Bryce Edward’s Guardian Column, Culture Wars and why Sanders vs Warren is the Class vs Identity Politics schism on the Left

A resurgent Bernie Sanders is terrifying the Democratic establishment and has seen Warren lash out and attempt to smear Bernie as a sexist.

This sexism smear is as outrageous as it is desperate, because Bernie was a feminist well before Warren was a Republican.

Sanders vs Warren represents the great Class vs Identity Politics schism on the Left and those woke Identity Politics activists won’t tolerate the patriarchy robbing them of another female candidate for President so expect the name calling and tribal social media lynch mobs that make them about as a popular as Donald Trump at a Queer Intersectionist Feminist Folk Festival to erupt if Bernie wins.

These woke Identity Politics dynamics have managed to alienate working class voters on social media to such an extent that they were major factors in the Trump win, the Brexit win, the Scott Morrison win and the Corbyn loss so if Sanders can beat Warren and then beat Trump, Class Left solidarity will have retaken the philosophical high ground on the Left.

This dynamic of woke Identity Politics activism alienating working class voters is one Bryce Edwards notes in his latest Guardian column, where he highlights that because there is so little in way of real policy difference between National and Labour, National will fight the next election using culture wars instead…

So where can it differentiate? National increasingly relies on stoking “culture wars” and law and order. It is these fertile new hunting grounds that give Simon Bridges his best chance of painting Ardern and her colleagues as out of touch with mainstream New Zealand.

Culture wars are concerned with debates relating to ethnicity, gender, sexuality, human rights, discrimination, free speech and civil liberties. Elements of the political left – especially in the Labour and Green parties – are increasingly associated with campaigns in these areas, and often their stances are not shared by many mainstream voters.

…hilariously for daring to point out that many woke Identity Politics activists are alienating more voters than they are winning over, Bryce has been immediately decried on Twitter by those very same alienating woke Identity Politics activists.

You can’t make this shit up.

I think the identity politics left in NZ are more focused on cancelling voters than recruiting them.

If your starting point as a woke Identity Politics activist is that all men are rapists, all white people racist, Trans Rights over all other rights always, if a woman says it then it must be true and anyone standing up for free speech is a Nazi, then you might want to sit this next election out because that message is pushing people away from our progressive  cause, not towards it, as this excellent piece in The Atlantic points out…

The Twitter Electorate Isn’t the Real Electorate

Social media is distorting our sense of mainstream opinion.

Does Twitter matter? The temptation is to say no. Its user base is small compared with Facebook—321 million monthly active users versus more than 2 billion—and a quick glance at the trending topics reveals its fractious, claustrophobic atmosphere. Yet as one dead fox proves, it does matter: On December 26, a single tweet by a British lawyer with 178,000 followers, announcing that he had killed a fox with a baseball bat, made the front pages of two major newspapers.

Yes, it was a quiet news day. But Twitter has become journalists’ easiest and most reliable source of cor-blimey (or OMG, to American readers) stories, because all of human life is there, and it’s searchable. It is also the world’s wire service: Just look at Donald Trump, who drops his unfiltered thoughts straight onto Twitter, confident that they will be picked up by journalists. For anyone interested in politics, it is the closest thing to a global community center, or a small-ads section—the virtual room where it happens.

All of this gives the social network—and its most active users—outsize power to shape the political conversation. Its influence can be seen in contests currently under way in the United States and Britain: the race to become the Democrats’ presidential nominee, and the struggle to succeed Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party. Both risk being distorted by what we might call the “Twitter Primary.”

British tweeters skew left and toward remaining in the European Union, which reflects their demographic makeup. “On average social media users are younger and better educated than non-users,” wrote the researchers Jonathan Mellon and Christopher Prosser in 2017. Users were also more likely to live in cities, “particularly wealthier areas with younger populations.” This phenomenon has been more thoroughly studied in the U.S., where The New York Times has reported that “the views of Democrats on social media often bear little resemblance to those of the wider Democratic electorate.” Active political tweeters in America were whiter, more left wing, more likely to be college educated, and less likely to say that “political correctness was a problem” than primary voters as a whole. Given the faux-democratic promise of social media, it is ironic that it has created a new establishment with roughly the same tight demographic boundaries as the old one.

…The real danger of identity politics over class politics, as we have seen in the UK election and with Trump, is that when white poor men start seeing themselves not as a class but as an identity, the Right win.

In the NZ context that means 500 retweets by Wellington Twitteratti = alienation not winning. If it’s popular on The Spinoff, it’s poison at the ballot box and if Action Station have a petition on it, avoid it like the fucking plague.

The woke won’t change their rage politics of alienation, they can’t. Social media has given them a sense of power they’ve never held before, an ocean of the bullied who can now bully will never hand over their weapons, so the Left need to ignore the Woke,  stop alienating white working class men and actually try to win them over.

Take white male privilege. Why would men want to be told they have it (when their suicide rates, mental health issues, low life expectancy, violence and murder rate is so high) and why would they willingly hand it over if they did have it?

Isn’t white male privilege being treated with respect? Not getting hassled by the cops? Getting paid properly?

The Woke scream for white men to hand over that privilege, but why would any white male look at the list and agree to be paid less, be treated poorly by the cops or accept sub-standard service?

Wouldn’t it be better to say that we want to expand white male privilege to everyone? Instead of attacking those Men, hold up their agency as the right every citizen should enjoy.

Expanding the franchise of democratic agency is something everyone can get behind including those it currently benefits because removing my agency so people who despise me can have more isn’t an easy political sale.

Fellow citizens shouldn’t fear the Left, the 1% should.

If Sanders can re-establish Class as the foundation for the Left, we can pull back working class voters from realigning with the Right and there might be a chance to avoid the madness of right wing Demagogues.

If Sanders loses, we are doomed to right wing populism. There’s more at stake this election than America gaining its first woman president, it could lose its soul.