Recently, a person I know shared an episode of a podcast called Derate the Hate on their social media. I had never heard of the Derate the Hate podcast but apparently is a show offering to help “navigate a world divided by FOG, & those who spread that fear, outrage, and grievance.” It’s hosted by a person who looks like he can get you a great deal on a jet ski.
The person who shared this podcast episode was someone I had met in the Jodi Shawverse. We had some polite back and forth while disagreeing on how race should or shouldn’t be understood. This person is also a committed (ahem) gender-critical feminist. They don’t post often but when they do, it's usually a link to an article, podcast, or speech they think presents a particularly cogent criticism of presumed leftist ideology. Like this Derate the Hate podcast interview with Eva Kurilova called Don’t Make the Political Personal.
I read the description of the episode. I took a screen capture of the description of the episode. I then highlighted two sections of the text and drew two misshapen arrows pointing to them (finally justifying my phone's included stylus). I now present the following image:
To recap: Eva has joined the Derate the Hate podcast to presumably discuss the negative impacts of identity politics and to stress the importance of seeing people as individuals rather than categorizing people based on their identity labels. She then follows that discussion by promoting a conference for people who identify as “reality-based women”.
Further reading into Eva’s views on her substack will reveal that she spends a good amount of time differentiating between LGB (she is a lesbian) and the TQ+, asserting that these two groups of people have nothing to do with each other and that these identities have diametrically opposed political goals.
I’m not introducing you to Eva or the Derate the Hate podcast because I want to talk about hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is dead and we’ve talked about it already. Neither Eva Kurilova nor Derate the Hate are particularly relevant voices in the discourse, they have about as impactful a platform as I do and that’s not saying much.
Instead, I want to talk about how this podcast description exemplifies a particular kind of argumentative rhetoric that makes substantive discourse all but impossible. It’s a shield against ideological self-inquiry and a very good way to make online debate opponents rage quit. I want to talk about abstraction.
In the Abstract
Abstraction is the process of describing something by removing or flattening distinctive characteristics to reduce it to its most essential. Abstraction can be both a useful analytical tool and a disingenuous strategy to avoid an argument. Going back to the DTH podcast, we can see both of these uses of abstraction in the discourse around identity politics.
Historically, identity politics is understood to be political advocacy on behalf of groups whose identities are considered non-normative and have been traditionally excluded from the process of ordering society, often to the detriment of those groups. A Black person who is denied housing on account of race doesn’t have the exact same problem as a Black person who has a home but has been unfairly targeted and harassed by police. However, abstracting those problems to describe them as racial prejudice allows both of those people to join a single political project that addresses both of their issues. This is useful because there is power in numbers and solutions that apply to a broad swath of problems are easier to conceive and implement than trying to address each individual problem on its own.
Here abstraction is useful because we can go up and down the levels of abstraction describing racial inequality without much issue. We can say that we need to address systemic racism, and when asked to substantiate this claim it's fairly easy to find examples of systemic disadvantages to Black people seeking a home or see Black people overrepresented in crime statistics. The abstraction isn’t meant to obliterate individual differences, but rather to find the points of common interest between individuals of a certain demographic or class.
Now let's look at identity politics as it is used in the discussion on the DTH podcast and elsewhere within conservative and (ahem) classical liberal discourse. In this abstraction, identity politics is defined as “categorizing people based solely on their identity labels” as opposed to “recognizing and respecting individual voices”.
This is a much higher level of abstraction than what we commonly understand to be identity politics. Notice that this description doesn’t articulate who is doing the categorization based on identity. We could be referring to white supremacists categorizing minorities as inferior based on their demographic background, or we could be referring to people calling for racial equity in hiring and/or higher education admissions. We could be talking about identifying common points of interest within a particular group or we could be talking about assigning certain characteristics to a particular group based on their identity.
What we’ve done now is abstract the concept of identity politics to the point where it says nothing about the substance of any one particular political formation based on identity, making it almost impossible to meaningfully travel between the levels of abstraction. And from there we can now say that any negative conclusions we can articulate about the broad abstraction can also be ascribed to any lower level of abstraction that fits the bill. We shouldn’t talk about how Black people are unfairly overrepresented in negative police interactions because that treats Black people as a collective identity instead of a collection of individuals with individual interactions with law enforcement, Hitler also viewed people in terms of their identity and we all know how that played out.
