’s system in France: “Finally, that famous system of Law or Lass, which seemed it must ruin the regency and the state, in fact sustained one and the other by some consequences that nobody could have foreseen.”.

For Mann in 1919, nobody could have foreseen that Germany would lose – nobody, that is, except all the people who were right all along, like his brother, Heinrich. I think that is a lesson that he tried to apply with more success in art than in his political positioning. Heinrich, of course, went from being the successful Mann to brother of Thomas, but he still maintained his faith in the Zola kind of intellectual. Which is why the East Germans brought his body back from its place in a cemetery in Santa Monica to Berlin, I believe.
The lesson is that there is a lotta traps out there, I guess.

”The lesson is that there is a lotta traps out there, I guess”

Like getting into a typical American gender-discussion? – as didn’t I tell’ya that AOC is a ”Bro” too -(besides NOT having what a lot of you guys might have between y’alls legs)

-(and I hope this comment get’s censored)

That should have been rise of facism not communism at the end of my last post.

Quite a generous and thoughtful take on Thomas Mann. I couldn’t have mustered the mental energy because I never could stand Thomas. The Manns are of course part of my cultural heritage (and school learning). I wanted to write that Golo (son of Thomas) was still alive when I was little, but it’s probably because he died when I was a teenager and would absorb the TV tributes that I know more about him. *He* *nearly* ended up a German Social-Democrat and supported the student movement of 68, which would have been antithetical to his father; but then, he reverted to form in his old age.

But I always liked Heinrich, this so-called less talented brother. Der Untertan — why is this title, this very common German word which would be useful in the current US situation, so hard to translate? it’s not “The Non-Political Man”; one translation, available as a PDF online, uses “The Patrioteer”, which makes me smile but is not, to my knowledge, a very convincing English word; “The Loyal Subject” is clunky, but at least gets the idea roughly right… — was always one of those books we were made to read in school and it was a good thing. It stabs right at the heart of something important, painfully so. I very much recommend the book.

Thomas, in contrast, for all that he was making the right choice at some critical junctures that some of his peers missed, never doubted in his own importance: it was the choices of people like him, educated men from affluent Christian German families, that mattered. His books are full of descriptions of the, how do I say this in English (Befindlichkeiten? états d’âme?), affective state and sensitivities of people of his class. And characters mourning and fighting progress to stem its decline.

As for who exactly you (Corey) allude to as having changed their mind, it’s a little hazy so forgive me everything I undoubtedly will get wrong. But it seems to me a very natural development to go from supporting Clinton to supporting/rejoicing about Ocasio-Cortez now. There’s a difference between what the pundits say and how people (I want to say citizens, but I’m not one and am part of this nonetheless) think about their political preferences. And in the case of “progressive Bernie-bros vs. neoliberal Hillary-bots” (<– pundit version) it became and still is an abyss. Among the people I know who're outside the media complex (ie, don't write for national papers or have a political podcast), only very few fall into these patterns. Sure, some are middle-of-the-road centrists and will always be middle-of-the-road centrists, they get head shy if you mention anything more radical than means-tested benefits, and by-and-large they supported Clinton. (Where they'll fall under more intense fascistic pressures, which it looks like the are developing, is anyone's guess and vary from person to person. I note that those among them who are non-white and female are by now ready to staff the barricades… speak about changing one's mind!) But as for the much larger number of Clinton supporters I know, some had Clinton as their senator and respect her for how she went about that office; some are moved by the personal story and resilience that was needed to withstand the shit that came her way including caused many times by her own husband; some started out supporting Sanders but became disenchanted, were happy about how Clinton's position had moved somewhat to the left and accepted that the time to reorient the disastrous foreign policies had apparently not yet come. For all of these, supporting candidates like Ocasio-Cortez now is a very natural step, no break whatsoever. (The two have something rather central in common, too, after all.)

When you talk about people changing their mind, I think it's a good idea to check if you were wrong, at least partially, in the first place.

(J-D: Great comment re: choice. Very succinctly put. My fellow LGB friends came to similar conclusions when talking about choice in sexual orientation.)

J-D: Great comment re: choice. Very succinctly put. My fellow LGB friends came to similar conclusions when talking about choice in sexual orientation.

A rather unfortunate choice of acronym in context (my understanding is this issue is mostly specific to trans people).

