The left-of-centre streamer Destiny has argued in a series of recent videos that the Left needs to do a better job at persuasion: that we've lost the capacity to argue effectively for our positions. This is a task I also identify and take up in my own book, "Politics for the New Dark Age: Staying Positive Amidst Disorder". One of Destiny's principle talking points has been that while the Left is often good at identifying structural injustice in society (as I put it: the Left is liberalism plus structural critique), we often critique it in a way that's perceived by the ordinary voter who participates in those structures as an attack on their personal identity.
This is an important point worth engaging, because it recurs in a range of policy areas. Take, as an example, the recent back-and-forth between YouTubers Arielle Scarcella and Contra Points over personal sexual preference. The disagreement between the two sides is not whether racist or transphobic (or ableist or fat-shaming) preferences in one's choice of intimate partner are legitimate (both insist they accept this), but rather whether academic critique of the cause and consequences of those preferences at a social level undermines that principle of individual choice. This twitter spat, of course, is merely a pop culture manifestation of the TERF argument that trans lesbians seek to invalidate the identity of cis lesbians (defined in terms of attraction to female sex characteristics). And it also carries echoes of the lower profile but long-running debate over racism and transphobia in gay male pickup culture.
Most people have little difficulty reconciling the idea that social cues play a role in the formation of their sexual preferences, even cues coded on problematic categories such as race or age (or gender roles or even dominance hierarchies). We all go about our dating lives, secure in the knowledge that our law and culture renders us sovereign over our choice of intimate partner and the pursuit of our own definition of happiness. Trans people are merely the latest in a long line of formerly marginalised minorities to go through the process of winning greater social visibility and respect; they are not the first step on a slippery slope to the erasure of gay identity or the erosion of the bedrock principle of sexual consent. Most of us are fine with being a little hypocritical now and then when it comes to getting laid.
A bigger problem: Virtue and Vice
But trans acceptance is merely the tiny tip of a very large social iceberg. Perhaps the principle way in which most people experience this phenomenon is when it comes to feminism, or more precisely: the concept of the patriarchy. Most of us have very little exposure of academic feminism, and even those few men (and women!) that do often hesitate to label themselves as feminists. Why? Surely, we can all agree that sexual assault is a very bad thing and that women should not be harassed or intimidated or made subject of violence. But - they insist - #notallmen are like that, by which of course they mean *I* (or my husband, or my father, or my son) am (is) not like that. Rather than putting aside their own identity to listen to the subjective experience of women about how you (yes you!) have contributed to and likely benefitted from a hierarchy that inhibits women's careers and violates their personal autonomy, they complain that feminism has gone too far and threatens their identity as men.
There are echoes of this too in the discussion of "working class whites", racial privilege and identity politics. The Left critique of structural racism and the way it privileges white identities is qualitatively and quantitatively rigorous. And yet the fact remains that due to widespread economic inequality, many white voters do not *feel* privileged - or indeed racist - at all! Despite the fact that Democratic Party policies would have done more to alleviate their material disadavantage than Republican ones, many conservative white voters chose to support an actual bigot over the candidate who put them in the "basket of deplorables". Most of Trump's supporters have no real attachment to white nationalism. But they will continue to be activated by a backlash bias against politicians who they perceive as attacking their sense of self as 'good people'.
The reality is that while formal philosophy largely focuses on deontological (or rule-based) and consequentialist ethics, most people continue to act as if their virtue was all that mattered. We all have a psychological need to see ourselves as good people, who do only good things for good reasons. We can recognise when bad things happen, but these bad things are done by bad people for bad reasons. In many ways, getting people to think this way about unjust structural categories is a victory. By the 21st century, most people agree that racist behaviour is bad and that people who perform racism are racists who deserve social ostracism. Social movements largely stop the act of persuasion at that point, because we've effectively won. But using categorical rhetoric to persuade people who think categorically limits our capacity to keep fighting when society moves on and new issues arise. We were so successful in convincing ordinary voters that legal racism or homophobia was bad that when we go back and ask them to recognise that ending legal discrimination left behind persistent structural inequalities (such as the treatment of trans people), they reject us on the same rhetorical grounds that we ourselves taught them to use.
The whole point of intersectionality and solidarity as a practice is to get people to listen and consider their place in society in relation to others. The centre and the right do not reject 'identity politics' because marginalised groups label themselves as victims: they oppose 'identity politics' because it serves to place them in the role of oppressors, a role that is at odds with their own sense of self. Solidarity ultimately is a two-way street: we have to persuade people not only of the justice of a single cause, but to be part of a perpetual movement of interlocking causes. But by the same token, we on the Left must avoid using our own categories in ways which are politically detrimental to the construction of such a solidaristic movement.
Where does that leave us?
One of the great advantages of evolution-centric thinking is that it conditions you to think in terms of the properties of populations, and not the properties of individuals. In this vein, racism, heteronormativity, homophobia and transphobia are measurable properties of the the social structure and thus should only be used to categorise society as a whole. Individuals, on the other hand, are not completely determined by categories: behaviour is probabilistic and therefore at least partially contradictory. People don't *feel* accurately defined by the labels like racist or transphobe because they often have subjectively good intentions and often blind to the negative consequences of their behaviour, which may be casual or incidental. As a result, they feel that critiques of structural categories are inherently personal.
So I think our starting position has to be that structural categories can only properly describe populations and behaviours, and not individuals. We can and should talk about how our collective decision-making leads to adverse consequences that disproportionately help or hinder certain categories of person. We can and should talk about the behaviour sets that effectuate and perpetuate those decisions. But we should be extremely reluctant to attribute a category to individuals or sub-populations. Structural racism, for example, is an unequal relationship between constructed racialised categories and is not the defining identity of any one group, even if that group disproportionately benefits from that unequal relationship. Transphobia, too, is a systematic pattern of oppression of trans individuals that is sustained by recurring patterns of discriminatory behaviour and belief, not the malicious intent of any specific individual or sub-group.
Of course, some people are just assholes. We can and should question how the individual chooses to relate to the structure. The vast majority of the time, they will be neutral or passive towards it. Sometimes, as with the patriarchy, they will actively benefit from it. Rarely, they will serve as active enforcers of structural inequality: punishers of deviance and propagators of supporting ideology. When people have power, and choose to use that power to sustain inequality, then it's fair to call them out for being bigots. But when people lack power and merely benefit passively from the structure, we need to be delicate in prying them from their attachment to the status quo. In particular, we need to find ways to break the identification between group identities and the self-appointed leaders of groups, so that our critiques of those with power aren't received as attacks on the powerless.
It's OK to be a little uncool sometimes
Progressives, generally, are more comfortable with ambiguity than conservatives. We more readily accept that it's ok to be uncool and hypocritical sometimes. That passively benefitting from racial privilege or only wanting to be intimate with people with vaginas doesn't make us any less of an ally to our comrades-in-arms. Authoritarians have a harder time with this: they are compelled to reconcile their personal identity with social contructed categories. Ultimately, our long-term goal should be to bring about social conditions that make more people into progressives, rather than merely constructing new social structures that cause conservatives to follow our behaviourial lead. Because we're going to want things (now and in the future) that we haven't yet socialised conservatives into supporting. And if we move forward without a way of doing so, the backlash will continue to be strong and fierce.