The only way that you could see any of this as some sort of terribly complicated conflict is if you don’t actually have a politics, but you instead have a series of cultural and social signals designed to tell the world what a moral paragon you are. The principle that Kotsko seems to be endorsing here, which is very popular in his neck of the elite bourgie media caste, is that political allies can never substantially disagree with each other in good faith. Which is, you know, utterly unworkable as an actual political principle in the real world. But then, for someone like Kotsko, who is always speaking out for the good of demographic and social classes he does not belong to, actual political efficacy– whether you succeed in making the world a better place– is mostly irrelevant. The educated white people who dominate our conversations about social justice need actual socially-just outcomes less than anyone, so they mostly don’t worry about whether their complex language games and wild signalling achieve just ends. I can’t imagine a surer sign of privilege than someone looking at a perfectly mundane inter-leftist political disagreement and saying, “sigh, I guess it’s a no-win scenario, I’m gonna go write a sad poem in my Moleskin.” The people who are the victims of injustice don’t have that option.
Posted on: Sun, 09 Nov 2014 14:29:08 +0000
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