@
”As any Iraqi can tell you”.

You meant as any Trump can tell you?

Or – wait? –

Nothing else loves Von Clownstick more – than attacking countries -(and their representatives) the US has peaceful and mutually beneficial relations with?

engels@163

Or for that matter would the US and UK have invaded if Iraq was a market for American goods, or Iraqi companies were a part of some MNC’s supply chain?

P.S. I’m not actually objecting to what the contributors apart from Sebastian H actually said it this thread, just noting that we let ourselves fall for the diversion .. and I think this kind of diversion in the wider political context could be really dangerous.

It was Sebastian H who brought it up in the first place; if he hadn’t, it probably wouldn’t have occurred to the rest of us to mention it. Notably, it wasn’t a trans person who brought it up. Indeed, we see Ghost Bird — who is the most likely to know something about the topic at hand — deciding, quite possibly correctly, that the whole discussion is likely to be a waste of time, and wandering off.

In fairness it must also be noted that Sebastian H has wandered off.

Is O-C such a change? [Nice choice of initials, if I say so myself]
She said she is trying to represent the views of her community, which is unusual, working class, urban, and immigrant. It should be expected to be an outlier.

Now for some of the other issues:
J-D thinks the left spends way too much time/energy on trans issues, and not much on actual working class issues. Certainly regarding perceptions, that is the case. It may be in the White Working Class’s economic interest to vote D, but they don’t actually know it.

McLaren @141.
I never read Future Shock, but those predictions seem pretty descriptive of much of the current situation. There in fact are enough good information jobs, to create good opportunities for maybe ten percent of the population. What wasn’t predicted, is how much these opportunities would cluster into a handfull of places, and that many of these jobs would be filled by legal immigrants, whose appetite for education seems to exceed our own.

About crime: I happen to think the lead hypothesis has a lot of explanatory power.

That brings up another area where the right is able to manipulate perception. Most of the things
that they get traction of portraying as being dangerously out-of-control, are in fact in substantial
statistical decline: Illegal immigration, is now roughly a quarter of what it was less than two decades ago. Similarly for abortion. Crime is down by about half. But the widespread perception is that these are all exploding. And fear of such drives the voting public ever more to the right.

I also directly called out Republicans shifting on Russia, but it seems as if we see the distractions we want to see.

Omega Centauri

J-D thinks the left spends way too much time/energy on trans issues, and not much on actual working class issues.

No! Have you perhaps confused me with Mario? (Would that be unflattering to both of us?)

Mario thinks that the left is too concerned with trans issues, and not enough concerned with the problems of the working class; I think that Mario is dead wrong about this.

Certainly regarding perceptions, that is the case.

It is obviously the perception of some people, or at least of Mario if of nobody else; but I don’t know of any evidence to support a conclusion about how widely the perception is shared.

SusanC makes a good point, and the falsehood Mario is repeating illustrates it.

@172
”What wasn’t predicted, is how much these opportunities would cluster into a handfull of places”

AND what wasn’t predicted, is how much these opportunities would lead to –
US workers ”mired in poverty and chronic drug addiction due to the destruction of the middle class by shipping all the high-paid blue collar jobs overseas” – and these workers election of a a German Baron von Clownstick as President.

engels

As a result of your mentioning handedness, I looked up the Wikipedia page on the subject, and discovered two things; one is that there have been some studies which suggest the possibility of a correlation between handedness and gender identity (and also a correlation between handedness and sexual orientation); the other is that observations of infants show that the development of handedness is complex, suggesting (to me; this last part isn’t Wikipedia) the possibility that handedness is, or can be, partly the product of choices made in infancy. You can look up the Wikipedia page for yourself if you’re interested in more details.

To be clear, for what it’s worth, my guess is that gender identity is not the product of choice. But how much is it worth? I know it’s just a guess. How much do you remember about your life, and the choices you made, before you were four? before you were two? before you were twelve months old? before you were six months old? So how certainly can you report what you did or didn’t do, or choose, then? Obviously we have no direct-from-the-source information about choices as they are being made by pre-verbal children, but I don’t feel that’s enough to justify me in concluding that pre-verbal children don’t make choices. Maybe they don’t; but then again maybe they do; and if they do, maybe some of those choices have the capacity to affect gender identity as experienced and reported at a later stage. My guess is still that they don’t, but I would not be surprised to have that guess disproved.