In this case, the abstraction of political movements based on identity is not meant to produce a simplified yet accurate description, it is meant to terminate any thought as to why people might seek to politically organize around issues of identity. Most people who participate in some sort of identity politics do so because of how society treats people belonging to their identity, not because they believe the particular identity in question is the only important thing about them.
On Hypocrisy Part Two:
Okay, I lied. I do want to talk about hypocrisy because understanding the difference between abstraction as a useful tool of analysis as opposed to a rhetorical weapon against ideological opponents is to understand a crucial contradiction within the backlash to identity-based social justice movements.
Constructing a set of politics around one's identity is an act of abstraction. Politics itself is an act of abstraction because a polis is composed of many different individuals who must create the rules of society based on their common interests. Pardon my vulgarity here, but this is just common sense. There is no feasible way to order a society in a way that treats every single person as an atomized individual whose interests are completely isolated from every other individual. Libertarians believe they have a system that does in fact do this, but libertarians also believe that industrial pollution is a problem that can be solved by individual lawsuits adjudicated by private courts.
The reactionary backlash to identity-based movements almost always stems from a rejection of identities that are seen as non-normative. At the heart of all these anti-identity politics is an implicit (or sometimes very explicit) assertion that the particular identity seeking political change is illegitimate. This is how we solve the riddle presented in the DTH episode description by the way. The reason why “identity politics” are bad, but a conference for self-identified “reality-based” women is good is because identity politics is a descriptor reserved for things like the trans acceptance movement, which is based on a false or illegitimate identity, whereas womanhood is a legitimate identity requiring consideration when constructing social norms.
This dynamic is helpfully demonstrated by our friend Eva and her absolutely unhinged article "Obey Us or the Conservatives Will Come for You", where she travels across levels of abstraction in a completely arbitrary way as to set the bounds of acceptable identitarian interest so that it includes her but excludes those she doesn’t personally like. She vehemently rejects the notion that her political interests as a same-sex attracted woman have any commonality with the political interests of trans people. And sure, at a lower level of abstraction, the ability to marry your same-sex partner is not the same issue as a trans person’s ability to use a public bathroom. But at the level of abstraction that the LBGTQ+ movement seeks to build a political coalition around, it's hard to substantively argue that socially and politically enforced heteronormativity isn’t a common problem for both cis gay women and trans women (of whom some are also gay).
Eva’s argument seems to be that lesbian women have earned a normative identity status and linking that identity to a broader queer movement that includes trans people will threaten this normative status. Of course, she doesn’t explain how gay women earned their normative status, or substantiate the claim that conservatives were content to leave LGB people alone so long as they didn’t try to include the TQ+. Most likely because there is no credible way to talk about the struggle for LGB acceptance without talking about the Stonewall Riot started by a Black trans woman and a resumed conservative backlash to cis homosexuality due to the inclusion of trans people says a lot more about the resilience of heteronormative prejudice within conservative politics than it does the presumed invalidity of trans identities.
When she writes things like this:
“You went into the schools. You went after kids. You started calling it a hate crime when someone used the “wrong” pronoun for you. You shut down events featuring speakers you didn’t like. You hijacked workplaces with your rainbow cult. You made all of society walk on eggshells.”
One can’t help but notice that this paragraph could have easily come from Anita Bryant's “Save Our Children” campaign, a political movement against people like Eva based on the idea that "Homosexuals cannot reproduce, so they must recruit." Anita Bryant herself was a speaker that LGBTQ+ people didn’t like, and she got a pie to her face for her troubles. For more on the comparison between homophobic backlash and trans backlash, see Contrapoint's excellent video “The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling”.
In presenting a picture of transphobia that so closely mirrors the homophobia that she feels was already conquered, she inadvertently demonstrates why the abstraction of LGB rights and TQ+ rights under the banner of LGBTQ+ is justified and necessary. Conversely, her use of high levels of abstraction when talking about “identity politics” contrasted with her more granular approach when seeking to exclude trans people from conversations about social justice, tells us that she is less interested in using abstraction to describe the nature and goals of particular political formations than she is using abstraction to avoid debating her own bigoted views.
The Good Ole Motte and Bailey
Speaking of bigots…..
