Why We’re Polarized Part 4: The Last one, about Party Differences

“But the second dimension concerns ease of access to abortion as the pregnancy progresses.”

Do you read the news at all? Are you aware that many fascist controlled states have already moved to banning all abortions at any stage of the pregnancy and that even access to contraception is now in serious jeopardy?

Stop accepting the right wing propaganda frame. They don’t care about any of the nuances you would like to make. They want to control women’s bodies, nothing less is acceptable to them.

Allow me one more remark. “the forces of polarization”, what is this supposed to be? This terminology is used by political analysts to sound more scientific, as if we were observing a physical system acting under forces like gravity, centrifugal forces and so on. (The metaphor of magnets used earlier goes in that direction.) I suggest this is not a useful framework for talking about politics. The radicalization of the US right wing is not a deterministic process brought about by anonymous forces of nature. There are actors and interests, there is hate and racism and mysogyny and lies and propaganda. Not “forces”.

In support of TM @ 3, I have begun to notice usages like “polarization is causing differential health outcomes between states with different political parties controlling policy,” when what is meant is “states where Republicans control the government have worse health outcomes that can be traced to differences between Republicans and Democrats’ policies.” Polarization is not a person who has chosen to make Republicans have worse health outcomes or simply the fact that the parties are different. I have know way of knowing whether the misuse of the word reflects a common belief about why certain people have certain beliefs about policy (which might explain why Klein refers to “partisanship” and “truth” and so on the way he does), or whether it’s the verbal equivalent of clickbait (which I think is the more plausible and less paranoid possibility). Either way, the suggestion is that Democrats are at fault for Republican states’ poor health outcomes, exactly because Democrats care enough to enact policies that lead to better health outcomes, and this makes Republicans feel bad and they react by polarizing. (Ironically, anyone pointing this out “looks polarizing” and the choice to sweep the details under the rug appears to be a choice not to “be polarizing”.)

The other thought that came to mind reading this post was that it doesn’t actually describe “polarisation”, or any other system-level effects; it describes the damage that can be done to a political system by the deliberate and cynical mobilisation of an audience previously cultivated through hate propaganda. So good luck dealing with that – and wish us luck with it in the UK, too.

I don’t understand if the problem is “polarisation is itself bad, let’s avoid it” or if it’s more a pragmatic question, “how do we get more votes to enact our preferred policies”.

But there is another problem: if the left is more a big tent group than the right, it is difficult to say what is the left exactly: there might be people in for feminism, and people in for economic redistribution, and people for both, but it is difficult to say if economic redistribution is more the core of the left or feminism is more core, and both sides of the left might think that they are the real deal and the others are the not very leftish ones.

It might be that as the right has a stronger identity the left turns out to be “everyone who is pissed of at the right.

My sense is that there are two distinct groups, one (that from my point of view are the radicals) is the economic left and in some sense is also the old left; the other (that I generally call the neoliberals) are in for the cultural issues including feminism and racism.

But it is very difficult to say what of the two groups is the more extremist, and also they at least in part overlap.
I wonder how much of the politics of the left can be explained by referencing to these two groups, and if they represent some sort of “class” division or other underlying factor).

reading @10 made me think – that’s the problem –
that’s the real problem about this Polarizing game with ‘trump’
(the Worlds new word for: Utmost Right Wing Racist Science Denying Warmongering Stupid) that you are so incredibly polite and nice and well educated Mr. Shouten and thusly are NO match for any Right-Wing Racist who just would insult you in the possible slightest way as a ‘nastywoman’ while my Harley mechanic would tell you –
if you really don’t like ‘trump’ as much as I dislike ALL nastwomen – why don’t you grow a pair and attack what you truly HATE with the force of a ‘trump’?

Didn’t Roe v. Wade already allow US states to restrict abortion in the third trimester? Wiki says that was the ruling from 1973 to 1992 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roe_v._Wade Its also not clear who the people calling for compromise would negotiate with. A Supreme Court can interpret the law however they please, and the only people who can negotiate before a ruling are the justices.

and let me try to translate some of the poli-lingo starting with my favourite:

‘To win electoral victory, Democrats need to appeal to voters to the right of center’.

Does that mean if ‘right of center’ means -(in America) that voters who are ‘right of centre’ don’t believe in abortions – the climate crisis – vaccinations masks and gun control –
that
THEN
US Democrats should believe a little less in ‘abortions – the climate crisis – vaccinations masks and gun control’ and what does that mean – as in sane societies – like for example in Europe the difference between somebody who dosn’t believes in ‘abortions – the climate crisis – vaccinations masks and gun control’ and somebody who does – is NOT the difference between somebody who is left – or right of center – it is the difference between some hard core Right Wing Racist Science Denying Idiots and EVERYBODY ELSE.

And how can one close that gap by believing ‘trying to win electoral victory, Democrats need to appeal to voters to the right of center’?

They can and have moved to the left in various ways, but they can’t survive if they abandon outreach to the middle, and indeed to the right-of-middle. Meanwhile, “freed from the need to appeal to the median voter, Republicans have hewed to a more conservative and confrontational path than the country would prefer. They have learned to win power by winning land, rather than by winning hearts and minds” (243).

Have I misunderstood? Is the conclusion to which this series has built:
‘Maybe Democrats should not resist some State-level restrictions on late-term abortions’
?

So if the Democrats aren’t unified around a single identity or ideology and a whole wing (including at least two senators) won’t even agree to oppose the Republicans on anything important, in what sense are they a polarized party? We’ve had an awful lot of words about “polarization” in the abstract and even a serviceable definition of it, but I still don’t see the proof that the problem as theorized fits our present situation. Maybe it’s because Klein can’t decide if he’s writing from the progressive Left or the “normcore” Center, but he’s clearly trying to have it both ways.

His description of a squishy, conciliatory, rules-based “liberal” coalition barely holding off a winner-takes-all hard right ascendancy doesn’t fit with the naturalization/physicalization inherent in his “feedback loop” metaphor. If one side is continually attacking or obstructing regardless of resistance and manufacturing controversy to keep amping up tensions even when no feedback is forthcoming what difference does it make what the other side does?

Frankly, I don’t accept the common liberal framing that Democrats are simply too honorable or moderate for right wing animus to ever be legitimate (Remember “Clinton derangement syndrome?”). I also don’t know where Klein gets off saying there’s no appetite for leftwing/alternative media. All those Tankies and “anti-imperialists” blaming NATO for the Ukraine war are getting it from somewhere. Maybe leftist idiots use media differently, but they were still able to shove #DefundThePolice down our collective throats during a crime wave.

Then there are the symbolic issues. Maybe it’s wrong that certain people’s identities get wrapped up in the culture wars, but it’s disingenuous to claim that there’s nothing political about the dramatic rise of formal (often hamhanded) institutional statements on diversity and solidarity, Orwellian “privilege”-speak that ignores class issues, or the sudden ubiquity of awkward neologisms like BIPOC, LatinX, gender neutral pronouns, and the confusing situation where you’re supposed to capitalize “Black” but not “white.” Any and all of these shifts can be easily justified (or turned into a critique of the old order), and as a younger Progressive I “get” the point of most of them, but they can still feel like an arbitrary decree from on high.

I often wonder who decided on some of this terminology and how it became this trendy this fast (the “white privilege” example of a whole movement being saddled with one rich academic’s personal baggage is not the outlier it should be). To people who don’t have a liberal arts background or a Twitter addiction, it can all be too much to keep track of. Is this sense of disorientation and alienation among the less “plugged-in” social classes justification for embracing fascists? Of course not. Diversity is life and belief in progress toward a better society shouldn’t be the narrow province of one political current. However, if we want real popular buy-in for a progressive social platform, we can’t accept a situation where a narrow few – be it Matt Taibbi’s “Twitter Robespierres, ” David Brock’s “blue” astroturfing, or “wonks” like Ezra Klein — get to define which forms of social “progress” make it on the agenda.

Gina 4: “My suggestion, instead, is that those on the left or in the middle who want to be able to make things better should care about the distinction.”

You haven’t given any reason why you think so, and especially why you think that this could be a possible remedy for “polarization” which is the context in which you are offering these suggestions. Note also, the question isn’t whether one should “care about the distinction” but what political strategy should follow from this, and I agree with Tim’s remarks @8 regarding that strategy.

@10 you deny “arguing for either of those things” but it’s entirely unclear then what you are arguing for.

I think your – and Klein’s – polarization framing is fundamentally flawed and completely misconstrues the political reality in the US () but in addition I think your (and Klein’s) suggestions don’t even make much sense within your own framework. The polarization around abortion simply hasn’t been pushed by Democrats at all, it’s entirely a right wing obsession. Appealing to Democrats to focus less on support for late term abortions is useless because Democrats *aren’t focusing on support for late term abortions.

If you take the polarization framework seriously, isn’t one consequence that quarrels about policy nuances are beside the point? You need to develop messaging that appeals to emotional identifications. From a messaging point of view it would be a grave mistake to promote a debate about extremely rare late term abortions. Liberals must reject the right wing framing and push the discourse into a different direction by highlighting the likely consequences of Republican / fascist abortion policies now entering into force:
– Women dying
– Women imprisoned
– Doctors imprisoned
– Clinics closed, doctors delicensed
– Important contraception methods oulawed or simply unavailable
– Freedom to travel abolished
– Establishment of a “citizen Gestapo” that denounces anyone involved with helping women obtain abortions (and denouncing parents of trans children, denouncing liberal or gay teachers, and others)
– Right wing governments criminalizing citizens of other states
… and so on and on.