The report experience of the overwhelming majority of people who are old enough to discuss the subject (and not just transgender people but also cisgender people) suggest very strongly that they experience gender identity as something fixed which can’t be altered by choice; but there’s not an automatic incompatibility between its being fixed from an early point in life (the position supported by the weight of the evidence) and its being possibly subject to some influence, at least in some cases, by choices made at a still earlier stage.

So my feeling about your earlier suggestions about some statements being necessarily incompatible with others is that the situation is more complex; and what you described as a shift from one position to another inconsistent with it seems to me more like the progressive development of a more nuanced view in which more complexities are articulated, qualifying earlier understandings but not necessarily flatly contradicting them.

Finally, what seems to me to be of much more practical importance is not whether there’s a conflict between the idea of gender identity being fixed from early in life and the idea of its being affected by choice, but whether there’s a conflict between the idea of individuals having a gender identity fixed from early in life, to which they have privileged epistemic access, and the idea of its being a social construct. There isn’t. Being a social construct doesn’t mean being a fiction or an illusion. Money, for example, is a social construct. Money functions, and plays a huge role in people’s lives, because people believe in it; but people do believe in it, and so it does function and play a huge role in people’s lives; and you can’t individually stop this from being true just by saying that you individually don’t believe in it any more.

Here’s a wonderful Australian example of someone who has shifted from Left to Right and then back to Left again

That’s not Kate Manne’s Dad is it?

Having reread the thread, people might want to read the first paragraphs of this https://purplesagefem.wordpress.com/2015/03/29/what-it-means-to-be-woman-identified-or-male-identified/ which I suspect Sebastian had misunderstood.

The 90s version of “gender studies” which seemed to involve many gay men and male feminists seems to have vanished from public view, if it ever was in public view, as well.

Of course by then, being “woman identified” had come to mean learning from your mother more than your father or (presumably male-identified) teachers, hanging out in the single-sex women-only group at parties, and liking cooking more than science. Pretty radical and anti-capitalist!

@180 J-D
I wasn’t going to say anything on this, but I like J-Ds comment @180 and it reminds me much of something a trans friend of mine said as she made her transition.

She used a growing a plant analogy and asserted that soil, sunlight and water are all necessary for a person to identify, accept and act upon being trans (she may have gotten this from somewhere else – I don’t know).

Soil she said is what’s in you. Its some disposition along a spectrum that causes dysphoria between your biological sex organs and how you perceive yourself. This may be there irrespective of whether the individual recognizes it or not or acts on it or not.

Sunshine is the environment in which the person operates. In oppressive, close minded home or society a person may feel trans but may also be made to feel unwilling or unable to act upon it. They may feel the risk is not worth what they see as the benefit. We read many stories like this of people felt ‘trapped’ in their gender role late into life and only when enough sunshine was about were they willing to let the idea grow.
The TV show Transparent is quite based on this premise to name a popular example. Society is far more open to trans now than it was 10, 20, 30 years ago and this ‘sunshine’ if you will even makes these kind of discussions possible.

Water she than said is the willingness to act. This is ultimately the sustaining force – ones willingness to make the change within themself, accept that the soil is there, allow the sunshine to warm the ground and the seed to take root. Watering that soil and accepting oneself and believing then sets that path for transition.

I don’t know where any of this fits on deterministic or non-deterministic or anything else – I’m a finance guy not a social scientist, but to me this was an elegant analogy and helped me to understand a little of what goes on for a trans person and how they might understand what part of the equation is within them and what part is within society. Maybe others will find it useful as well.

I know this is an off-strand, but it seemed like it was a topic still getting attention.

Look, I am a rural peasant. I have noticed, over the years, that bulls cannot safely be trusted to behave like oxen, nor like cows. Anyone doubting this is invited to go into a field containing a bull.

Now, is that on account of social conditioning of cattle by some sort of bovine patriarchy, or is it innate?

