Sunday, February 24, 2019

The identity-politics police come for Bernie Sanders

Bernie Sanders catalyzed the Democratic Party's post-Obama move to the left.

In the language of the modern left, the straight, cisgendered Sanders is burdened by his utter lack of intersectionality.

Sanders cited the famous Martin Luther King Jr. quote about judging people by the content of their character and replied, "We have got to look at candidates, you know, not by the color of their skin, not by their sexual orientation or their gender and not by their age. I mean, I think we have got to try to move us toward a nondiscriminatory society, which looks at people based on their abilities, based on what they stand for."

Given a choice between Sanders and the free-market Republican Tim Scott for president, do progressives want African-Americans to vote for Scott? Should Bobby Kennedy, lionized for decades for his unifying campaigning, be retroactively deemed just another straight white male who had to get out of the way? Do we let ourselves slide into a society of Shiites and Sunnis, merely conducting a census every election cycle by voting for our own regardless of any other consideration?

Anyone who looks at, say, Steve Forbes and Sanders and thinks, "Oh, just a couple of white guys," is disregarding every political and philosophical difference in favor of a racialist reductionism.

Today, Sanders is seen as retrograde by the identity-politics hall monitors who increasingly rule the Democratic Party.

The root of the problem is that Sanders is an old-school socialist who attributes primacy to a class struggle that crosses racial boundaries, rather than to race as such.

https://nypost.com/2019/02/22/the-identity-politics-police-come-for-bernie-sanders/

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