The part of the population that thinks these things are ok will never be won over by offering minor policy concessions. The others, if they need to be won over, they first need to understand what is at stake. This is the messaging challenge liberals must meet to prevent the worst.

(*) One fact that should be better known: Literally one of the first things the Nazis did after taking power was the foundation of the „Reichszentrale zur Bekämpfung der Homosexualität und Abtreibung“. The obsession of the US right wing with sex, gender identity, abortion, and queerness is a characteristic shared with all past and present fascist movements. Those US liberals still in denial about the state of their country have no excuse.

Interesting that it is always Democrats that are encouraged to move to the right and moderate their positions to appeal to the “center”.
I can’t remember anyone ever advising Republicans to move to the left to appeal to the center. The truth is that even “left leaning” pundits are right of center.
It is possible that they realize Republicans will never budge.

“There are, in essence, early-stage pogroms occurring regularly now at queer events. It is being encouraged and amplified by some of the most powerful voices with the largest megaphones. We really have to see this for what it is: the first stage in something much worse.”
https://twitter.com/EladNehorai/status/1536962479137251329

Apology if this is considered off-topic. I think it isn’t. We are at the stage of open fascist violence being incited and condoned by powerful Republican leaders. Talk of “polarization” is in these circumstances not just wrong-headed but insulting.

You may well be right. Thanks for doing the whole series. It was really great. I look forward to following your work in the future.

I think the dynamic identified as polarization means there is nothing Democrats can do to appeal to a supposed center. People who are single-issue voters on abortion, in 2022, are already in that dynamic. They have chosen a side.

I don’t know what to say to someone who believes right-wing rhetoric that tells them to think the most extreme things about pro-choice advocates, or that tells them they’re in a war with evil people and anything is worth defeating them. A “nice” response would be to cede some ground for the sake of getting along. But the responsibility for making sure they believe good information and discard the bad is not mine. It’s not the responsibility of the people they demonize.

Similarly, I don’t know what to say to someone who believes there’s broad support for an invisible ideology that would give enormous benefits to people of all races, deemphasize profit and private ownership, and reduce the cultural respect given to bling and the wealthy, except that they also want more traditional gender roles and more lip service paid to traditional religion. A fascism that removes choice from most people’s lives but makes everyone feel “good” about themselves, and keeps black and brown people in enclaves so white racists don’t have to see them (they are not actually going to give up racism once they have UBI and male pride) is not that.

Thanks again.
I am going to brag around the department that Gina Schouten responded to my comment on Crooked Timber.

I envy you. I wish I knew people who would be impressed if I told them that Gina Schouten responded to my comment on Crooked Timber.

Maybe leftist idiots use media differently, but they were still able to shove #DefundThePolice down our collective throats during a crime wave.

What crime wave?

Maybe it’s wrong that certain people’s identities get wrapped up in the culture wars, but it’s disingenuous to claim that there’s nothing political about the dramatic rise of formal (often hamhanded) institutional statements on diversity and solidarity, Orwellian “privilege”-speak that ignores class issues, or the sudden ubiquity of awkward neologisms like BIPOC, LatinX, gender neutral pronouns, and the confusing situation where you’re supposed to capitalize “Black” but not “white.”

Of course there’s something political about some of the ways that the use of language changes (although I have found no evidence of the existence, specifically, of anything which is accurately described as ‘Orwellian “privilege”-speak that ignores class issues’), but I don’t know why this is supposed to be worth mentioning; I’m not aware that anybody is denying that there is something political about it, and there’s no reason why political change should not be associated with changes in the use of language. I am aware that some people object to the idea of language changing (or being changed, which comes to the same thing), but their objections are ill-conceived, as for example:

… they can still feel like an arbitrary decree from on high.

I get how they might feel like that (to some people), but just because it feels so doesn’t mean it is so!

I often wonder who decided on some of this terminology and how it became this trendy this fast

I also sometimes wonder about such things, but I don’t make the mistake of thinking it’s important.

(the “white privilege” example of a whole movement being saddled with one rich academic’s personal baggage is not the outlier it should be).

Just delete the last five words. The ‘white privilege example of a whole movement being saddled with one rich academic’s personal baggage is not. There are no examples of a whole movement being saddled with one rich academic’s personal baggage.

However, if we want real popular buy-in for a progressive social platform, we can’t accept a situation where a narrow few – be it Matt Taibbi’s “Twitter Robespierres, ” David Brock’s “blue” astroturfing, or “wonks” like Ezra Klein — get to define which forms of social “progress” make it on the agenda.

Then you should be pleased that we are not faced with the problem of whether to accept such a situation, because there is no such situation! Good news, right?

While I personally am not so fussed about how things are labelled, I do recognise that “framing” is important (I think it is fairly well established that how a question is asked can influence the answer).

So why frame this as “is abortion morally uncomplicated at all stages of pregnancy?” rather than “is violation of bodily autonomy morally uncomplicated for medical conditions?”.

Why not frame it as ‘What good is done by imprisoning people for terminating their pregnancies?’ That’s how I frame it. Note that within this frame, if somebody objects ‘Some people have abortions late in pregnancy without due consideration for the gravity of the decision’, the response is ‘It’s possible that this is true, but supposing it is, what good is done by imprisoning those people?’

J-D: Nah, the series has not built to that. Each part was meant to describe a bit of Klein’s argument and then make some minor point about it.

It’s your blog and you can post what you like, but if you describe the argument at this much length without having any major comments to make on it, that suggests you find some value in it. I find no value in it; what am I missing?

BUT! –
on the other hand –
A group of… let’s call them… ‘Mechanics’
have built
H E A V E N Nr.7
THE ROOM for all of you guys to find – what they call in Germany: ‘Erleuchtung’
(y’all know ‘Kant and all of such ‘stuff’)
And that room is ‘mobile’ (on the base of a Ford 350 Econoline) and easily can come to each of YOU guys –
(and even to Harvard)
and
THEN
y’all can sit in it –
(just one after another – as THE ROOM is very small)
and
THEN –
Michael Heizers Levitated Mass -(lifting OFF) will give y’all the answer y’all obviously need so desperately –

And Dear Mrs. Shouten couldn’t’ we make an appointment when we should arrive in Harvard?
(because currently H E A V E N Nr.7 is still in North Hollywood at CBS Auto Body getting repaired after a Hyundai Santa Fe rammed the – HAHA! – ‘Right’! Side!)

Gina Schouten @ 30

Firstly, thank you for taking the time to respond and offer your perspective in a thoughtful and engaging way – I appreciate it takes time and effort, and value the way you (and others on CT) endevour to provide a good discussion.

I think that abortion is both a matter of bodily autonomy (and women’s equality) and morally complicated”

Certainly! I didn’t mean to imply anything about your position (I apologise if I gave that impression), but rather about the framing you used. Again, this may seem like a trivial point, but it seems to me that if terminology such as “morally complicated” is being used, so too should “bodily autonomy” – otherwise the framing (regardless of the beliefs or positions) may end up becoming lopsided (even though that may not be the intent).

“But I also think that certain parts of the left talk about the issue in ways that are off-putting to voters” […] the set of people who are misogynists.”

This may well be a reasonable assessment (I can’t really speak to that myself). However, I would note that there are certain parts of the right who talk about the issue in ways that are off-putting too – yet it doesn’t seem to have hindered their ability to elect people who adopt even rather extreme positions.

I don’t say this to try to make some form of “both sides” argument, or as a justification, etc., but rather to make the observation that – regardless of what appeals to voters – it seems that the decades long project of chipping away at abortion access may well culminate (at least according to the reproductive rights discussions I’ve read?) in a fairly dramatic and sweeping overturn of abortion rights.

While I think it is fair to consider what is/is not appealing to voters, it also seems that a certain degree of strategy is required (for example, more extreme positions may well be more appealing in certain areas than others – as the previous discussion on polarization have highlighted!). I have heard people discuss Overton window shifting as a strategy – essentially (as I understand it) making the argument that a spectrum of positions are required so that a) extreme positions balance out and b) extreme positions make less extreme positions seem more acceptable. I am curious as to how you feel about these sorts of approaches, and how they fit in with your position here?

”Second: Like you (I think), I suspect that most abortions are very grave and serious matters to those who are having them.”

I do think that abortions are typically serious matters to those having them – and so, if people are concerned about people treating their abortions in a frivolous manner, then this may well be a point worth making.

I should clarify a little that I don’t think that abortions should have to be grave and serious to someone for that abortion to become “acceptable”. The main reasons for this which spring to my mind are 1) I don’t think someone’s access to an abortion should be dependent on moral evaluations, as making degree of bodily autonomy a function of assessed individual character seems a dangerous precedent to set; 2) I don’t really see any way of reliably measuring how grave and serious an abortion is to someone; and 3) I don’t see any way of enforcing any degree of gravity and seriousness which doesn’t (to my mind) veer into the cruel and unusual. In short, to my mind bodily autonomy is a useful metric as it is (relatively) easy to assess and enforce, whereas having appropriate seriousness seems to me difficult to assess/enforce and as something potentially opening up a can of worms (and thus being somewhat less useful from a practical perspective). I wish to be clear I don’t say any of this to make an implication about your own positions, as an attempt at disagreement, or even as a coherent thesis that I assert others should adopt – this is purely to clarify my own thoughts on the matter.

“My suggestion is that the issue be treated as one with more moral gravity by politicians who are talking about it as a political issue. Thanks for prompting me to make this clarification.”