On the actual topic of the post, I think people (maybe increasingly) don’t want coalitions, much less movements, they really just want to make converts, or actually they want to go around making mini-conquests here and there. They may talk about gender performativity and social construction in the abstract, but what they really mean is, “you see how you’ve been passive aggressive all this time as an excuse while blaming me for being sexist, while in fact you’ve been performing femininity instead of doing your work in a proper ungendered way,” or maybe “you see how much better than you at adulting I am.” “Thank you for your offering, but get back on your own side of the altar rail, or the choir loft will become too crowded.” “Aha, good point! Now see how I use prep school debating skills to get the point for making it myself.” The left wants to persuade others of its positions, but they’re the same as anybody in enjoying the persuading at least as much as the end-state of agreeement, and if liberals take the same positions as leftists, then leftists will be left with nothing to argue with them about.

J-D,

surely you can show me fora where I can accurately sample the priorities of the left / liberals. Just today I opened The Guardian and it had a lot of mixed stuff of world politics, Kids in Thailand, etc, but nothing on the NHS, housing crisis, and other topics of this kind. But sure enough it had (i’m tempted to write “of course” here) a sad-face piece denouncing that trans actresses cannot get roles in Hollywood.

Here in Germany, the coalition running the city of Berlin (not the German government) is running on a program that has more pages on LBGT issues than on building schools and finding teachers.

SusanC,

Conservatives often bring up the trans subject because bringing it up is a cheap end effective political tactic. You just throw the issue into a room of lifestyle leftist and boy do they go off. Witness this very same thread.

And the tactic is effective because the issue actually bothers a lot of people, even liberally minded people, quite a lot. And it touches them where it hurts. If you want to see a glimpse of the full toxic potential of this issue in terms of politics, google for “puberty blockers custody”. If you are running for office, I, as a parent, really want to know where you stand on that issue.

Mario makes a ludicrous analysis of the guardians coverage of “working class” issues by saying it has nothing on the NHS on a day that the foreign sec resigns and the brexiteers plan begins to unravel, there is a chemical weapons attack on the UK and Trump announces his SCOTUS nominee.

Except it has a bio of the health minister, and an article on the universal credit debacle, an issue the guardian has pursued relentlessly (and thanklessly it would appear judging from Mario’s sneers) for years.

Is this what passes for analysis in Super Mario World? You open a newspaper you think is left wing on a random day and if it has no articles on the NHS you declare it to be fetishizing trans issues? You’ll go far in politics Mario, you really will.

Nope

It seems to be:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Manne

@194+192

”Here in Germany” – we specialize in reading just what we want to read in newspapers -(I only read ”Kultur” and ”Todesanzeigen”) – and the rest of the paper is used for filling the paper recycling bin – a far FAR more important and pondered -(I love this word) – issue than some ”gender stuff”!

So my feeling about your earlier suggestions about some statements being necessarily incompatible with others is that the situation is more complex; and what you described as a shift from one position to another inconsistent with it seems to me more like the progressive development of a more nuanced view in which more complexities are articulated, qualifying earlier understandings but not necessarily flatly contradicting them.

I don’t see how this connects with anything specific I wrote. It seems mainly to be a rather passively-aggressively formulated general insinuation that your undertanding of these issues is more ‘complex’, ‘nuanced’, etc, and from that superior vantage point the opposition I have taken some trouble to spell out in detail simply goes away. I can’t see that it does. However complicated you wish to make things, construction (social or individual) is not the same thing as cognition.

Btw and on topic, here’s a recent US article on democratic socialism:

http://theweek.com/articles/783700/democratic-socialism-bad-why-norway-great

…democratic socialism is a political tradition aiming broadly at democratic control of the economy, achieved through electoral processes. In concrete terms, that generally means a completed cradle-to-grave welfare state plus democratic ownership of big swathes of the economy through mechanisms like a social wealth fund or state-owned enterprises. Importantly, this definition rules out authoritarian systems like the state socialism seen in the Soviet Union. Democracy means at a minimum regular, free, and fair elections, where a conservative party has a real chance of victory.

