Very enjoyable read again Dubai. For the sake of debate, how do the liberal classes get their "heads out of their arses?" While the right can reminisce about the great days of the past, getting back there may drag every one to the bottom? Globalization is not an easy force to reverse and should we be pandering to people's base instincts of intolerance and bigotry, as our government are currently doing, to get there? I really don't think there is a simple way to reverse this trend. It took a war last time we were in this position.
Self-questioning should be a critical component of getting our collective heads out of our asses. the first question that should be asked is simply 'what is happening?'. The answer is that automation and globalization are creating a huge underclass of unemployed blue-collar people, who in turn see immigrants as competition for what jobs they have left and see the urban classes that *have* prospered due to globalization as utterly unconcerned with them and how they live - this is being exploited by nativist, populist movements across the Western world with ever greater degrees of success. The next question then becomes 'how do we stop or reverse this trend of populist, often nativist movements winning elections across the West?'. The answer is simple enough - win back the voters who are driving this trend. Namely, poor, formerly blue-collar, usually uneducated white voters - usually rural voters in countries where significant rural-urban divides exist, but otherwise both rural and urban voters in sufficiently developed nations. The next two questions then become 'should we make the effort of winning them back?', which speaks to the philosophical question of whether we engage with them *despite* what we have collectively labelled racist, misogynistic, xenophobic behaviour from them, and 'how do we win them back?' which is a more prosaic question that is concerned with methods, not justifications.
The answer to the first question is simple - yes, we absolutely should engage with them. They are people, people who have often been seriously misrepresented and smeared by what I would call and increasingly intolerant, regressive wing of the left, who in their haste to impose racial and social justice based on gender and identity politics (both noble aims in and of themselves) have taken to stupidly and counter-productively labelling an increasing number of things racist, misogynistic, xenophobic et al., creating an almost unspoken social order of 'acceptable' views and opinions that has done absolutely nothing, nothing whatsoever, to actually educate or inform people. Instead, it has turned them away by labelling them horrible people for holding opinions that as recently as a couple of decades ago were considered mainstream - this, when combined with the fact that the left has utterly given up trying to seriously fight the right on economic issues, has backfired horribly, and turned empathetic people who would have listened had you only approached them with a bit more understanding into people with grudges to bear against the people who ignored their concerns and labelled them 'bad' for believing things the urban chattering classes considered uncouth. Are there actual racists and sexists among the classes of people now driving this trend? *Absolutely*, there are. But spacegoating them all as racists and sexists, which is something the liberal classes (media, acacdemia, blogging class, nearly everyone of note) have done with disheartening regularity over the past year, does nothing to change the essential facts that, firstly, these are mainly empathetic people who were cheated out of the lifestyles, jobs and communities theirs parents possessed due to the onset of globalization, fierce competition by immigrants and automation - and, secondly, that these people still make up the majority of the voters you need to win elections/referendums and actually drive policy-making instead of sitting secure in your bubble of ideological purity where you only ever condescend to talk to people who agree with your worldview.
The answer to the second question is derived from the answer to the first - how do you win these people back? Well, firstly, you win by being what has become a rapidly unfashionable term among the chattering classes - you win by being 'colorblind'. You advocate for the economic and social prosperity of *all*, as opposed to selecting some groups for special advancement over others because of historic or current injustices. There is a logic to saying that one group has suffered more than another, necessitating special treatment for that group to bring them up to speed - however, it is not a universal vote-winning logic, it is not a unifying logic, it is not a logic that makes people feel a part of a wider society that values them as much as anyone else. Implicitly, such a policy makes one group of people feel unwanted compared to another - that's just how we are, it isn't going to change. That's why advocating for such policies has to be done with the lightest of touches and the most persuasive, understanding, tactful of ways - sadly, too many on the left do not possess such qualities and methods, and have done great harm to progressive causes by pig-headedly pursuing these divisive policies without understanding in the least how to first bring everyone together and forge a consensus about them. Thus, if we want to win again, we cannot afford such policies, given that we clearly are not skilled enough as a group to advocate for them in a manner that creates a unified public understanding of their necessity - ergo, we must be be colorblind now. Any policies the left puts forward must be based on this point - there cannot be a division between rural and urban poor on the basis of ethnic, religious or social 'in' and 'out' groups, it must equally be for the poor as a whole, regardless of color or creed, or it must not be pursued. Anything else will fail in this hyper-tense, post-fact political environment that now exists, and will only ultimately harm the minorities and disadvantaged groups that the 'liberal' progressive left ostensibly wants to help - , namely, by allowing populists to pander to the fear among the broader class of poor, blue-collar workers that the left doesn't give a damn about them and their 'unfashionable' troubles, as
@Gilzeantoscore rightly points out.
(Continued)
. Sadly, 'in-group'/'out-group' psychology posits that you can only really identify with a 'tribe' if there's another tribe to contrast yourself against - i.e, if there's some tribe to compete with for resources and general utility. Otherwise the social glue that sticks people together while negating all their personal/physical differences just isn't there.Thus, the idea of people all uniting into a human 'tribe' as opposed to ethnic/religious/national tribes only holds sway if there's some other species for humans to compete against/measure ourselves to. One of the reasons, actually, why some observers posit that there will never be a 'world' government until we conclusively find proof that we're not alone in the universe. Until then, we're likely stuck competing against one another based on national/cultural/ethnic differences.
