Conversation with Dr. Norman Finkelstein on Human Dignity, Identity Politics, and Class-Based Politics: Independent Political Analyst (2)
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/09/01
Abstract
Dr. Norman Finkelstein remains one of the foremost experts and independent scholars on the Israeli occupation and the crimes against the Palestinians. He expanded some research into more academic freedom issues in the newest text. His most recent book is I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It!: Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom (2022). Finkelstein discusses: mobilization of a class-based movement thwarted; persons and peoples; identity politics and virtue signalling; and bourgeois progress.
Keywords: Aaron Maté, Al Sharpton, Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, bourgeois, class-based politics, Colin Powell, Hillary Clinton, human dignity, identity politics, Kamala Harris, Katie Halper, Madeline Albright, Marxist, Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein.
Conversation with Dr. Norman Finkelstein on Human Dignity, Identity Politics, and Class-Based Politics: Independent Political Analyst (2)
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Do you think, by this definition of “radical” for a movement, that the attacks from these individuals who you cite in the text, and their source material, in a critical way nullifies the base that was present for the mobilization of that, basically, class-based political movement?
Dr. Norman Finkelstein: I would say its effect is to wreck and discredit the class-based movement. The combined systematic assaults on the Bernie campaign for being weak on these questions. Then I would add that for most working-class kids, young people, or those who are trapped with student debt, skyrocketing student tuition, inability to move out of their parents’ homes, jobs with no future, and so forth. The first item on their agenda is exactly those material concerns that animated the Bernie Sanders campaign. This obsession with issues of “identity” is, basically, a concern of very privileged circles of people. The old Angela Davis, who I remember growing up as a child, was on the FBI’s ten most wanted list. She was one of the ten most wanted persons in the country. The new Angela Davis, the poster child of identity politics, she is on Martha’s Vineyard: five most coveted lit. It is a really sorry, sorry thing that Angela Davis, extremely smart, either doesn’t see or doesn’t want to see why she is so welcomed into the corridors and into the vacation spots of the wealthiest and most privileged people in the world, in the world. She doesn’t even see what is going on or doesn’t want to see what is going on. She is now useful to them.
Jacobsen: I want to combine two statements from the text. In one commentary describing your mother’s death and Clara, one of the caretakers, there was a statement, “There are only persons, not peoples”. At another point in the text, there was a statement, “To be proud of being black, a woman, or gay defies rational sense, one cannot be proud of what one is, only what one does”. Professionals in psychology, and psychiatry, have noted a rise in narcissism in American culture over the last couple to few decades. Do you think this focus on the self, as in identity, is a reflection of this, too, rather than focus on one’s actions and real-life accomplishments?
Finkelstein: I don’t know much about… I don’t know anything, not even not much, about this psychological or psychiatric literature on narcissism. I can see the beneficial values to not being ashamed of who you are. And Martin Luther King, I quote him at some point in a footnote. His reaction to the black power” and black is beautiful movement, which merged in the 1960s. He said that even though he disagrees with the slogan of black power. He recognizes that it might — and also black is beautiful, in the context of people who have been taught, educated to be ashamed of themselves… that he can see the positive resonance of those slogans. So, I can see — the black is beautiful or “I am woman, here me roar” — the therapeutic effects or the therapeutic value of those slogans. I get that. I get that. During the ACT UP movement, the movement that emerged during the AIDS epidemic. The slogan was, “We’re here. We’re queer. Get used to it.” “We’re here. We’re queer. Get used to it.”I thought that, frankly, was a good slogan, but I get those slogans. But I then think it turns into something not sensible, not reasonable when you acquire a value as a person over something over which you had no control. You’re not black, you’re not gay, you’re not a woman, by virtue of personal exertion, some concentration of personal will. It’s not an achievement. It’s just a given. It’s not an achievement. It doesn’t make sense to me to be proud of something over which you had no input. What are you proud of? You had nothing to do with it. “I’m proud of the fact that I’m Noam Chomsky’s son, for example.” Well, why would you be proud of that? You can only be proud of what you, yourself, accomplished. Just being his son, in and of itself, cannot be a source of pride, that doesn’t make any sense. That’s the same thing with the identity politics in general, or the identity politics in general. It makes no sense to be proud of something over which you have no control or input.