Thank you for your clarification. I would say it is not unreasonable to assert politicians who are talking about abortion as a political issue should treat it with moral gravity (though, and I suspect you’d agree with this, it is important to ensure “treat with gravity” does not veer into stigmatising!).

Without any examples of politicians treating this issue with what you view as insufficient seriousness it is difficult to see what is meant by “more” in this context, so I can’t really comment on that.

From a purely rhetorical and political perspective, it may be the case that the degree of gravity and seriousness which plays well somewhere may not elsewhere. For example, could it be possible some people would resent having their abortions treated with what they view as unnecessary moral gravity and feel that it borders onto moral judgements about them? I don’t say this to imply that that would be the intent (or even necessarily the result), but certainly I know (non-USian) people who would respond to being told their abortion is a morally grave matter…rather negatively (though this may be something of a cultural divide!). Of course as a political calculation one would need to make an evaluation of the rhetoric and see how much support is gained or lost – but again, without any specifics this seems destined to head into speculative “what iffery”.

”My point is that liberals could tack to the right relative to the abortion stance they set out in many policy pronouncements and much of their rhetoric (NOT relative to the status quo), but only on one side of the access distinction I made in the post.”

Thank you for laying out your point so clearly and concisely.

I think part of the problem here though is that without examples it is a bit difficult to make any judgements (“liberals” is quite a broad block of people, and without specifics regarding rhetoric or policy proposals it is a bit tricky to see if this is a point of agreement or disagreement!).

Another part of the problem is that, again, rhetoric and policy pronouncements by “liberals” (which may, after all, include people with little chance of effecting any change, or perhaps are an advocacy group) may be selected for different reasons (such as “firing up the base”, or “shifting the Overton window”, or “counterbalancing anti-abortion rhetoric and policy pronouncements”, etc.). In which case, it may not make sense to “tack to the right” as that may run contrary to what is trying to be achieved.

I don’t say these things as a rebuttal or counterargument, but merely to make the point that while your argument may well be reasonable from a specific perspective with specific goals in mind, it may not be from another perspective with other goals in mind – and so, reordering of the “political magnets” may run both ways, depending on what is trying to be achieved….

I’m not sure, ultimately, that this comment I am currently writing is going to be particularly useful, but hopefully it manages to lay out some points of potential interest for future thought. So thank you for writing out your perspective in this series of discussions, and for the interesting feedback – I genuinely appreciate it.

… I don’t want “wake” gender roles either …

Then you’re in luck! There are no ‘wake’ gender roles. Good news, isn’t it?

It seems to me that it is the other side, the “cultural left”, that for some reason can’t conceive that someone sees the cultural objective as secondary, and therefore assume that, let’s call them “mildly leftish” cultural positions, in reality have to be necessarily culturally reactionary because they assume no middle ground.

This is at least my impression as en “economic leftie”.
…
I have no idea who are the “economic lefties” who want this, in your view.
… Who exactly are we speaking about?

Oddly enough, that’s my question for you. Who exactly are you speaking about? Who are the ‘cultural left’ about whom you have the impression you described?

MisterMr @ 32

You’re at an advantage here, because I can’t say “I’m an economic leftist, and here’s what I believe, and other economic leftists also believe this.”

Following several comments on this post (and some elsewhere by people who are both leftists and religious), I was trying to make sense of the idea of a political view that’s for economic leftism, against cultural leftism, against everything neoliberal, feels good to people who put religion at the center of their lives, and is popular. I don’t think such a thing exists. I described two different things and you appear to have misread me and taken my comment as a personal attack.

I’m noticing that your comment is much more about what you dislike, and what you think is in my own head, than what you like. I see that you are for economic leftism, and for gender-blindness (and also race-blindness?). It sounds like you’re against both extreme religiosity and extreme atheism. You’re against politics where people organize or ask for things on a basis of race or gender. You’re against particular activists (who you think must be cognitively deficient or else they’d agree with you that your issues are more important than theirs). Your economic leftism might include a UBI (not sure because you appear to have just picked up on the one economic policy I mentioned myself). You want people to have money and you want people not to be mean to one another.

That sounds very nice. If only people would be nice, they would want to give everyone enough money and they would not make distinctions on a basis of race or gender. They would not ask others to treat them more nicely, because confrontation is rude. I would agree that niceness is popular. I doubt, however, that those policies are popular or that most people living in the US today really, in practice, want to live in the world that would make white male “economic leftists” happy. (It’s possible your “economic leftism” is actually a mild left-centrism, or just a general attitude of being nice to working people. I can’t know because all I know is that you don’t like either “wokeness” or “neoliberalism.” But in that case I admit it might be popular, as long as you called it centrism and not leftism, and dropped the obsession with telling people stuff they like is “neoliberalism”.)

And that does not address the many people who are currently organized on the basis that the government must impose a religiously-founded morality on everyone, whether they like it or not, and are committed to overthrowing a system of government in order to get it, unless their opponents roll over and do it for them. The above would not sound “nice” to a someone who’s a single-issue voter on abortion.

Fake Dave wrote:
“”What Crime Wave?”
THIS ONE!!!”

Uh, I guess you weren’t living in New Haven 1981-1985. My apartment was broken into three times, there was all sorts of excitement on the street between the police and civilians.

Seriously, US murders, per 100,000 population, went down from over 10 (1980) to around 6, the last few years*. Sure, it’s up recently, but given the stress of covid and the vastly larger number of guns in people’s hands, it’s actually surprisingly low, at least by late 70s to late 90s standards.

Interestingly, Japan has also seen a reduction in murder rates from 1990 (0.55) to 2018 (0.26). About 20 times lower than the US. Oh, right. There are no guns here, so you really have to mean it if you want to kill someone. Guns: another complete insanity brought to you by the completely insane Repugs.

*: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/murder-homicide-rate

WAIT!

I made a terrible mistake –
it’s this one:

https://youtu.be/eiDiKwbGfIY

to this… rap:
‘that this is ‘off-putting to voters
who care about bodily autonomy
and women’s equality
and who also think abortion is morally complicated,
and so those parts of the left should take better care to acknowledge the moral complicatedness,
or at least not to equate the set of people
who think there’s a complicated issue here
with the set of people who are misogynists’.

@J, not that one 41

Things that I would like, and that I don’t think the general “left” is even trying to do, are:

Very high marginal income tax rate, as in 80% rate;
Enforced limits on the workweek, like 35h workweek;
Significantly higer automatic stabilizers, which means in general a significantly higer part of the economy ran by public institutions, and generally higer unemployment help (might be an UBI, but not necessarily);
Taxes on wealth drawn with the purpose of decumulating wealth (so yeah, some people should pay in taxes more than the income they get from wealth, otherwise this doesn’t work).

The problem that I see is that many people in the left balk at this stuff, and sorta assume it is a pipe dream or that the politicians who propose this are just bulshitting.

In many countries this comes out as two different parties, or two different currents of the same party:
In the USA Sanders VS Clinton and later Sanders VS Biden;
In the UK Corbyn VS Stramer;
In France Melenchon VS Macron;
In Italy a variety of figures where there are many mini-parties on the left that keep changing every election but sorta play the same role of Sanders/Corbyn.

What I see is that in many cases these leftish currents are accused of not being enough into the “cultural left” camp, as in Sanders being accused of being anti-feminist when he campaigned against Clinton, or Corbyn being charged with more or less bogus charges of antisemitism.
I don’t see Sanders, Corbyn etc. as being against the “cultural left”, but I see often the “cultural left” being against them, so I have the suspect that the “cultural left” actually represents a different worldview than the economic left also in economic matters.

You say: ” You want people to have money and you want people not to be mean to one another.”
Not at all: I want the left to be way less nice and way more confrontational against some economic interests. I see the “cultural left” as being too nice about economic interests, and I suspect that this is because the “cultural left” actually doesn’t believe that strong economic policies, like rising the marginal income tax rate to 80%, are doable or even desirable, so when the left is in power and rises the marginal tax rate from 30% to 30.2% this is seen from many of the cultural left as “mission accomplished”, and then they are somehow surprised when people in the “economic left” feel betrayed in their expectations.

[JD, 33] I am aware that some people object to the idea of language changing (or being changed, which comes to the same thing), but their objections are ill-conceived

Here’s an apparently ill-conceived tweet from Ruben Gallego, who represents Arizona in the US House of Representatives:

To be clear my office is not allowed to use “Latinx” in official communications.
When Latino politicos use the term it is largely to appease white rich progressives who think that is the term we use. It is a vicious circle of confirmation bias.

https://twitter.com/RubenGallego/status/1467920180135276554

“It’s not even clear they care about abortion as opposed to controlling women.”

Coming from a fundamentalist, Republican-voting family, I don’t see it as that narrow. In my experience, women (of that sort) are often the strongest anti-abortion advocates. I see it more broadly, as control of other people’s morality. There are lots of other things which they would like to control, some of them gender neutral. E.g., homosexuality (male or female) and drug use. If and when men started cloning themselves, they would object to discarding any of the clones for defects at early stages of development also. (Even if they objected to the cloning itself, which they probably would.)

A lot of them sincerely think that’s what a god who created everything wants them to do. To un-polarize them, you just have to convince them that’s wrong. (I tried a few times, didn’t work.) Or you can try the argument that other people should have the right to make their own moral choices. (Tried that, too. Abortion is murder, so, no.)

There are a lot of liberal issues like health care which they wouldn’t mind voting for, but not if they had to vote for a pro-choice Democrat to get it. Some of them whom I know recognized who and what Trump was in 2016, but couldn’t vote for HRC either so they wrote in some other name.

