The common usage of "progressive" and "the left" is white male supremacist bullshit.
To be on "the left" you have to be idealistic on Wall Street issues. But idealism about civil rights is usually treated as optional. That's bullshit.
You can be "progressive" and still go on Fox News to complain about identity politics. That's bullshit.
"Progressive" and "the left" can be defined a lot of ways. There are multiple kinds of power imbalances in this world for people to oppose (money, gender, religion…) and any attempt to reduce all that to a binary is going to be reductive and subjective.
And it just happens that the dominant approach in this white male supremacist country is one that makes gender and race equality extraneous to what makes someone "left".
You can't even say the dominant definition is based on financial equality, because there's no such thing without gender and racial equality (or at least, it's never been observed in the actual world). It's based on opposition to the injustices that affect straight white guys.
Take two people - one a moderate on Wall Street but a boat-rocker on civil rights, the other a purist on Wall Street but a ready compromiser on civil rights. Each has equal claim to the progressive label. But only one will get called a centrist.
I'm not saying one or the other is the *real* progressive. I'm saying if your definition is white male supremacist, get off your high horse. Acknowledge your own moderation.
The divide on the left often gets described in terms of purity versus pragmatism. And that binary matters. But it's usually masking something else. What issues are you a purist on?
There are people who are across the board purists on all the world's different power imbalances. But a lot of "the left" is pragmatic as hell when it comes to issues that don't affect straight white men.
(I'm not saying you need to be an across the board purist to be a True Progressive. Every movement needs a mix of idealism and pragmatism. Purity and compromise are both useless if they don't bring results.)
I've thought of myself as a progressive for years. But the word has gotten tainted by white male grievance. And I'm tired of the hypocrisy of people who rant against "identity politics" (aka civil rights) call other people on the left DINOs.
Our need to reduce things to a single left-right spectrum along a single axis isn't helping us. And the dominant way it gets reduced shows just how invisible white male supremacy is to the people who benefit from it.
If we defined politics as an n-dimensional space, where n = all the kinds of power imbalances a person could oppose or defend, you wouldn't need a horseshoe to explain Michael Tracey.
But we're humans. We reduce things to binaries. I won't hold my breath for an n-dimensional definition of politics.
Probably shouldn't hold my breath for people to get off their high horse either…
Probably shouldn't hold my breath for people to get off their high horse either…