Jacobsen: In conversation with Katie Halper and Aaron Maté, your conclusion was such that identity politics is a weapon of the democratic party to nullify class-based politics. You commented briefly on that earlier in the interview. What follows from this conclusion if it is a conscious weapon to nullify or eliminate individuals or movements seen as a threat to anything focus on class-based politics?
Finkelstein: I would say it serves several functions. One is the one that you just named. Two, it is designed to replace the white working-class base of the democratic party, which has been the case since Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930s. That’s been the base of the democratic party, the white working-class base. It’s to replace it with a new base, which is identity politics based. So, you have a black woman Vice President in order to get black woman votes. You have a gay Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg, in order to get gay votes. You have a Jim Clyburn as the third most powerful person in the House of Representatives to derail the Bernie campaign in the South Carolina primary, when Clyburn endorses Biden. So, a second function is, of identity politics is, to win over a potential constituency by putting in an identity representative of that constituency in the senior position of either actual power or figure head power. That’s a second function. The third function is among the identity politics folks themselves, where the identity politics are jockeying for power. If you create a new oppression, so, you’re a black, female, lesbian. That’s a triple oppression. Then you have a claim to representation by your own special oppressed group, not just black, not just woman, but black, woman, lesbian. So, you have a new kind of representation of which you can be the representative. That’s another function of identity politics. That is not at the level of the ruling elite. It is at the level of what you might call minority entrepreneurs, who fabricate identities in order to gain positions of power or of privilege.
Jacobsen: With individuals like Barack Obama, do you think this, at the time of his presidency, surrounding himself by people like an Al Sharpton rather than black intellectuals with a little more intellectual or academic cachet was a really first moment at a higher level of political office where identity politics and virtue signalling were given a lot more leeway?
Finkelstein: Look, Al Sharpton will never get a medal for marching. He’s an old-time hustler. He’s always been a crook. Everyone’s known him to be a crook. He’s a low-life of the first-order. He’s a top-notch low-life, but he has organization. He has connections. And so, Obama took him in, in order to turn out — not just turn out — his own little club, but because he is connected, knows how to organize a rally, knows how to network. Because he has an extensive network. So, that wasn’t virtue signalling, I think. Virtue signalling is when Joe Biden chooses a black woman Vice President and another black woman in the Supreme Court, now has a black woman Press Secretary. That’s party building. That’s how Biden thinks he will get that constituency, and he probably will get that constituency with the black women he is choosing.
Jacobsen: I feel like some aspects, as a Canadian example, of the Canadian military… they had made changes for, sort of, identity to be incorporated into some of its systems and policies, and so on. Yet, it still, the military, is used for the purposes in foreign countries. Do you think in these other institutions of the State that the use of identity politics for those aspects of empire are merely extensions of that into the more brutal of an empire, or extensions of, say, violence and force, or institutions that are, typically, used for that purpose?
Finkelstein: Look, there is a legitimate argument. There is a legitimate area of contention, whether putting women, minorities into positions of power represents some kind of progress. Is it progress that the Secretary of State was, in a sense, Colin Powell? Was it progress that the Secretary of State was Madeline Albright? Is it progress that Kamala Harris is the Vice President? People can disagree on those things. I don’t really have an answer to it. To use the old-fashioned Marxist framework, it would represent progress because it is the completion of what they called back then bourgeois rights: full equality before the law is a bourgeois right. Everyone should be treated equally. Ending discrimination is a bourgeois right. They would say as a bourgeois, or in a capitalist democracy, that represents progress. I guess there is some truth to it. If Hillary Clinton had been elected president and made a woman president, is that progress? At some level, it is. Of course, I can see that. But does it represent a radical change? My answer: No. I can see it, as I said, a bourgeois demand. But does it represent a radical change? No, not in my opinion. You see it among young people nowadays who are much less thrilled by the fact that Barack Obama was President of the United States. The attitude is, “Yes, it was a historic achievement, but we have to move on. There are more pressing concerns”.
Jacobsen: Norman, thank you very much for the opportunity and your time, again.
Finkelstein: Okay, and thank you too, for being patient with me.
Jacobsen: No worries.
Finkelstein: We’ll be in touch.
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