I’m not saying there are no hypocrites or grifters on the Republican side, of course there are. But the ones I know are quite sincere, and do a lot of volunteer charity work.

or should it be titled:

‘America and HER Right-Wing Racist Science Denying Warmongering Idiots’ –?!
(subtitle: Un-Poloraized)

Mr Mister @45
Not sure that I follow exactly what your desires are, but you must understand the way you framed the last point – taxes raised on wealth aimed at decumulating wealth – I can’t agree with as expressed. I think the word “wealth” is a very ambiguous term, but I don’t want to tax wealth as such, but large collections of wealth. I agree with Herman Daly – our aim should be to maintain and even improve our capital while minimizing throughput (i.e. use of resources and creation of waste). Understood that this is the aim of the whole society and says nothing about distribution.

I often explain my preferred world as one where it is easier to become a millionaire, but impossible to become a billionaire.

I’m inclined to think that high marginal tax rates and high inheritance taxes are sufficient to reduce wealth extremes.

Here’s an apparently ill-conceived tweet from Ruben Gallego, who represents Arizona in the US House of Representatives:

To be clear my office is not allowed to use “Latinx” in official communications.
When Latino politicos use the term it is largely to appease white rich progressives who think that is the term we use. It is a vicious circle of confirmation bias.

I don’t know how much truth there is in the statement that Hispanic politicos use the term ‘Latinx’ largely to appease rich white progressives who think that it is the term Hispanic people use. It would be relevant to know how much truth there is in it. If it’s true, or mostly true, then Ruben Gallego’s point is valid. If it’s not true, then his point is still not ill-conceived; in that case, the problem with it would be not that it was ill-conceived but rather that it was based on a mistake of fact. (Everybody makes mistakes of fact sometimes; it’s not a sign of muddled thinking to have made a mistake of fact.)

I became sufficiently curious to try to find out a little more about the history of the use of the term Latinx; looking at the relevant Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinx) I found this instructive:

Critics say the term does not follow traditional grammar, is difficult to pronounce, and is disrespectful toward conventional Spanish …

The objection that Latinx is difficult to pronounce in Spanish is well-conceived and I take it to be accurate (although I don’t know enough about Spanish pronunciation to know why). When somebody coins a new term (in any language), it is relevant and appropriate to discuss how easy it is to pronounce. The objection that the term is ‘disrespectful toward conventional Spanish’ is ill-conceived, and a typical example of the kind of ill-conceived objection that is made to language change in general (in any language). People deserve respect; no language is the kind of thing that deserves respect.

and I know I have been… very… silly –
but it was meant to be as some kind of humorous ‘incentive’ in order to finally talk about the real reason for the unpleasant polarisation – as do you guys remember the Movies Social Network or/and the Wolf of Wall Street?
Like when ‘the Zuck’ was worried that outing him as ‘a Greedy A…hol’ would have all kind of negative consequences for him and his business – and then he found out that there were a lot of Americans out there – who (still) believe that ‘Greed is Go(o)d’ and with ‘trump’
(The Worlds New Word for: Utmost Racist Right Wing Science Denying Warmongering Idiot) ALL of these American finally got FREED to express their ‘a… holiness’ to th utmost dgree –
and
NOW
it’s just some ‘Libs’ (the Right needs to owe) who keep on spoiling that Party of
NO FILTER ANYMORE!

Or as my Harley Mechanic confessed:
When Obama was President I couldn’t do this… that…
‘Polarizing Thingy’….

and @58
‘Your citation of prior use of the term “white privilege” is not terribly enlightening in this context – it’s like pointing out that the term “evolution” pre-dated Darwin’s use of it in a discussion of the theory of evolution.

But who –
of all the Racist Right-Wing Science Denying US Idiots have
EVER
heard of ‘Peggy McIntosh’s 1987 foundational work “White Privilege”?

None?
As they just associate ‘White Privilege’ with the utmost current Tucker Carlsons rant’s against anybody who use such… w-w-w-words?

Right?
(Wingy-Winky)
Sooo –
Pointedly –
the term: ‘White Privilege’ now is majorly linked to the Racist Right-Wing –
as one of ‘the terms’ they HATE most!
(and who is… who?… M-M-M- Mackintosh?)

@ J-D 48

This thread has probably heard enough from me, but I do have to rebut the notion that a single year jump in homicides by almost a third is just noise. Looking back over the data, the last time it came close to doing that was a 20% jump in 2001 (presumably the 9/11 victims are included.) I didn’t pull the homicide rate just to cherry pick. The overall crime rate for 2020 isn’t out yet (at least I couldn’t find it). Many other crimes have seen similar jumps such as domestic violence or the aforementioned Fentanyl crisis, but feel free to keep checking my work.

After all, you were right that Allen apparently talked about “white skin privilege” first, which I may have known at one point. I read a few chapters of The Invention of the White Race and it did seem like a real scientist wrote it, but it was also quite a bit more nuanced and complex than the pop culture definition of “white privilege,” which is pretty much pure McIntosh. Maybe McIntosh had read Allen, but she certainly doesn’t cite him. In fact, except for one brief namecheck of the Combahee River Collective, she hardly cites anyone. She’s actually quite eager to assert in both her original papers that this is her brilliant idea that she came up with all on her own. My read on her is that she was a dedicated and well-intentioned scholar who made the all-too-common mistake of assuming her expertise would transfer to an unrelated field. It’s a forgivable sin and I’m sure she’s done good as well, but many of the more persistent myths of modern pseudo-science started with the same combination of ignorance and arrogance. If we actually want to win the culture wars, we need weapons that shoot straight.

PS in the last post I said McIntosh went to private school in New York, but I was misremembering. She actually went to public school in New York. The private schools were in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

@J-D 56
It’s not clear that Emmanuel Macron (or his party) count as ‘left’ at all; in current French politics he (and it) are probably more naturally described as ‘centre’ than ‘left’.
From wikipedia:
“Macron was appointed a deputy secretary general by President François Hollande shortly after his election in May 2012, making Macron one of Hollande’s senior advisers. He was later appointed to the French cabinet as Minister of the Economy, Industry and Digital Affairs in August 2014 by prime minister Manuel Valls. In this role, Macron championed a number of business-friendly reforms. He resigned from the cabinet in August 2016, launching a campaign for the 2017 French presidential election. Although Macron had been a member of the Socialist Party from 2006 to 2009, he ran in the election under the banner of En Marche!, a centrist and pro-European political movement he founded in April 2016.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_Macron

I’d say center-left is a reasonable definition, perhaps more center than left but still left, not right.

Of course there is variation within the left: some are further to the left and some not so far to the left, and some proposals are supported by some but not all. This is why there are descriptions like ‘far left’, ‘moderate left’, ‘centre-left’, ‘hard left’, ‘soft left’, and so on. Missing is any justification for using the specific description ‘cultural left’ for the people balking at the proposals you favour.

The impression I have is that groups that are against “hard (economic) left” policies strongly use “(cultural) left” policies to signal their diffwerence from the guys on the right. Now, there might be many explanations for this:

Maybe I’m just more (economic) far left and less (cultural) far left, so I use my opinion as a parameter and see everyone not enough (economic) far left and instead a lot (cultural) far left, but this is just a matter of my perspective.

Another explanation, that I think is quite plausible, is that in the 90s (economic) left policies where unpopular, so some leftish paries pivoted towards moderate (economic) leftish policies. Parties on the right had then to go harder on the identitalry policies, because the Clintons and the Blairs were stealing their “reasonable realistic people” appeal (that I think in the 90s still very much was something associated to the right).
As the rightr became more and more identitarian, it gained in some groups but also it became unpalatable to others, who were thn pushed towards the left.
According to this explanation, there are now two groups that form the left:
one old left, that I call the economic left, that is also more extremist in economic matters;
a new left, that in reality is made by people who would be centrist economically, but who were pushed to the left because the right became more and more identitarian, so for example if you are a centrist who is religious but not a fundamentalist you will be pushed toward the left when the right becomes more and more pro fundamentalists and gets mixed with Q-anon adn stuff; This second group is actually centrist, but it is formed by all the people who were pushed to the left by the right’s identitary policies, so they end up being the (cultural) left.

There are perhaps also other options, for example I’m using the term “cultural left” to mean a variety of issues but someone who is a feminist is not automatically an anti-racist is not automatically an enviromentyalist etc., so maybe the “cultural left” is a void concept.

Personally I’m quite in doubt, on the one hand I understand that it might just be a matter of my perspective, on the other hand I sometimes say something like that the left should raise taxes and increase redistribution and people look at me as if I was weird, so I think that there might be a group that self-defines as “left” but is very different in opinions VS what was usually called “left”, and would be probably better be defined as “liberal” (old sense of the word).

@20″…violation of bodily autonomy…”

It doesn’t seem that banning a medical procedure when it’s not required by medical necessity violates anyone’s “bodily autonomy”.

@28 “The fact is, being against abortion is being for the birth of unwanted children.”

Yes, unwanted by the biological mothe… sorry… what is it now — the birthing person?.
But probably very much wanted by plenty of other persons. So, where’s the drama?

It seems like a lot of the comments are more about the “Popularists vs. Progressives” debate than about polarization.

Ezra Klein wrote about this – in particular about the views of David Shor, and Shor’s critcs – here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/08/opinion/democrats-david-shor-education-polarization.html

Gina Schouten discusses sorting by ethnicity and then says:

The upshot is that “Democrats need to go broad in order to win over their party and…they need to reach into right-leaning territory to win power. Republicans can afford to go deep” (231). And that means that Republicans can appeal to voters through appeals to group identity, whereas Democrats must use party platform and policy goals to unify a diverse collection of interest groups.