Which iirc means Britain c1980 was a democratic socialist state. Wish we’d appreciated it at the time!

many very interesting comments, but i find myself puzzled by the OP’s implicit premises concerning what politics as philosophical discourse is (the nature of the beast), and what it would mean for an individual person to be “consistent“ over time.

it seems to me that political discourse is a stream into which it is not possible to step into at the same place twice. and, it also seems to me that political discourse always reflects the panoply of human ambivalence amidst deep uncertainty about the consequences of public choices conditioned against private actions. could anyone strive to either embody the full range of ambivalence or be “right”? i think not.

our political opinions are in the nature of hedges: expressions of some thing we think we “know” balanced against a background of things we choose not to focus on or fully consider. and we bet our hedges socially, aligning with others on the basis of some portfolio of salients, and in historical time, ephemeral salients at that. dare i add, for and against? push-pull marching in step

the split that opened in the Democratic coalition in the 2016 primaries was just as startling and rapid as the current spate of coming together.

I tend to think of them much less the product of malevolent inconsistency, but rather as a sign that, somehow collectively we’ve learned something. Not in a scholarly or scientific sense, but more simply in the sense that shreds of understanding that were controversial, marginal or not really formulated 20 years ago have become relatively widely accepted as at least building blocks of how this stuff works. We don’t even use some words in exactly the same sense any longer. This doesn’t mean that what used to be cornerstones of feminist thought… were wrong. Clearly they weren’t. But pushing the criticism into a more radical formulation… didn’t quite work out, at least not without interrogating what we mean… At the same time, just because something is performative it doesn’t mean that it’s *only* performative… Overall, I think we’ve made some (maybe limited, maybe encouraging) progress…in accepting that the whole topic is complicated…. Not that we should rest on the status quo, but it’s better than what we used to have

Ok. The only thing I still don’t understand is why an 8-foot-tall wookie would live on the planet of Endor with a bunch of 2-foot-tall ewoks…

If I discovered a political party devoting more words to LGBT issues than to schools,

The thing is, “words used” is a shitty metric because people only talk about the things they think their counterparties don’t know already. Governments use lots of words where they think they’re running ahead of [or behind] the population and feel their positions could benefit from justification. The link between “warrants explanation” and “pressingly important” is… not huge. LGBT policies require dragging the population along, thus words; grabbing people off the streets and putting them in locked rooms because of “crimes”, less debated and thus less focussed on in communication, even though virtually any government is going to be doing vastly more of the latter than the former.

Apologies, the last one was garbled: The coalition agreement for Berlin talks about LGBT+ issues on about 3 pages altogether (notably 104-106), and at much greater length about schools (all of 12-20, plus multiple passages throughout, including whole pages on higher education). Also, apologies to Mario for misspelling the name.

and @
”How eerie and unsettling it can be when people change their minds”

we do it aaall the time – even given up looking for the ”right facts” to justify our changes – as it it is truly ”liberating” to confess that the change happened entirely ”emotional” –
just the way Heinrich – and Thomas Mann got together again – after Heinrich for such a long time wouldn’t talk to Thomas anymore –
Which could remind us on Thomas Mann’s last -(and most? ”unsettling” piece) –

Die Betrogene –
(The Black Swan)

In this nasty piece of work an older woman really get’s betrayed by some ”facts” of her body – as the body firstly signals ”menopause” – but when she falls in love with a younger man – her lower part seems to entirely change (back) to some ”happy days of love” and how does Mann say it so ”beautifully literally”:
A heightened state of sexual awareness –
including the return of menstrual bleeding.

But, but, but – as we later find out – that’s just do to ”a hemorrhage caused by what would soon prove to be a fatal metastatic tumor in her uterus”.

Uuuuh?

– and then some ”surgeons comment:
”Cancer was an obvious cause of the tumor, but one doctor insinuates that it could have been the yearning for love and her altered or re-awakened erotic personality that stimulated her ovaries thereby causing the cancerous growth” – precisely like the love of… some older men for a German Baron called FF von Clownstick??!

-(oder ist das wieder mal viel – viel zu weit hergeholt?!)

Chris (“merian”) W. @210,

I have that information originally from a Faz article, and hadn’t read the actual program. Either way, now I looked over it, and I’m afraid I just have to stick with the data point: the passages on ensuring the viability of the schools is tiny compared to the three pages on LBGT issues. They talk a lot about schools, but only in passing about building them and about getting new teachers, both fairly important points in a city with 80000 more children than the schools have capacity, and very serious problems with teaching quality and recruiting.

