Spiked Magazine Panel - "Identity Politics: The New Racialis

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I pulled down my initial post on this because I was initially hoping it was by and large a great panel talk with some minor emphasis on crowd disruption but it seems like it was much more Q&A geared so the dominant thread of the discussion was the constant side-lining and derailing of orderly conversation by at least a half dozen to a dozen audience members:



I think what this points to is an intelligence cap of sorts. What I mean by that is people who tend to be specifically distrustful of nuance are people who are effectively kept out of conversations or removed from them when nuance comes in because they can't keep up. Those same people don't see certain things changing and so they come to assume that anyone speaking with nuance is either in favor of or selling out to the status quo.

I'm not sure what can be done about that aside from maybe the center and center-right having their own sort Michio Kaku or Bill Nye to reduce the complexity of the main points or even find ways for people who need guidance in how to assert their political needs to have a path toward doing so, or seeing people take action to inspect and review the problems, in such a way that they aren't feeling completely alienated. I think if we had a better handle on that gap in our current political process there'd be fewer people turning to demagogues due a sense of not having better options. Turning to demagogues seems like it's a hallmark of expertise gone wrong, ie. when the experts tell the common people 'you wouldn't understand - but trust us, we're right' and then those people simply don't see things getting better for them. It's as much an element of the far right growing as the far left.

In this lecture it did seem like Kmele did his level best to try and explain certain things at their component level but it was already too much and he might have missed a few opportunities to diffuse rather than argue. Sarah and Bryan probably hung back the most and it was Mark Lilla who probably gave the most scathing criticism of the audience that they were all about protesting and making a lot of loud noise that only the choir they were preaching to could appreciate.