Then later:

How does this restrain polarization on the Democratic side and exacerbate it for Republicans? To win electoral victory, Democrats need to appeal to voters to the right of center. They can and have moved to the left in various ways, but they can’t survive if they abandon outreach to the middle, and indeed to the right-of-middle.

The Shor view – or this article, Klein – puts more emphasis on educational or class sorting, which I think is helpful in explaining Schouten’s points. Here is one (hopefully not too long) excerpt:

What’s changed the equation, Shor believes, are several interlocking forces.

First, educational polarization has risen sharply in recent years, particularly among white voters. Democrats are winning more college-educated white voters and fewer non-college white voters, as pollster shorthand puts it, and Donald Trump supercharged this trend. There was a time when Democrats told themselves that this was a byproduct of becoming a more diverse party, as non-college white voters tend to be more racially reactionary. Then, in 2020, Democrats lost ground among Black and Latino voters, with the sharpest drops coming among non-college voters.

I want to stop here and say I believe, as does Shor, that educational polarization is serving here as a crude measure of class polarization. We tend to think of class as driven by income, but in terms of how it’s formed and practiced in America right now, education tracks facets that paychecks miss. A high school dropout who owns a successful pest extermination company in the Houston exurbs might have an income that looks a lot like a software engineer’s at Google, while an adjunct professor’s will look more like an apprentice plumber’s. But in terms of class experience — who they know, what they believe, where they’ve lived, what they watch, who they marry and how they vote, act and protest — the software engineer is more like the adjunct professor.

Either way, the sorting that educational polarization is picking up, inexact as the term may be, puts Democrats at a particular disadvantage in the Senate, as college-educated voters cluster in and around cities while non-college voters are heavily rural. This is why Shor believes Trump was good for the Republican Party, despite its losing the popular vote in 2016, the House in 2018 and the Senate and the presidency in 2020. “Sure, maybe he underperforms the generic Republican by whatever,” Shor said. “But he’s engineered a real and perhaps persistent bias in the Electoral College, and then when you get to the Senate, it’s so much worse.” As he put it, “Donald Trump enabled Republicans to win with a minority of the vote.”

Correction of the following NYT article:

‘The Republican Party in Texas made a series of far-right declarations as part of its official party platform over the weekend, claiming that President Biden was not legitimately elected, issuing a “rebuke” to Senator John Cornyn for his work on bipartisan gun legislation and referring to homosexuality as “an abnormal lifestyle choice.”

The platform was voted on in Houston at the state party’s convention, which concluded on Saturday.

The resolutions about Mr. Biden and Mr. Cornyn were approved by a voice vote of the delegates, according to James Wesolek, the communications director for the Republican Party of Texas. The statements about homosexuality — as well as additional stances on abortion that called for students to “learn about the Humanity of the Preborn Child” — were among more than 270 planks that were approved by a platform committee and voted on by the larger group of convention delegates using paper ballots. The results of those votes were still pending on Sunday, but Mr. Wesolek said it was rare for a plank to be voted down by the full convention after being approved by the committee.

The resolutions adopting the false claims that former President Donald J. Trump was the victim of a stolen election in 2020 as well as the other declarations were the latest examples of Texas Republicans moving further to the right in recent months’.

STOP!
NOT further to ‘the right’
Further to INSANITY!

Gina Schouten @31
“But I also think that certain parts of the left talk about the issue in ways that are off-putting to voters who care about bodily autonomy and women’s equality and who also think abortion is morally complicated, and so those parts of the left should take better care to acknowledge the moral complicatedness, or at least not to equate the set of people who think there’s a complicated issue here with the set of people who are misogynists. …
My suggestion is that the issue be treated as one with more moral gravity by politicians who are talking about it as a political issue.”

It might help if you could be more specific: do you suggest campaign ads stating “We Democrats agree that aboprtion is a grave moral matter”, or “we do not support late term abortions”? I don’t need to explain why that would be an awful idea do I?

Democrats do much less talking about abortion than Republicans, because they consider it a private issue (notwithstanding its moral gravity). When they do talk about it these days, it’s almost always in the very specific context of the right wing assault on reproductive rights. So Democrats tend to emphasize their comitment to these rights (e. g. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/05/03/statement-by-president-joe-biden-4/), because the political moment requires it.

It is instructive to revisit Obama’s attempt at combating “polarization”. I remember how in the very first presidential debate in 2008, which was held at a conservative church (it was not an “official” debate), Obama had talked about abortion in terms of moral gravity (I don’t remember the exact words) and then stated something like “at least we should all agree with reducing unwanted pregnancies” (which btw is an absolute standard position of moderate conservatives in Europe). The response from the audience was icy. It was clear that this wasn’t what they wanted at all.

Obama actually tried to implement a program to “reduce the need for abortion.” Here’s an interesting account (https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/01/barack-obama-faith-adviser-book-abortion-reduction-214635/):

“Over the course of the initiative to “reduce the need for abortion,” we met with more than a hundred leaders and advocacy groups, held dozens of internal meetings and spent hundreds of hours on draft documents. The end goal was clear: create a set of common-ground policies and administrative actions that move our politics beyond the zero-sum game of the culture wars, and actually reduce abortion by addressing its root causes.

But zero-sum politics won. Anti-abortion groups, most of which might as well be legally incorporated into the Republican Party, did not want to give a pro-abortion rights president the victory of leading the charge to reduce abortions. Moreover, they had already warned the country that the president would be the “most pro-abortion president in history,” thus making it difficult to partner with him.

This ain’t “Polarization.” Remember what Obama was hated for most: expanding health care (including maternal health care in Southern states) and expanding access to contraception. It is impossible to find a mainstream conservative figure in Europe (not sure about Poland, but certainly in Western Europe) publicly opposing contraception, or for that matter opposing medically accurate sex education in schools, yet in the US it is the standard position of the GOP which has already started outlawing important contraception methods, guaranteeing more unwanted pregnancies, more teen pregnancies, and more women seeking abortions (so the fascists can criminalize them).

Messaging is important. Lamenting polarization in the face of a full-blown fascist war on democracy, war on women’s rights, voting rights, gay rights, war on historical truth, war on science, … is bad messaging.

This weekend in polarization:

Gustavo Petro, a former rebel and a longtime legislator, won Colombia’s presidential election on Sunday… Mr. Petro, 62, received more than 50 percent of the vote, with more than 99 percent counted Sunday evening. His opponent, Rodolfo Hernández, a construction magnate who had energized the country with a scorched-earth anti-corruption platform, won just over 47 percent. Shortly after the vote, Mr. Hernández conceded to Mr. Petro. “Colombians, today the majority of citizens have chosen the other candidate,” he said. “As I said during the campaign, I accept the results of this election.” (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/19/world/americas/gustavo-petro-colombia-presidential-election.html)

Texas Republicans Approve Far-Right Platform Declaring Biden’s Election Illegitimate
The Republican Party in Texas made a series of far-right declarations as part of its official party platform over the weekend, claiming that President Biden was not legitimately elected, issuing a “rebuke” to Senator John Cornyn for his work on bipartisan gun legislation and referring to homosexuality as “an abnormal lifestyle choice.” (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/19/us/politics/texas-republicans-approve-far-right-platform-declaring-bidens-election-illegitimate.html)

It is impossible to overstate the extent to which the GOP is a right wing extremist outlier even among right wing parties internationally, even in countries with a history of right wing authoritarianism.

I would say “left” doesn’t mean “left of center.” It means “farther left than the Overton Window,” or in the US “farther left than either party in the standard party system.” Could confusion about this point itself lead to polarization, or am I overthinking it?

Orange Watch @ 68

“The core objection is that the term originated from a small group of prescriptivist Latin activists”[…]“broader Latin population”[…]“(many if not most of whom were not Latin)”

I think you mean “Latino”? The “o” ending denotes the masculine form which (as I would hope you would know, given you are pontificating on the subject) takes primacy for any group not explicitly female only. Of course, if you wish to be slightly more inclusive you could use “Latino/a” (or some variation thereof) instead. As far as I am aware, unless you are referring to the language of ancient Rome there is little reason to use “Latin”.

“In a very real sense, it’s an issue of giving not just the English language primacy over Spanish in what claims to be a demand to be more respectful of Spanish-speaking people’s identity, but a specific activist subset of anglophones primacy.”

As I understand it, the issue is primarily a result of Spanish words being inherently gendered, making it rather difficult to navigate if you happen to be (for example) outside the typical gender binary or you object to being referred to using the masculine gender for non-female exclusive groups / feminine gender for groups typically associated with being female-exclusive (the first objection typically being associated with the LGBTQ+ community, the second with some feminists in arguments going back at least to the 1980s which I believe significantly predates “Latinx”). The idea being not to be “more respectful of Spanish-speaking people’s identity” but rather to be “more respectful of some hitherto excluded Spanish-speaking people’s identity”. One can certainly argue with the approach, but I think it important to be careful and recognise this is not stemming from an argument made solely anglophones but has also, for example, long been the subject of discussion amongst feminists in Spanish-speaking countries (who, one might presume, may have at least some say in how they choose to use their own language).

In short, as I understand it this is less a problem of “Spanish grammar conventions being perceived as problematic when imported into English”, but it is in fact more inherent to the Spanish language itself (there are other approaches adopted by the Spanish-speaking community, such as using non-gendered neopronoun “elle” and the “e” ending, or the alternative proposals summarised by Bengoechea dating back some 40 years). I would suggest, therefore, being careful not to conflate the issue (use of gendered words within a language) with one specific proposed solution (using “Latine” or the more Americanised “Latinx”).

