I agree with much (but not all) of this from the writer and critic Freddie deBoer (although the labels "universalism" and "particularism" are inapt):
If you don’t believe me, and your Twitter account occupies any kind of progressive space, go on there and tweet “I think Democrats and the left should work to improve conditions for poor white people as well. Their suffering matters.” The notion of the left working for poor people as poor people, rather than merely as an extension of some identity frame, would be totally uncontroversial among the vast majority of left-leaning people throughout the existence of the modern political spectrum. Today? Go ahead, tweet that out, if you have a lot of liberal and leftist followers. See how that works out for you....
Perhaps the most glaring change in the left, in my lifetime, has been the abandonment of civil liberties as a core left issue - or, at least, of civil liberties for anyone who does not fall into a protected identity class....Civil liberties have been a core element of liberal and leftist belief going back centuries, but have been abandoned by today’s social justice advocates, who have been educated not in organizing meetings or union halls but on Tumblr and in seminars at $80,000/year liberal arts colleges. They put free speech in sneer quotes every time they invoke it...
Freedom of speech and other liberties were not assumed [during the Civil Rights struggle] to be inherently antagonistic to the fight for racial justice; they were understood, correctly, as conjoined in the effort against establishment power, which restricts whatever freedoms it can when it suits the interests of the rich and powerful. But then, this has been the default assumption of the international left for centuries, that civil liberties are a core element of any radical project. That assumption was embraced by Karl Marx, Frederick Douglass, Rosa Luxemburg, Eugene Debs, Emma Goldman, Hal Draper, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, Noam Chomsky, Harvey Milk, Ira Glasser, and many, many more. The political and social reform movement in the 1960s that would have such indelible influence on the left was called the Free Speech Movement for a reason. Radicals have recognized the essential place of civil liberties in our movement for so long because its members have understood that the purpose of left-wing practice is to liberate - not only from government oppression, the boogeyman of the right, but from poverty, from racism, from inequality, from injustice. The whole point is for everyone to get free....
Contemporary social justice politics are a niche politics. They favor tiny fringes rather than the great mass of the populace. They pursue niche goals not despite the fact that they are niche but because of that fact, as they see politics as a type of fashion which like all fashion doles out cool based on exclusivity. The real left, in contrast, sees politics as a means to enact material change in the world, to end exploitation and ensure the good of all, a means which we will gladly set aside when those goals have been secured. (Anyone who sincerely enjoys politics is a sociopath.) The traditional left would not close its mind to radical police reform. But we'd never have taken up the cause of “Defund the Police” under the conditions in which that happened last year, because the vast majority of people (of all kinds) rejected the idea. Does that mean that we could never move to end policing as we know it, or embrace other unpopular ideas? No. It means that we can win such a fight only if the people lead, if there is sufficient gravity within the country to achieve such a thing. We must slowly educate and gradually mobilize; no skipping steps. The Defund the Police impulse never fully committed to educating and mobilizing in this way; it was seen as sufficient to suggest that everyone who wasn’t already on board was a racist. Inevitably, it collapsed, as there is no left politics that is not a mass politics. Populism is not optional for us. It never has been.
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