Op-Ed: The Left's Identity Politics Strategy Is on a Direct Collision Course with Itself
When presidential hopeful Sen. Tim Scott recently dismantled the divisive racial narrative voiced on “The View,” he immobilized the radical left’s weapon of choice.
Co-host Joy Behar incredibly had accused Scott, a black man who grew up in the 1960s South, of blind ignorance regarding “systemic racism.”
Scott refused to play the victim, asserting that “the truth of my life disproves every single lie from the pit of hell that we’re hearing from the radical left” and condemning the propagation of victimhood as a “dangerous, offensive, disgusting message to send to our young people today.”
Scott instead highlighted what he views as tremendous and encouraging legal and cultural progress regarding race, offering as evidence his own experience and how many blacks have similarly risen to the White House and other positions of prominence.
Why do leftists not rejoice along with Scott about such progress but instead keep repeating the narrative of irredeemable, rampant racism as their go-to political weapon?
Why do they continue to attempt to dominate and cancel their ideological opponents with identity politics labels — racist, homophobe, anti-women, anti-science?
Like all fascists, radical leftists resort to attack propaganda and coercion because they have no positive agenda, no demonstrable successes, to offer.
Can they brag about canceling student debt while bankrupting the country? Can they trumpet a Green New Deal that sacrifices American energy independence and jobs?
Can they virtue-signal their compassion for illegal immigrants when their open-border policy has facilitated fentanyl smuggling and deaths, cartel profiteering and human trafficking? Can they gloat over training service members to use transgender pronouns while allowing communist China to gain naval ascendancy?
With no policy successes to feature, the leftists have nothing to say other than, “Don’t vote for the racist, homophobe, anti-women, anti-science Republicans!”
Identity politics stresses victimhood. LGBT groups thrive on victim status despite the fact that these groups today are among the most widely celebrated in society, business, politics and entertainment. With government sanction, they enjoy the whole month of June to publicly celebrate their success.
To tap into the political power of the transgender movement, leftists have proved willing even to throw women under the bus. Their transgender mandates have severely diminished women’s rights, including eliminating the “women” from women’s sports and removing privacy and protection in women-only facilities.
Trans victims are all the rage, so goodbye, Martina Navratilova, and welcome, Dylan Mulvaney.
Transgenderism relies on the absurd pretense that by reason of imagination alone, a male with immutable XY chromosomes can become a woman, or a female with immutable XX chromosomes can become a man.
It does not seem to occur to leftist activists, however, that race, like male and female chromosomes, is also an immutable biological characteristic.
And that is where the left’s gender and race identity politics strategies collide and collapse.
Leftists cannot simultaneously insist that race is immutable and that gender is not. Embracing the absurdity that gender is merely a social construct logically mandates embracing the parallel absurdity that race is a social construct.
When Rachel Dolezal imagined and passed herself off as black and served as president of a local NAACP chapter, leftists erupted in apoplectic protest. They condemned Dolezal for viewing herself as a “transracial” black woman.
Yet Dolezal’s assertions of self-defined reality are precisely the same justifications leftists deploy for transgenderism.
Definitions based merely on autonomy and imagination ultimately render both gender and race meaningless.
If gender is not a biological fact but merely a mental or social construct, and if leftists like Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson cannot even define what a woman is, what can it possibly mean to “transition” to a female or male? Male and female are meaningless constructs.
And if by such illogic gender is rendered meaningless, the meaninglessness of race must follow.
The left’s identity politics strategy is careening down a path of self-destruction.
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