Of course, it may be worth noting any approach which seeks to agglomerate a large group under one “label” is going to be problematic – indeed, I believe many people reject such labels as “Latino/a” altogether and identify using the country of their family’s origin. So arguably people should avoid using “Latino/a” (let alone, what I understand to be the rather fraught term, “Hispanic”!) altogether anyway…

“This latter is a recurring theme in the interactions between critical theory adherents and/or those descending from that tradition (first in academia, but also further down the pipeline in activist circles) and the public at large.”

If, as you appear to imply, “critical theory adherents” are responsible for forcing the term on people, why do “critical theorists” also use Latino/a (for example, LatCrit – Latina and Latino Critical Legal Theory) and why do some (albeit a small minority) of Spanish speakers also use Latinx/Latine when referring to themselves (often in addition to Latino and Latina for others)? Why does it seem “Latinx” and “Latine” seem more popular amongst LGBTQ+ Spanish speakers than the more general demographic?

I suspect one reason may be because this is less an issue of “anglophone activists forcing language imperialism upon Spanish speakers” and more an issue of “people are trying to introduce more gender neutral terms (sometimes clumsily) which are generally being rejected by a broader society”. Similar issues, I should note, have also occurred when gender neutral terms have been attempted to be (re)introduced in English (consider the singular “they”).

Personally (though I should note this is speaking as someone who is neither a “critical theory adherent” nor someone who is likely to use “Latinx/e/o/a” on a regular basis), were I to be so bold as to suggest an approach it would simply be to ask someone how they identify rather than trying to force a label upon them – but perhaps the world is not ready for such a radical notion.

“Sure when you start from the premise that Macron… represents the
cultural left,’ you can arrive at any nonsensical conclusion you like. It’s easy for a certain brand of leftism to agree with the fascists that wokeism is the enemy, and if need be you can always quote an antiwoke centrist neoliberal as proof of the ‘cultural left‘s’ rottenness.”

The Macron premise is only meant to apply to French politics. The concluding generalization that the Macron premise applies universally is nonsense, attributing a preposterous position to unnamed persons to condemn—in this case—a “certain brand of leftism,” and manages to conflate the left and fascism, harking back to moldy nonsense about totalitarianism.

It is not an accident that the question of whether Macron is “woke” is merely dismissed. Macron of course is entirely “woke” on feminist issues, like, the hijab is oppression of women. The Taliban oppresses women. Russians and Chinese oppressing gays is evil. Etc. Etc. Etc.

The difficulty cropping up here is that there is no guarantee that the so-called cultural left is actually left. The touchstone for leftists, at least in the Marxist tradition as a whole, is, solidarity with the working class and the oppressed.

The impression I have is that groups that are against “hard (economic) left” policies strongly use “(cultural) left” policies to signal their diffwerence from the guys on the right.

A question which should be asked by anybody reading a remark like this is ‘How reliable is this impression? On what is it based?’

Another question which MisterMr has not yet answered is ‘Who do you mean by “the cultural left”?’

… I sometimes say something like that the left should raise taxes and increase redistribution and people look at me as if I was weird …

If the definition of ‘the cultural left’ is ‘people who look at MisterMr as if MisterMr is weird’, it’s not a useful term.

The discussion of weaponizing antisemitism against Corbyn you’re responding to here refers specifically to the The work of the Labour Party’s Governance and Legal Unit in relation to antisemitism, 2014–2019, a leaked Labour investigation.

Maybe this is being cited with the intention of supporting a point I was making; maybe it’s being cited as contradicting a point I was making; maybe neither. It’s not clear.

The other thing your comment underscores is how increasingly unhelpful dogmatic usage of a one-dimensional left-right political spectrum is even when not discussing authoritarian-egalitarian divides.

I don’t think so. The ways in which the political concepts of ‘left’ and ‘right’ were once helpful are ways they are still helpful; the contexts in which they are not now helpful are contexts in which they were never helpful.

You might want to go further afield than Wikipedia on the Latino/Latina/Latinx controversy.

I am aware of the limitations of relying on what Wikipedia tells me, but I am also aware of the even greater limitations of relying on what one anonymous blog commenter tells me.

The idea that a single essay (and the baggage baked into it) would shape an entire movement descending from it might seem implausible …

It doesn’t stop being implausible just because somebody tells me it isn’t.

So –
in conclusion can’t we ALL agree –
that:
@ ‘Lamenting polarization in the face of a full-blown Right Wing Racist Science Denying Idiots war on democracy, war on women’s rights, voting rights, gay rights, war on historical truth, war on science, … is bad messaging?

And instead of ‘polarization’ let’s just call it just:

‘Fighting for the truth’
(and there are NO nice people on both sides)

I want to stop here and say I believe, as does Shor, that educational polarization is serving here as a crude measure of class polarization. We tend to think of class as driven by income, but in terms of how it’s formed and practiced in America right now, education tracks facets that paychecks miss. A high school dropout who owns a successful pest extermination company in the Houston exurbs might have an income that looks a lot like a software engineer’s at Google, while an adjunct professor’s will look more like an apprentice plumber’s. But in terms of class experience — who they know, what they believe, where they’ve lived, what they watch, who they marry and how they vote, act and protest — the software engineer is more like the adjunct professor.

Of course the things listed (who I know, what I believe, where I’ve lived, what I watch, who I marry, and how I vote, act and protest) are all part of my experience; but it would never have occurred to me to describe them specifically as part of my class experience. The suggestion having been made, I find it weird. If I were asked to describe aspects of my experience which I thought of specifically as my class experience, it’s not things like that which would come to my mind. Beliefs, for example–does anybody think of being religious, or being an atheist, as a class experience?

The problem isn’t the neologisms per se though (gender inclusivity is cool and good), but rather the self-righteousness with which factions of the intelegentsia try to push their preferred terms (and worldview) on the rest of us.

If some people self-righteously insist on a term being used, the self-righteousness is a problem; if some (other) people insist on exactly the same term not</> being used, the self-righteousness is a problem.

“Where’s the drama”?

Abortions have been safe and legal in much of the world (*) for at least a half century and some people apparently need to be reminded how many women just were killed routinely by abortion bans before liberalization.

Great news that we now have time machines to go back to the dark ages:
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/jan/26/poland-death-of-woman-refused-abortion
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/02/18/poland-abortion-protest/

“educational polarization is serving here as a crude measure of class polarization”

That’s totally wrong and this kind of framing is often an intentional attempt to divert attention from the actual inequality.

[Btw We should resist feeding the troll even more… it’s obvious there’s good reason why they are banned.]

banned commenter @ 92

“It doesn’t seem that banning a medical procedure when it’s not required by medical necessity violates anyone’s “bodily autonomy”.”

To me, “bodily autonomy” means, simplistically, the right to self-govern (autonomy) one’s own body (bodily). Thus, external influences which prevent someone from governing what happens to their own body are a violation of “bodily autonomy”. This would be true if someone’s body is being affected against their will, and is equally true if someone is prevented from affecting their own body against their will – in both cases your ability to self-govern what is happening to your body have been violated.

”The medical establishment is not allowed to perform the procedure, and you still control your body to the same extent as before.”

If you are prevented from having an abortion then you do not control your body to the same extent as were that not the case, because you have been prevented from controlling your body via the medium of an abortion.

”You have fewer choices in your life”

Yes – you have fewer choices over what happens to your body. And, if you are prevented from making choices over what happens to your body, your ability to self-govern (autonomy) your body (bodily) has been violated – and so, your autonomy over your body (“bodily autonomy”) has been violated.

”but that, in my opinion, has nothing whatsoever to do with “bodily autonomy”

Well, yes, in your opinion. Perhaps, at some stage, you might consider offering some explanation for how you reached that opinion, or some justification for its basis?

““First, the drama is in the lives of the people who find…”
“The birth of unwanted children” is missing from your list of dramas. Does it mean we agree?””

Gosh, what an interesting place to cut the quote from J-D. I wonder if there was anything after that point that could be relevant to your question? Let’s get the full sentence, shall we:

“First, the drama is in the lives of the people who find themselves unable to terminate pregnancies they wanted to terminate and suffer the consequences of that.”

I wonder if one of the consequences of people being “unable to terminate pregnancies they wish to terminate” could be “the birth of unwanted children”?

It’s not at all clear what Stephen T. Johnson (or anyone else) means when they say “woke” these )days. It used to mean something like a dawning awareness of the legacy of prejudice and systems of oppression in society (including bans on ethnic headwear, presumably). Now though, it’s been thoroughly appropriated as a buzzword by an oblivious mainstream and as a term of abuse by the right. Some social justice types (used to) identify as “woke,” but most of the people thus labeled probably don’t.

It’s not at all clear what Stephen T. Johnson (or anyone else) means when they say “woke” these )days.

Usually it means either ‘My thinking on this subject is confused’ or ‘Expressing my position clearly would not be to my advantage, so I am clouding the issue instead’.

Women’s lives don’t matter to fascists.

Texas Abortion Law Complicates Care for Risky Pregnancies
Doctors in Texas say they cannot head off life-threatening medical crises in pregnant women if abortions cannot be offered or even discussed.

Dr. Ingrid Skop, an obstetrician in San Antonio who belongs to the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said that even a girl as young as 9 or 10, impregnated by a father or a brother, could carry a baby to term without health risks.
“If she is developed enough to be menstruating and become pregnant, and reached sexual maturity, she can safely give birth to a baby,” Dr. Skop said.

