[Peace-discuss] Fwd: The News-Gazette: Letter to the Editor Submission

[C. G. Estabrook]

> Begin forwarded message:
> 
> From: "News-Gazette.com" <noreply at news-gazette.com>
> Subject: The News-Gazette: Letter to the Editor Submission
> Date: November 6, 2016 at 9:57:18 AM CST
> To: cge at shout.net
> 
> Thank you for submitting a letter to the editor.
> This is a copy of your letter to the editor.
> Name: C. G. Estabrook

> Type in your letter:

> I was sorry to see News-Gazette columnist Sundiata Cha-Jua embrace warmonger Hillary Clinton’s specious identity politics (“Hillary Clinton is the only viable option,” Sunday, November 6). With Clinton as president, we’re certain to get more of Obama’s vicious war-making; with Trump as president, we might not. (And the Green party candidates, Stein and Baraka, are far better.)
> 
> What’s wrong with the Clinton/Cha-Jua argument? Adolph Reed spells it out:
> 
> Identity politics is “the politics of the left-wing of neoliberalism. It is the expression and active agency of a political order and moral economy in which capitalist market forces are treated as unassailable nature.
> 
> “An integral element of that moral economy is displacement of the critique of the invidious outcomes produced by capitalist class power onto equally naturalized categories of ascriptive identity that sort us into groups supposedly defined by what we essentially are rather than what we do. As I have argued, following Walter Michaels and others, within that moral economy a society in which 1% of the population controlled 90% of the resources could be just, provided that roughly 12% of the 1% were black, 12% were Latino, 50% were women, and whatever the appropriate proportions were LGBT people.
> 
> “It would be tough to imagine a normative ideal that expresses more unambiguously the social position of people who consider themselves candidates for inclusion in, or at least significant staff positions in service to, the ruling class.”
> 
> ###