Neo-Progressivism: Social Justice or Injustice?

During the Democratic debate, candidates, namely Bernie Sanders, paraded themselves under the flag of Progressivism. However, the Progressivism these candidates are referring to is not the Progressivist movement spearheaded by Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson during the late 19^th century and early 20^th century; the candidates on stage during the debate are waving the flag of Neo-Progressivism, which was organized in the 1950s and was one of the great locomotives of the New Left in the 1960s. Neo-Progressivism preaches the idea of political-economic and social movement, but the movement does more to stifle liberty than to promote it. Ironically, Neo-Progressivism suppresses rights through the pillars in which it stands: identity politics, political correctness, and post-modernism.

Identity Politics

Identity politics is defined as “a wide range of political activity and theorizing founded in the shared experiences of injustice of members of certain social groups. Rather than organizing solely around belief systems, programmatic manifestos, or party affiliation, identity political formations typically aim to secure the political freedom of a specific constituency marginalized within its larger context.” To put it in laymen’s terms, identity politics takes away a person’s experience and places him into a larger group, which is usually based on physical characteristics, in order to document a homogenous, group experience. In identity politics, those who look alike must think alike. For example, Robert is a young, black male that comes from an affluent family and is attending Harvard University as a law student. Robert considers himself an ardent conservative, but because of the color of his skin, identity politics marginalizes poor Robert into the larger African-American community, a group protected by identity politics because it is often labeled as “oppressed”. According to identity politics, Robert must understand the “black man’s plight” simply because he is black, despite him being from a family of doctors, lawyers, and businessmen 5 generations down. Instead of being “Robert”, a Harvard law student, he is now a “discriminated black youth”. Through identity politics, the Neo-Progressivist movement is able to trap Robert into association to a group’s experience rather than association to his own individual experience. Poor Robert becomes ensnared by the idea that he is being discriminated against by American society and is now a sociology major with a focus on ethnic studies, constantly writing on his Tumblr blog about the evil “white, male, cis scum” (white, cis, male being another group created though unprotected by identity politics). How ironic is it that Martin Luther King’s dream of judging a man based solely on the content of his character is destroyed by Neo-Progressivism, the all-encompassing cure that yet categorizes based on the color of the man’s skin?

Political Correctness

While identity politics rallies troops, political correctness is the sword that the movement wields. Political correctness is defined as “The avoidance of forms of expression or action that are perceived to exclude, marginalize, or insult groups of people who are socially disadvantaged or discriminated against”. Through political correctness, Neo-Progressivists are able to use words such as racist, misogynist, or bigot to strike down those who may distort the image of a group protected by identity politics. Political correctness not only confiscates one’s freedom of expression, but it also obstructs justice. The Rotherham and Peterborough sexual abuse scandals are cases in which “sex gangs”, located all over the U.K., consisting almost entirely of men of Pakistani heritage raped over 1400 white British girls. These gangs went on without full-scale police involvement from 1997 to 2013. It has been documented that the reason for the failure of police investigation was the fact that the offenders were Muslims: a group that is protected by identity politics. Thankfully, political correctness has not clouded everyone’s judgement as the founder of the British Muslim Youth recognized the faults of the police, “The fact these guys were predominantly Pakistani heritage men should not be a reason for providing a cloak of invisibility.” Nonetheless, the police were right to assume that the offenders might accuse them of racism, as one of the offenders did indeed call the judge a racist ^[1]Political correctness works as a sort of parry and riposte in which it parries attacks by those of a group unprotected by identity politics and ripostes by attacking the person on the fact that they are of a group unprotected by identity politics. This style of attack works to move around the actual argument in order to attack what the argument is based on, which ties political correctness into post-modernism.

Post-modernism

Post-modernism is the antithesis to modernism: the idea that society is objective with an objective sense of happiness and enlightenment. Post-modernism argues that society is subjective with people and groups creating their own sense of happiness and enlightenment. In debate, post-modernism is able to destroy an argument by destroying the certainty, or objectivism, in which the argument is based on. The post-modernist, like a 5-year-old child, is able to tire their opponent by asking “why?” after each of their rebuttals, exhausting their opponent’s ability to make a cohesive rebuttal, and leaving them wide open for attack. A post-modernist debater can win an argument without presenting an actual argument. Neo-progressivism adopts post-modernism because it challenges the idea of “traditionalism” or the nuclear family. The attack on traditionalism may actually be fair in cases like gay marriage in which political leaders such as Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama, who a decade ago both opposed gay marriage, now change their views. However, this war on traditionalism, like identity politics, places the experience of the group over the individual. In order to create the idea of workplace gender equality and to destroy the traditionalist idea of workplace gender roles, we must have a 50-50 representation of men and women in the workplace. This means that if a job can hold 20 people, 10 of them must be male and the other half must be female. This is a problem when you consider a job in which the gender division is currently 15 men to 5 women as you are going to have to fire those 5 men in order to hire 5 more women. By firing qualified, hardworking individuals simply because of their gender, one places the group, in this case the gender, over the individual’s experience. Here we see a contradiction in the tenets of Neo-Progressivism, which preaches justice for all. In order for the demographic of women to progress, men must suffer injustices because they were born male. This ties back to identity politics and political correctness. Since women are protected by identity politics, the persecution of men is justified because they are the opposing, unprotected party.

Conclusion

Although Neo-Progressivism has worked in progressing society during the Civil Rights Movement, it begins to rear its ugly head as the issues become more complex in today’s society. Neo-Progressivism creates a system in which injustices towards an individual are made moot in order to appeal to the goals of a group. This is contrary to the human sense of attachment. Interestingly enough, a quote from Joseph Stalin touches on this point, “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic”. Why do we cry when we watch The Boy in the Stripped Pajamas but stay stern faced when learning about the Holocaust? Why are we so engaged when reading or watching the experience of Chris Kyle (aka The American Sniper) but comparatively uninterested in Middle Eastern conflicts?  It is easy for one to become attached to an individual’s experience; it is impossible for one to become truly attached to a large group’s experience as it is impossible to conceive all of them as individuals.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rochdale_sex_trafficking_gang

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFnd6IS0DrY

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-28951612

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/postmodernism/

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/political-correctness

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-politics/