“It’s one of the most egregious invasions of the physician-patient relationship that we’ve ever seen,” said Dr. Rick Snyder, a cardiologist in Dallas who is chair of the board of trustees of the Texas Medical Association.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/26/health/texas-abortion-law-risky-pregnancy.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/20/us/abortion-high-risk-pregnancy.html

When all nouns are gendered, the notion “Latino” being gendered as male has the same impact as gendering in a language where only some nouns are gendered strikes me as a difficult proposition to accept. The notion that a verbal formula that officially includes women doesn’t strike me as actually including women. Words don’t have the impact that daily life does. Using “men” for both men and women means something different when women are a real and inescapable presence in all parts of our experience.

notGoodEnough@79:

No, I meant Latin, as in “Latin America”. It’s a subtle jab at the fact that there’s no need to create a neologism to import the word Latino into English w/o gendering it – we very literally already have a word for it. Using “Latinx” instead of “Latin” draws attention and gives cultural cachet to the academics and activists introducing the term. It’s creating jargon to empower these individuals rather than the broader group they purport to speak for. Latinx is creating a problem where none exists – if you want to borrow the Spanish word rather than using an English term, it makes sense to borrow the grammatical conventions as well. If you can’t abide by the implications of using a gendered noun/adjective in a language where that has different implications than in its source language, you should make it gender-neutral according to the linguistic rules the target language actually uses rather than inventing new ones, particularly when the new ones are as ostentatiously alien to the language.

As to the broader point you’re raising, it does look like you’re falling into an anglocentric trap. This is not at all uncommon in the discourse we’re engaged in, and is a result of the different sociological implications gendering has in an ungendered language than in a gendered one. Forex, you see francophone feminists creating specifically female forms of nouns in a way that is anathema to anglophonic feminists – in English, it’s viewed as pejorative to be a waitress (f) rather than a server (n), but in French not having both male and female versions of a professional noun is what is viewed as exclusionary because the language is (grammatically) gendered. This is the same issue with Latino/Latina/Latinx/Latine/Latin – an English understanding of grammatical gender (which is strictly equated with sociological gender) is being given primacy over the Spanish understanding of grammatical gender (which is not strictly equivalent to sociological gender). Latinx is more inclusive when we ignore or subordinate hispandophone understandings of grammatical gender to anglophone understandings thereof – but this necessarily gives primacy to anglophony (and again, specifically an activist jargon) even as it purports to defer to hispandophony by importing the Spanish term. If you must use a neologism, go with Latine, as it is closer to the phonology of both languages even if it has the same underlying conflations of grammatical and sociological gender. Either using Latino (and thus not imposing English understandings of grammatical gender on a Spanish word) or Latine (or even the older, more cumbersome Latin (American)) is far more respectful than creating an extremely artificial neologism that corresponds to neither English nor Spanish grammatical (or phonetic) conventions.

And it must be said that the generally-solid maxim of “use whatever the other party wants used” isn’t actually a solution here, because these terms will be frequently used in conversations where no such person is a participant. We still have to decide which term is “best”, and given that there are competing views amongst those being referred to about which of these are not just acceptable but offensive, we cannot simply defer to one authoritative voice. Alas.

Dr. Ingrid Skop, an obstetrician in San Antonio who belongs to the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said that even a girl as young as 9 or 10, impregnated by a father or a brother, could carry a baby to term without health risks.
“If she is developed enough to be menstruating and become pregnant, and reached sexual maturity, she can safely give birth to a baby,” Dr. Skop said.

Correction: for ‘said’ read ‘lied’, throughout.

Is it really the case that Klein wrote this?

Because the mainstream media and academia actually aren’t that liberal, because they mostly do put truth-seeking ahead of partisanship

Does he really believe that the media put “truth-seeking ahead of partisanship”? Because that’s the most ridiculously stupid thing any adult human being could write, and you can’t take anyone seriously if they believe something like this.

Indeed, I’m inclined to greater skepticism when a commenter expresses a general lack of deep knowledge of the subject coupled with a Wikipedia article (or comparably shallow source) upon which they base strong conclusions.

Did I seem to be basing a strong conclusion on a Wikipedia article? I don’t think I did that.

J-D I think strictly speaking in that episode of Buffy Cordelia was not yet an adult? I also maintain that Oz’s plan is more rational than writing, in a book, in 2022, that the mainstream media “put truth-seeking ahead of partisanship”.

In October 2021, Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, published “The Rise of Political Violence in the United States.”

If you want an illustration of polarization, the fact that a respected researcher at a reputable organization managed to write an article on “political violence” and completely miss/ignore/define as out of scope the massive and massively effective BLM protests/riots is hard to beat as an example. My adopted hometown (Richmond) was vandalized to the point of being unrecognizable, including by its political class which was willing to argue that long-standing monuments were an “urgent threat to public safety” because of the rioting: if that’s not “political violence,” the term isn’t particularly meaningful.

@
‘If you want an illustration of polarization, the fact that a respected researcher at a reputable organization managed to write an article on “political violence” and completely miss/ignore/define as out of scope the massive and massively effective BLM protests/riots

BUT Kleinfield didn’t –
he wrote:
Ideas that were once confined to fringe groups now appear in the mainstream media. White-supremacist ideas, militia fashion, and conspiracy theories spread via gaming websites, YouTube channels, and blogs, while a slippery language of memes, slang, and jokes blurs the line between posturing and provoking violence, normalizing radical ideologies and activities.
AND –
‘While violent incidents from the left are on the rise’ –
AND did you miss that? –
‘While violent incidents from the left are on the rise’ – political violence still comes overwhelmingly from the right, whether one looks at the Global Terrorism Database, F.B.I. statistics, or other government or independent counts. Yet people committing far-right violence — particularly planned violence rather than spontaneous hate crimes — are older and more established than typical terrorists and violent criminals. They often hold jobs, are married, and have children. Those who attend church or belong to community groups are more likely to hold violent, conspiratorial beliefs. These are not isolated “lone wolves”; they are part of a broad community that echoes their ideas.

Perhaps the most telling aspect of Kleinfeld’s essay is a chart based on statistics collected in the Global Terrorism Database that shows a surge in far-right terrorist incidents in the United States, starting in 2015 — when Trump first entered the political arena — rising to great heights by 2019, outstripping terrorist incidents linked to the far left, to religious groups or to environmentalists.
What will come of all this?

Parent made a good point by email: “This is tricky: Trump has been a conspiracy theorist since forever and he was only briefly a successful politician.” As The Times put it in 2016, “Donald Trump Clung to ‘Birther’ Lie for Years.”

Parent continued:

What’s freakishly destabilizing about the present is that ideological glues have never been so designed to eviscerate democracy and promote violence. Previous leaders always had the option to go down that road, but chose not to. Now the inmates are running the asylum’.

@117 “its political class which was willing to argue that long-standing monuments were an “urgent threat to public safety””

If you are referring to monuments glorifying seditious racist traitors, then it’s long past time they were removed.

The medical establishment is not allowed to perform the procedure, and you still control your body to the same extent as before.

This is an interesting principle. Does it also apply to dentistry and open-heart surgery? Can they be banned without implicating issues of bodily autonomy?

Does it also apply to interventions that one performs on oneself, like Plan B?

What about other matters that require the cooperation of another individual? Are we saying here that bodily autonomy is not implicated in questions of human sexuality? Can we ban heterosexual sex without violating the bodily autonomy of consenting adults?

Can we say that one has no right to bodily autonomy in the food that one consumes? In where one travels by car, bicycle or plane?

I do understand that you recognize that bodily autonomy is an issue for suicide, masturbation and self-mutilation — as long as no tool manufactured by someone else is used. But does your conception of bodily autonomy recognize anything that involves the participation of another person?

If so, then we’ll just have to invent another word to account for things that normal people consider matters of bodily autonomy. Maybe we can all agree to call these things “boodily autoonoomy” or something.

TM, have you heard of Maggie Halberman? The idea that (what you call) mainstream media are devoted to truth-speaking over partisanship is ridiculous. As a case in point, consider the NY Mag scandal happening this week (boys who are ostracized for revenge porn are victims of cancel culture). Look at the way the entire US and European media were reporting for 5 years about nazism in Ukraine, just to turn on a dime and declare there is nothing to see there as soon as the war began; the constant barrage of copaganda in every mainstream media outlet; the reporting of the recent local elections in the USA.

I assume you’ve read your Chomsky, but Klein clearly hasn’t if he believes this hogwash. And how are we to take any analysis or prescriptions seriously when the person writing them believes the people reporting on the issues are telling him the truth. This foolish man, for example, has been writing a book on polarization while believing all the stuff about cancel culture he is seeing in media is being reported honestly; or thinking Halberman is not Trump’s stenographer.

I mean, I’ve never taken this dude seriously. But if you want to see just how unserious he is, imagine him umming and ahhing and Thinking Very Hard over Bari Weiss’s latest cancel culture screed or Haberman reporting something “from Trump’s inner circle” that was actually the result of a direct call to the deranged idiot himself, and then Klein Very Seriously writing Very Serious Thoughts about how society is polarized?

It’s just impossible to take such a thing seriously.

My adopted hometown (Richmond) was vandalized to the point of being unrecognizable, including by its political class which was willing to argue that long-standing monuments were an “urgent threat to public safety” because of the rioting: if that’s not “political violence,” the term isn’t particularly meaningful.

It’s not clear what the antecedent of ‘that’ is. Is it ‘people arguing about monuments’? I think the term ‘political violence’ is still meaningful even if it doesn’t include people arguing about monuments. Is it ‘extensive vandalism’? I think the term ‘political violence’ is still meaningful even if it excludes many examples of extreme vandalism.

