YOU enabled David Brooks' stupidity.
All the rhetorical devices that have been a staple of identity politics are now being exploited by the Clinton and Obama campaigns against each other. They are competing to play the victim. They are both accusing each other of insensitivity. They are both deliberately misinterpreting each other’s comments in order to somehow imply that the other is morally retrograde.
All the habits of verbal thuggery that have long been used against critics of affirmative action, like Ward Churchill and Thomas Sowell, and critics of the radical feminism, like Christina Hoff Summers, are now being turned inward by the Democratic front-runners.
Not like anyone that listens to him will vote for either of you. And I do like his linking Ward Churchill and Thomas Sowell...
But the entire theory of identity politics was that we are not mere individuals. We carry the perspectives of our group consciousness. Our social roles and loyalties are defined by race and gender.
I would say assigned rather than defined. And I would say we carry the experience of common treatment.
It’s a black or female thing. You wouldn’t understand.
And yet David's startling self-assurance suggests he understands, making him Black or female.
Gah. He has to misinterpret. It's his job.