The Disconnect

 Two examples of why the Very Online Left and the Academic Left are perhaps not as attuned to the needs of the people they claim to represent.

First, Matt Yglesias takes Andrew Yang's mayoral campaign as an example of how activist groups are often wildly divergent from the various groups that they purport to represent. He also talks about Elizabeth Warren, who in many ways was the perfect Academic Left candidate. She was, after all, a professor. She reached out to the various advocacy groups for African Americans and Latine - excuse me, Latinx - voters. 

But she never broke through with those actual voters. She never escaped the college educated crowd. The "moderate" Joe Biden was the one who racked up Black votes. Yglesias also puts forth Julian Castro. Castro ran on "open borders." This is a terribly stupid idea, both practically and politically. And you know who REALLY hates it? Hispanics. Almost as much as they hate the term Latinx. 

"Defund the Police" had a similar effect on Black voters. The activist class wanted police "defunded" which didn't mean what it really meant or maybe it did. As Deray McKesson explained to my school, African Americans don't want NO policing, they want the same policing that white communities get. The problem with Black neighborhoods, is that they are simultaneously UNDER policed (crimes against African Americans are not investigated rigorously) and OVER policed (petty crimes by African Americans lead to George Floyd or Michael Brown or Freddie Grey or....

As someone working in academia, I'm routinely exposed to the neologisms of the Academic Left. The latest addition to LGBTQ...I'm not trying to be trite or disrespectful when I say there is limited utility to trying to keep up, because there will simply be a new one added once I've learned what comes next. I absolutely support the fundamental right for people to be their whole human selves, the live their own lives in the way they define it for themselves. Trying to keep up with the increasingly narrow turf wars (or TERF wars) within the very narrow activist base is impossible. 

While there is a commendable effort to draw the circle of understanding wider and wider, paradoxically it can wind up excluding more people - even those of good faith. 

This is the fundamental flaw of Leftist Identity Politics. It ultimately defeats allyship with the majority by adopting increasingly specific terms and rules.

Another example is the apparent defeat of efforts to unionize Amazon. Among a portion of the Economic Online Left, Amazon is evil incarnate, simply by being Amazon. The retail giant DOES stifle competition; it DOES dominate the market in unhealthy ways. 

And apparently, it's not as bad a place to work as some make it out to be. Or simply that unions are so unpopular in Alabama that even if it was as bad as people say, no one wants to join a union.

The problem with living in a theoretical world is that you lose touch with actual human experience. Women don't want to be made uncomfortable at work, but that doesn't mean they are outraged that people aren't using the word "womxn." Unless, that it, you are wedded to a theory about language creating reality in a way that having "man" in "woman" makes women subservient to men. 

In this moment strides Joe Biden. Good old boring Joe Biden. Ignoring demands to center certain specific language, he is instead attempting to radically alter our relationship to government. And he won.