Have you noticed how many people lately have taken to decrying the very use of the term bigot? It’s a neat piece of political rhetoric because, in a few sentences, you can abstract away from substantive critiques of bigoted views and focus the conversation on how it's bad to call people names if they don’t agree with you. Because we can all agree on that, right? If I prefer veggies on my pizza and you prefer pineapple, I shouldn’t call you a shithead for that disagreement in preference.
And yet the word bigot is specifically used to describe a specific kind of disagreement, a disagreement on whether certain kinds of people deserve consideration and equal treatment versus whether they deserve to be marginalized or worse. It doesn’t really tell us anything about why someone called someone else a bigot when we reduce the application of the term to simple name-calling. However, it’s a lot easier to defend oneself against being called a name than it is to substantiate why you think a particular identity is invalid and worthy of exclusion.
This is called a Motte and Bailey argument, where a person makes an argument that is difficult to defend: “How can I be a bigot just because I believe that all trans people are mentally ill sexual predators?” (The Bailey) and when asked to defend that argument they retreat to a more defensible position: “Calling people names is hurtful, and you shouldn’t do it” (the motte).
The Motte and Bailey is a systematized application of abstraction as thought-terminating rhetoric. It's often used to abstract away the substance of a political movement and frame that movement in terms of disagreeable tactics, erasing the disagreeable social context that precipitated said movement in the first place.
We should note that this is not unique to conservatism but rather reactionary politics in general no matter where they nominally lie on the political spectrum. Liberal moderates preaching civility are particularly beholden to motte and bailey arguments, as Martin Luther King once famously articulated. Even the left can be guilty of using abstraction in a disingenuous manner when legislating the hierarchy of oppression.
Abstraction is not a bad analytical tool in and of itself. In fact, it's pretty fundamental to the entire practice of statistical analysis. As with any tool it depends on how you use it. An abstracted statement about a political movement can be truthful in the broadest possible terms and yet still be false through lies of omission. It's very easy to pick and choose where you are willing to abstract something to define it on uncharitable terms and where you reject abstraction to draw sharp lines between people with common political interests.
Everyone wants to believe that they are forming their politics from a place of objectivity. Arguing from a place of assumed objectivity is much easier than defending your subjective stance. Objectivity is useful in substantiating an argument but ultimately our prior ideological commitments tend to shape what we see as relevant objective arguments and what we reject. To understand if an abstraction is being used to substantively describe something or to avoid a more difficult defense of a political position, it's helpful to understand what the use of said abstraction gives a person permission to do or believe. In Eva’s case, her abstraction of identity politics clearly allows her to dismiss political movements she disagrees with and promote movements with which she is aligned. In the case of Black Lives Matter or GLAAD, the abstraction of many issues affecting individuals into a broad coalition allows these groups to build solidarity and affect change on a systemic level. Or to put it another way….participate in the democratic process.
Ultimately all this talk about abstraction is itself an abstraction of the fundamental question of politics. Who gets to enact their political will and who is politics enacted upon? These days it’s pretty difficult to argue that certain groups of people shouldn’t have a say in the political process, even harder to argue that certain identities should be eliminated. But it’s far easier to abstract away from the lives of actual human beings to remove their agency and assign responsibility for their political activism to unnatural ideologies imposed on us from foreign sources.
A better discourse may just be impossible. Some people just aren’t interested in a substantive conversation, they have no intent on meeting people where they are. But perhaps it’s a bit useful to be able to spot a person like Eva, whose arbitrary use of abstraction lets us know that her commitment to seeing people as individuals ends where her irrational prejudice begins. Not to say that Eva needs to be canceled or barred from the discourse, just that one should set their bullshit meter accordingly.
Solidarity forever.
Anyone who uses the phrase 'identity politics' in a derogatory manner, as a problem to be dealt with, is displaying (despite their best efforts to disclaim and camouflage) their true viewpoint, which is simply bigotry.
The need for abstraction .... isolation of knowledge, information, and experience... a large group of uninformed, miseducated, and confused people... they can be sold any kind of dope you want them to consume... "yeh, come here brother man, let me break it down to ya" ... my question about abstraction is...are things really that complicated...and if they are, should they be?
https://youtu.be/hCDAfa-NI-M?si=aWxnqhzmQkemz-Fj