What they talk about profusely when they talk about schools is about reforming them to implement things like “inklusion” and lots of other ideologically laden things that in fact will burden the existing schools even further. I would have expected, from a left wing coalition, a serious strategy and concept beyond a sentence or two of the kind “we will build more schools and repair the derelict ones, as well as fix the quality issues”. They manage to find more sentences when it comes to “inklusion”, for example. And then they have all those pages about LBGT issues. It is really clear that this matters to them a great deal more than the practical aspects of running a schooling system. As it stands, the schools will be fully inclusive, gender mainstreamed, and five-ways social-justice buzzword compliant, but also overcrowded, their roofs leaking, and there will not be enough actual teaching.

But If that weren’t enough, the three LBGT pages have to be seen against the background of a country where gay marriage is fully equivalent to hetero marriage by law. It’s not comparable to, say, Iran, by any stretch of the imagination! The passages on schooling have to be seen not only against a background of infrastructure weakness, but also against a background of an already very liberal and inclusive school system. This isn’t the fifties.

(Re. name – it’s ok)

@210
about
@214
”now I looked over it”

Me Too –
(not believing that somebody made me read this?)
BUT! – just had to look at the following ”Inhaltsangabe” (summary) – of the Vereinbarung everybody -(who uses google translate) can find out – that Mario is a far bigger joker than I thought –
176 Pages about everything – an American Socialist only can dream about!! –
and could somebody please tell US – under what ”point” of the summary do we find these ”LBGT rights”?

Is it under:
”Bezahlbares Wohnen für alle” (Payable Shelter for all)
or under:
”Gute Kindheit und Jugend in einer familienfreundlichen Stadt” (Good Childhood and youth in a family friendly city)
or do we find it under:
”Gesundes Berlin” -(Healthy Berlin)

Wer is it in:
I. Investieren in die Stadt von morgen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Beste Bildungschancen für mehr Teilhabe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .12 Bezahlbares Wohnen für alle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Stadtentwicklung in Berlin – intelligent, nachhaltig und partizipativ . . . . . . . . . . 31 Sauber, bequem und sicher durch die Stadt –
Mobilitätswende einleiten und Umweltverbund stärken . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .39 Innovativ, gerecht, nachhaltig – Wirtschaftspolitik für Berlin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
Berlin – Vorreiter für Klimaschutz und Energiewende . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 Haushalts- und Finanzpolitik . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 Wissenschaft – Impulsgeberin der wachsenden Stadt Berlin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
II. Den gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalt stärken . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
Gute Arbeit in der sozialen Stadt
Die Hälfte der Macht den Frauen
Regenbogenhauptstadt Berlin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .104
Gute Kindheit und Jugend in einer familienfreundlichen Stadt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .107 Metropole Berlin – weltoffen, vielfältig, gerecht . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .112 Kultur- und Medienmetropole Berlin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .120
III. Ein bürgernahes und lebenswertes Berlin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131 Leistungsfähige Verwaltung und moderner öffentlicher Dienst . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .132 Öffentliche Sicherheit und Bürgerrechte für Berlin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
Die Berliner Justiz im effektiven Rechtsstaat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151 Starker Verbraucher*innenschutz in Berlin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .157 Aktiver Natur- und Umweltschutz – ein ökologischer Aufbruch für Berlin . . . . . . .159 Gesundes Berlin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165 Bürger*innenschaftliches Engagement und Partizipation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .174 Berlin – Stadt des Sports . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176

Mario please help US???!

J-D @205,

that they care more about branding, i.e. wearing badges like “diversity”, “inclusion”, “gender mainstreaming”, “rainbow capital” (I wish I was kidding), than about real problems and their solutions. It’s called narcissism.

It’s not something that afflicts all of the left, but certainly their most vocal and consequently most powerful segment.

nastywoman @216,

it’s the “rainbow” thing.

I guess we are going to see. I bet they will build only very few if any new schools. They won’t get the drug dealers out of the childrens’ playgrounds, either. But it will be a Rainbow Capital!!1!

But back to how eerie and unsettling it can be when people change their minds: Miss Wagenknecht, the German head of the party “The Left”, recently positioned herself against open borders, noting that uncontrolled immigration burdens predominantly the local working class (duh!). That didn’t go well with her party but still… there is hope, I guess.

