Identity Politics in Overdrive

I recommend a good article by Heather MacDonald, called Identity Politics in Overdrive from a site called The Social Order. 

She mocks Paul Krugman, my least favourite public figure outside the Catholic hierarchy. I quote:

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman took a similarly deterministic line. Race, sex, and class drove Kavanaugh’s testimony—but not Ford’s. Kavanaugh’s rage resulted from his recognition that an “increasingly diverse society no longer accepts the God-given right of white males from the right families to run things.” Kavanaugh’s belief in his innocence had nothing to do with his remarks.

Portraying Kavanaugh’s testimony as a mere epiphenomenon of his identity-politics-defined traits absolved the anti-Kavanaugh lobby from evaluating the evidence. Just as female self-described “survivors” deserve unquestioned belief, so do privileged white male defendants deserve unquestioned condemnation. The absence of any corroboration for Ford’s story went unmentioned in most mainstream media accounts.

When Maine senator Susan Collins delivered a careful analysis of Ford’s account and explained her reasoning in confirming Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, however, the identity coalition cleaved. Femaleness was no longer a unifying victim category. Whiteness and privilege were reintroduced into the female side of the ledger, distinguishing Ford’s female backers, still unmarked by race and class, from the turncoats who supported Kavanaugh. These “gender traitors” put “their racial privilege ahead of their second-class gender status,” wrote Alexis Grenell, a gender commentator, in the New York Times. The female senators who voted for Kavanaugh and the female voters who supported Trump did so “to prop up their whiteness,” according to Grenell. Reasons beyond gender and race could have nothing to do with that support, in the eyes of the Left.

It is noteworthy that as more and more laws are passed to extend opportunities to everyone, regardless of sex or race or a lengthening list of other things, and to prevent racial and sexual, etc. discrimination, we have instead of social harmony an endless shrill, cacophonous complaint of victimhood. This might seem surprising to very naive people, but of course it is not. If people are rewarded for discovering grievances, as they are, they will discover or manufacture them very industriously.