@125
‘It’s just impossible to take such a thing seriously’.

How true
I mean, I’ve never taken this dude @125 seriously. But if you want to see just how unserious he is, imagine him umming and ahhing and Thinking Very Hard over all these jokes Americas Right-Wing Racist Science Denying Warmongering Idiots make. about such truly serious people like for example Maggie Halberman?

I mean – did Maggie Halberman EVER crack a joke?
NAH – she is for sure as ‘SERIOUS’ as… as the Klein Dude of even as Mrs.Shouten!

And –
THEN –
having the nerve to accuse such truly SERIOUS Americans to be Clowns like ‘trump’ (the Worlds New Word for: Utmost Silly Stupid Right Wing Racist Science Denying Warmongering Unserious) that takes a ‘Faust’ –
as what did Faust say:

Von Zeit zu Zeit seh´ich den Alten gern und hüte mich, mit ihm zu brechen.

and wasn’t he speaking about the…
the?…
THE DEVIL???!

AND as Faust is back
and I have to confess –
that I truly missed –
‘the joker’

let me quote his worst joke:
‘Ich bin der Geist, der stets verneint!Und das mit Recht; denn alles, was entsteht,ist wert, dass es zugrunde geht;Drum besser wär’s, dass nichts entstünde.So ist denn alles, was ihr Sünde,Zerstörung, kurz, das Böse nennt,Mein eigentliches Element.

or was that a tweet out… of the infamous
‘GREEN-
(and Not: black-)
WALD?
(forest)

‘Why in this World
IS the biggest failure in the US -(and NOT only by Klein)
the obsession with both-sidesism, and in trying so silly to treat right wing lies and Faustish Dreck – as equal to the verifiable facts the NON-Fox media reports?’

as –
it just can’t be because every American family has it’s Crazy Uncle -(or aunt) – and y#all just don’t want to spoil that Thanksgiving Dinner – I (ME-MOI) NEVER wanted to spoil by talking about ‘stupid politics’ –
THEN don’t talk about ‘politics’ (or religion)
just talk about –
NOT getting fooled by the HUUUGEST FOOLS on this planet!

As I said, I think SamChevre is incorrect that Richmond is so racist that it is unrecognizable without its racist statues, but I do agree with Sam that the statues — erected as monuments to Jim Crow — are inherently political, and not some kind of neutral effort to embody heritage or whatever.

Orange Watch @ 136

Since your latest reply is short on anything new or particularly relevant to what I’ve been discussing, but long on reputation and insinuation about my motives, I feel justified in offering a more general reply rather than addressing individual points.

I will address the lesser part of your comment first (that which – if I’m being generous – might be characterised as approaching something of an actual response to me). I have not, as far as I can tell, made an argument from authority, weaponised standpoint epistemology, argued that opposing gender neutral language is necessarily regressive, or any of the other accusations you have consistently been leveling at me since your first reply with all the surgical precision of a particularly inaccurate blunderbuss.

If you recall, the bulk of my comments to you have been to address your argument that gender neutral language is a “solution to an invented problem (i.e. Spanish grammar conventions being perceived as problematic when imported into English, which lacks the corresponding linguistic rules and structures)”. I first responded by pointing out that Spanish-speaking people also have made arguments regarding the sociolinguistic implications of Spanish grammatical gender, making it (at least to me) fairly obvious that this is by no means solely the result of misunderstanding resulting from linguistic differences and that the source of perceived problematic nature did not rest solely in anglophone communities. When you responded to this by suggesting I had “fallen into an anglocentric trap” and offering a (rather overly simplistic, in my opinion) assertion regarding “the Spanish understanding of grammatical gender” (because apparently you think there’s only the one), I inferred you assumed my alleged “anglocentric” perspective could not be trusted on this matter and so instead pointed you to what some Spanish-speakers themselves had to say about the matter – not to make an argument from authority, but because their very existence demonstrates your repeated assertions regarding the lack of sociological implications for grammatical gender within Spanish and the provenance of Spanish GNL being anglocentric are, to put it as kindly as possible, highly dubious. Given I have been very clear about this point of disagreement (which has, after all, constituted the vast bulk of my comments to you), you now seem curiously eager to assert this is all an irrelevant digression and “we” are actually talking about English all along. You may, of course, choose what you discuss, but I’m afraid you don’t get to make such decisions on my behalf.

[Note: as purely a point of amusing digression, I would also note that the same sorts of arguments regarding the problematic nature of grammatical gender and the use of the masculine generic also appear to have been raised in English (one’s mind immediately turns to John Stuart Mill’s complaints regarding the lack of gender-neutral generics forcing the use of “he” somewhere around, I seem to recall, the 1850s). However, please do not feel the need to comment on this, as I offer it only as a hopefully entertaining sidenote regarding the tendency of history to rhyme.]

Your assertions regarding the nature of evolution of language are delightful (apparently your familiarity extends as far as evolution through natural selection, yet not quite as far as evolution through artificial selection). However, I’m not sure exactly where you expect changes to originate from if not a minority (I’m unaware of any case where a majority suddenly wakes up one day with new linguistic understanding), and I really don’t see how you can argue that 40+ years of discussion regarding Spanish GNL can be considered a short timeframe except in the most relative of senses. You assert that Spanish GNL has been broadly rejected, yet considering its usage appears to be (albeit slowly) still increasing (particularly amongst younger demographics) that seems somewhat premature – indeed, small scale polling (though I must qualify this by noting there is a lack of any substantive data, indicating the need for better research) suggests the majority of people either favour Spanish GNL use or are indifferent to it, suggesting it is a far less polarising issue than you imply and casting doubt on the degree to which it is in fact opposed by Spanish-speakers. Yet despite this, you seem to think that when Spanish-speaking feminists argue for GNL (such as “-os y –as”) it is polarising imposition of prescriptivism (even though it is not exactly rare or unique to academia), but you seem to view reactionary and socially conservative rejection of all GNL as somehow unpolarised descriptive neutrality. You certainly give the appearance of someone who is a great appreciator of Russell’s conjugation.

While I am glad that you seem to agree with me (albeit only to an extent) that the Spanish-speaking community’s opinion has some weight in such matters, I find it mildly (but only very mildly) interesting to see the boundaries to which your generosity extends. My position (as I’ve repeatedly stated) is that the preferences of the community to which a label might apply should (as far as possible) take precedence, and that labels should not be applied against its wishes (someone might be able to infer from that what I would think of any particular given scenario in which a label is being applied against a community’s wishes). Given that the majority of the “hispandophone community” (which is, of course, less a community and more an artificial agglomeration) prefer other terms to “Latinx”, I would suggest their wishes be acknowledged and the term not be used in a general sense (though of course it would be different for me in cases where some specific person or community has embraced it purely as a self-descriptor). Where you and I appear to significantly differ is that when polling suggests that the majority also reject “Hispanic” and “Latino” and prefer instead “American” or “[hyphenated-American” (indicating country of familial origin), I think that those wishes should also be acknowledged and you appear to disagree while implying that at this point it now becomes a matter upon which everyone should weigh in on. This does give the rather unfortunate impression your interest in the preferences of a community correlates strongly with potential utility as a rhetorical point, and that it correlates weakly with the wishes of the community itself – though that is, I suppose, a matter between you and the “hispandophone community” and has little to do with me.

If I may make a minor digression into a topic without giving the appearance of inviting discussion (I have little interest in opening a new line of discourse with you given how unfruitful conversation with you is proving to be), I must confess to a degree of weariness when you contrasted English neopronouns against the singular they. While it may well be true singular they has gained “more” traction than nonbinary neopronouns, you seem to gloss over the fact that there has also been an exceptionally strong and polarised backlash to the singular they from much the same people who object to neopronouns (need I really list all the examples – such as Schrier’s WSJ column arguing singular they is forced speech or Peterson arguing he’d prefer to go to jail – or can we take this as a reasonable inference on my part?). My supposition would be that to whatever degree there has been a sociopolitical driving force behind a greater acceptance of singular they comparative to neopronouns, it is by no means as significant as other factors. And while admittedly this is mere opinion, it does seem to me somewhat premature to assume that singular they will become widely accepted by those who object to the neopronouns you list. My impression is that the majority of people who are uncomfortable with nonbinary neopronouns are also uncomfortable with the nonbinary they, which – if true – would seem to indicate that it is a social rather than linguistic objection, and that it is the public recognition of nonbinary people which is the point of polarisation. If that were the case, it would in turn indicate a somewhat different root problem, and that there would be no nonbinary term which would not raise objection (because it would be the subject rather than the descriptor that causes the culture-war). Of course, it is entirely possible this is all wrong (I certainly won’t argue my impressions are more than that, particularly about a country I do not inhabit), but I think my impression is not entirely unreasonable. But regardless, I’m afraid I’m not overly interested in further discussion with you on this topic (feel free to continue making whatever insinuations about my motivations and accusations regarding my limited perspective you wish simply because I have an opinion on the topic – I find them more amusing than insulting).

To conclude, since you have now stated that the main points which I have been discussing with you all this time (the provenance of both Spanish GNL in general, and the perception of Spanish grammatical gender being problematic) are digressions, and that the topics you wish to engage are those in which I have little interest in discussing with you, it seems to me that the dialogue has run its course. I might respond if should you choose to continue speculating about my motives and reasoning (an approach one might also gently suggest as likely to be polarising, albeit on an individual level), but otherwise I doubt I will.

Regards, etc.