I went back to Mario’s argument. Maybe what he is referring to by “building schools” is literally the process of erecting the building, and all the stuff about creating more of school type X and Y doesn’t even count? In which case, how many words does he expect to be used on this? How to build and repair a school is a solved problem. I’m sure Berlin has a bidding process, specialized construction companies and a project management department. Insert money, wait 2-3 years, school falls out. The only thing you need is to say how much money you spend on it and maybe a word about prioritization, if that’s controversial. Literally one sentence. The document does this for 2017. As for “finding teachers”, what you neglected to tell us is that Berlin has a recruitment problem. I’m more used to complaints about teacher unemployment, so forgive me if I didn’t realize the topic needs more attention that just ongoing tweaks. There’s a lot of it in the press from 2018. Was the problem as acute in 2016 already? Maybe. Fine. There’s a whole bunch about it in the document nonetheless, including bits and pieces in the higher education part. Even in the most literal interpretation about those two things you consider the highest priority in the Berlin school system, there’s probably still enough to amount to the same number of paragraphs as the LGBT section. But the main thing is: What do the piddly 3 pages about LGBT issues have to do with the first problem? You’re coming across like someone who complains about the number of vegetarian dishes on a menu (6) compared to the steak (4) and burger (2) choices, when there are in reality 25 meat dishes altogether and the REAL problem is that they don’t have Wiener Schnitzel, so you take it out on the vegetarians.

No adequate services for abused lesbians or kicked-out trans kids, no la-di-dah things like making sure the kid in the wheelchair can do Abitur in the specialization he wants, no language support for recently arrived refugees, no measures that would help the kid with Turkish parents who clean offices for a living to develop her intellectual interests and maybe become a history professor one day, nothing to prevent bullying of minorities — none of this newfangled “inclusion” stuff, not until Mario’s priorities are adequately addressed. And if Citizen Mario (is this the same person?) thinks that all these things are not “solving real problems” but empty badging, branding and labelling, then this is noted.

Chris (merian) W. @220,

Berlin has a severe budget problem, so it’s not all that easy. And if you’ve been involved in this kind of thing – it’s never as easy as popping money in and out comes a school. I could write three pages on what needs to be done to get Berlin to offer schooling for 80000 additional kids on a budget and I’m not a specialist. But I care about it, they don’t. They care about the gender *, which is literally in every page.

To your second paragraph.

The newfangled “inclusion” stuff is deeply unpopular, because it causes more problems than it solves. I don’t know if you are familiar with it, but it is a great example of blind moral principles causing a lot of damage. What do these leftist do? Stick with the morals of course! Who would want to be seen not doing that?

Yeah, I insist that schooling for 80000 kids comes first. I’m a bad person like that.

There was a similar problem raised in my local GLBT center. Given the lack of attention trans people got in the past, one of the activists pushed for 50% of the money earmarked for helping GLBT teens put out on the street by their parents to be specifically targeted to trans teens. (This involved both direct physical help, and also raising awareness among each group that the services were available). One of the other activists pointed out that since trans people were about 1/10 of GLBT people, even though they were a little less than twice as likely to be put out on the street by their parents (very sad but true), the total number of them was still about 1/5th of GLBT teens, so devoting 1/2 the budget was likely to cause GLB teens to suffer a noticeable reduction in services. They suggested that the amount be closer to 1/3.

That argument was called extremely transphobic. The year after, number of extra trans teens helped, one. Number of GLB teens helped 12 fewer.

Sebastian H: Well, those things can sometimes lead to debates that generate more heat than light, especially in largely volunteer-run places. Don’t expect that just because someone is LGBT this makes them any more discerning than the next guy. Setting quotas beforehand is unhelpful — you’ll get whoever you get. My experience here in the US, though, has been that the number of trans kids who seek services has skyrocketed. A colleague of my wife and his wife got involved with PFLAG after their daughter came out as a lesbian, and they also lead LGBT+ outreach in their (liberal) church. Their main clientele are trans rather than queer kids. This is in Texas. ::shrug:: I really have no idea what shares of each category to expect: the figures in the shadows are still large. You can’t do supply-side management for youth seeking support. Also, given that you can’t take a step in pro-trans direction without encountering transphobia, including from some lesbians, gay men, bi…, I wouldn’t assume if the unlucky trans activist didn’t get their share of inappropriate reactions. Hopefully it’s water under the bridge now.

