Right, that's why I subscribe to your newsletter
I was wondering...
You ever have one of those friends who you can’t remember why you ever started hanging out with them, but then they do something pretty awesome and you think “Oh, yea, he’s a pretty good guy”?
Freddie deBoer pulled that off nicely today. Sure, sometimes he tosses off strangely vacuous statements along the lines of modern identity politics being a rehash of Ayn Rand1, and I spend time wondering if it is even worth responding to something so silly.
Then he goes and writes an essay ending with this:
I need free speech because I don’t have the faith this army of sneering white dudes has that I know everything, that every debate has already been settled and we just need to let the goodies rule over the baddies. I don’t think everything is obvious. I don’t think all political questions are easy. So I need free speech in order to be exposed to all kinds of ideas, including ones I find deeply offensive, because it’s through the friction of philosophical conflict that new and better ideas arise. And I need free speech because the socialist politics that are core to my identity are at present vastly unpopular in this country, despite what you might hear in Brooklyn or on the NBC News Slack, and the only way that changes is through the long, slow, uncool work of gradual persuasion.
And I think “You know what Freddie? You’re alright. You might be wrong, you might be a bit of a boor, and you call yourself a socialist with a straight face, but you are alright.”
So, well said, Freddie. Well said.
Because defining yourself by what intersectional identity groups you belong to is individualistic, apparently? I would give good money to see Rand come back from the dead and give a 20 minute rant about progressive identity politics, if only because there would be more smoke coming out of her ears than the pack of cigarettes she would blaze through.
Hmmm...I keep thinking the obsession with individual identity has a right wing libertarian quality, so what FdB said about it chimed at my end. I think he’s talking more about an intersection between those ideologies rather than saying they’re equivalent. But obviously I’m not in his mind. And I’ve decided to identify as a tree from here on, so you’d better respect that or I’ll email your employers.