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Francis Fukuyama – Against Identity Politics

amc.sas.upenn.edu

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Re: Francis Fukuyama – Against Identity Politics

#81

Post by pessimizer »

roenxi wrote: post #62
was8309 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

per 'defund the police' being extreme, here's a story. living near Pitt in 1981. iiuc, Reagan defunding forced the local psych hospital to empty out. So now we had a bunch of patients with psychiatric disabilities living homeless in the neighborhood, and my understanding is that they needed to stay close by the hospital in order to get daily meds. Of course this resulted in more police involvement, and though I don't…

> So my understanding of 'defund the police' is to reverse what happened in that and many similar situations... Most comments explaining "defund the police" seem to settle on a different meaning, because I've seen one or two around and this one is new to me. It is best to take political slogans literally. When a large group of people gets together and starts chanting something, then votes someone in who promises to e…

> Most comments explaining "defund the police" seem to settle on a different meaning,

Most comments explaining "defund the police" are from people who disapprove of it. The above is exactly how I've always heard it described. If they wanted to abolish the police, they could have just said "abolish the police."

Re: Francis Fukuyama – Against Identity Politics

#82

Post by beaconstudios »

AzzieElbab wrote: post #78
andrepd wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? Precisely the opposite, Marx thought the only fundamental differences were class differences. Does "proletarians of the world, unite!" seem like a nationalist/identitarian slogan?

Not “unite”, unite in fight against oppression. Unite against your countrymen, the opposite of nationalism. Once proletariat in developed countries was deemed unsuitable as engine for revolution new ideologies aimed at urban blacks and college students were developed.

This is the "frankfurt school tried to invent a new communism" conspiracy theory. In actuality, "identity politics" is a big bracket of civil rights issues, some applications of which are good and some of which (the obvious example being cancel culture) are bad. But the whole point is to try to move towards an egalitarian society for queer, trans, ethnic, female etc people who have historically had the short end of the stick in the West in various different ways. The whole "if you're white then you're an oppressor" angle is a gross misapplication of the theory by people who don't understand the difference between individual and systemic effects.

Re: Francis Fukuyama – Against Identity Politics

#85

Post by marcusverus »

pessimizer wrote: post #81
roenxi wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So my understanding of 'defund the police' is to reverse what happened in that and many similar situations... Most comments explaining "defund the police" seem to settle on a different meaning, because I've seen one or two around and this one is new to me. It is best to take political slogans literally. When a large group of people gets together and starts chanting something, then votes someone in who promises to e…

> Most comments explaining "defund the police" seem to settle on a different meaning, Most comments explaining "defund the police" are from people who disapprove of it. The above is exactly how I've always heard it described. If they wanted to abolish the police, they could have just said "abolish the police."

> If they wanted to abolish the police, they could have just said "abolish the police."

Interesting. What form would you expect this to take? Maybe an Op-Ed in the New York Times entitled "Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police"?

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol...

Re: Francis Fukuyama – Against Identity Politics

#86

Post by tomlockwood »

borepop wrote: post #3

Also Francis Fukuyama: history ended in 1992.

Yeah, not sure I'm going to give much serious eartime to an academic who is most famous for predicting democratic neoliberalism was going to sweep the globe, pre-9/11 and the ascendancy of China.

Re: Francis Fukuyama – Against Identity Politics

#87

Post by AzzieElbab »

beaconstudios wrote: post #82
AzzieElbab wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not “unite”, unite in fight against oppression. Unite against your countrymen, the opposite of nationalism. Once proletariat in developed countries was deemed unsuitable as engine for revolution new ideologies aimed at urban blacks and college students were developed.

This is the "frankfurt school tried to invent a new communism" conspiracy theory. In actuality, "identity politics" is a big bracket of civil rights issues, some applications of which are good and some of which (the obvious example being cancel culture) are bad. But the whole point is to try to move towards an egalitarian society for queer, trans, ethnic, female etc people who have historically had the short end of t…

- “ This is the "frankfurt school tried to invent a new communism" conspiracy theory” - I am sure I could google exact quotes from I think Marcuse that states the opposite. Maybe his utopia wasn’t called communism, does it make any difference? Having said that, what I find more interesting is how Marxism is the only theory adopted by all of western humanities, because it is the only theory that defines what social progress should look like. I feel we desperately need some alternative view of what progress is, because what we use now clearly isn’t working

Re: Francis Fukuyama – Against Identity Politics

#88

Post by mjmsmith »

uejfiweun wrote: post #27

I hate identity politics as much as the next guy, but I think a lot of Fukuyama's takes here are pretty bad. He repeatedly paints massive groups with a large and indiscriminate brush. For instance: "The right seeks to cut off immigration altogether and would like to send immigrants back to their countries of origin." Uh, what? The United States is a nation of immigrants and we all know it. I don't think anyone wants…

They "seek to" cut off immigration altogether, and work towards it. They "would like to" send immigrants back to their countries of origin, but know it's not going to happen. The sentence seems carefully constructed to me.

Re: Francis Fukuyama – Against Identity Politics

#89

Post by wahnfrieden »

UIUC_06 wrote: post #46
wahnfrieden wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’d like to see the writing on Chagnon that Graeber promoted, which I’m not certain your summary really captures - http://dwhume.com/darkness_documents/0246.htm

You really want to push an article with garbage phrases like this? "By far the greater part is the story, sufficiently notorious in its own right, of the well-known anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon: of his work among the Yanomami people of Venezuela and his fame among the science tribe of America." "during the late 1960s and early 1970s Chagnon had served as a jungle advance man and blood collector." "Chagnon inscribe…

you chose the editorialized bits instead of the content that explains why the author finds such editorializing suitable. going to disengage here

Re: Francis Fukuyama – Against Identity Politics

#90

Post by marcusverus »

dlbucci wrote: post #58
fumanchux wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The “Reagan defunded psychiatric hospitals” trope needs to die. The wards started emptying in the 60s with the granting or rights to the patients. We don’t want to go back to “one flew over the cuckoo’s nest”. Then more with the invention of meds that controlled the worst symptoms. Psychiatric hospitalization rates dropped 65% from 1970-1979. Those hospitals were funded by states not the feds, so there was a much lar…

Both things can be true. Reagan did repeal this, for example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_Health_Systems_Act_of...

The bill had been only law for 10 months when Reagan repealed it. It seems dubious that either the bill or its repeal had any significant impact on the national trend which, as the gp pointed out, was well on its way by 1980.
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