Unlike you, I don’t think you have to mistreat queer and disabled kids to get your necessary schools built.

You really think that this is what I think? If I don’t support getting them special treatment – I’m in favor of mistreating them?

But I get it, as long as the children of mainstream straight Germans like yourself are suffering WE MUST NOT HELP ANY MINORITY KID. Understood

Roughed-up cishet German blonde male children are also roughed-up children. But I totally understand that they lack features that get you bonus piety points if you help them. They are kind of meh if you are a narcissist and want to show the world how especially good you are. But beware, christian warrior: vanity is a sin!

Sebastians’ story sounds so hilariously asinine that I suspect it to be satire. What did they tell those twelve kicked out LBG, but not T, children? “Sorry, we have no budget for you?”.

And here is a gripping story about the left failing victims of abuse out of vanity and an addiction to the piety contest.

@
”but the way this works in Germany is through a set of twitter accounts and a few handfulls of journalists in the top five newspapers. If you are on the left, you do not get to sit on a board discussing actual policy if this networks has gone thumbs down on you. You would have to observe this for a while to grasp this amazing power”

Good Lord!

Now I understand – you are one of these guys who believes ”that the way this works in Germany is through a set of twitter accounts and a few handfulls of journalists in the top five newspapers”.

No it doesn’t ”work” like this in Germany – and please – as I’m -(currently) commenting from Germany too –
IT doesn’t work like this ”in Germany” – and there is nooo reason for y’all to believe such silly nonsense!

Mario

And here is a gripping story about the left failing victims of abuse out of vanity and an addiction to the piety contest.

From the linked piece:

The report noted the experience of Adele Weir, the Home Office researcher, who attempted to raise concerns about the abuse with senior police officers in 2002; she was told not to do so again, and was subsequently sidelined.

Do you generally count senior police officers as part of the left?

Mario:

“If I don’t support getting them special treatment – I’m in favor of mistreating them?” Well, you have no problem whatsoever with the fact that they have to deal with special obstacles. So yeah, that in Germany we continue to clip their opportunities and ensure they continue to have a much harder time accessing the harder-to-access educational paths is, to me, mistreating them. (Not to mention the direct mistreatment because…)

“Roughed-up cishet German blonde male children are also roughed-up children.” … because apparently you’re not against *all* bullying prevention, just bullying prevention for heterosexual cis (male?) white students (at least how many generations?) of German ancestry. Got it. But only if they aren’t bullied because of a disability or physical quirk, because that would be Inklusion, which is bad. Right. Well, at least *someone* gets some extra support in your empathy-free, stratified world. Glad to hear it.

Listen, you could have avoided the whole kerfuffle by saying something like “In Berlin, where I live, the left-wing coalition has made complete fuck-up out of capacity management in the school system. They failed to anticipate the incipient problem and are still not taking it seriously enough.” It’s too far upthread for me to remember how it fits into this post’s argument, but just taken for itself, you’d have myself and people like me cheering you on. But instead of badgering your government and raising hell about this very valid point, you go on a bizarre rant about their positive attitude to LGBT+ (and later inclusion in general). It’s an on its face absurd attack. (“How DARE this restaurant serve a decent soup when they run out of mashed potatoes and roast chicken! I want the soup chef fired. There should be no soup until this horrible failure is remedied!”) It suggests that you care a lot more about people unlike yourself never being served ahead of people like you than about solving the actual problem (which we had to do internet searches on, since you hardly let us know that there IS a special problem going on).

The one thing I want to stress is that it’s incredibly frustrating to continue to run into people who present helping LGBT+ people (or refugees, or whatever) as being done for vanity, piety points, as if it wasn’t just as much about helping people as staunching a teacher shortage is.

(Will you find a politician who only talks about inclusion and LGBT+ stuff etc. to raise their profile, for opportunistic reasons? Sure! Many! I cannot count how many. I could tell you war stories about the PACS in France in 1998. Just ask a queer activist of your acquaintance and they’ll tell you which ones are in it for the brownie points and which ones understand the issues and appear to be sincere, for the time being. But that’s the same for every single policy area — it’s a bug in how we incentivise politicians. I daresay you’ve also encountered politicians who talk about how they’ll improve schools without doing anything effective, no?)