I was taken aback while listening to this episode towards the end. I’ve only recently discovered the show and have been pretty much binge listening for the past week or so. I was very upset during the clip from politically reactive, where they were lamenting the fact that people after the election were complaining about the preoccupation with identity politics. Their comment was “if you were one of those people complaining about identity politics, fuck you!” My immediate response was “well fuck you too!” I actually said that out loud in the car.

I was one of those people, criticizing the left for it’s obsession with identity politics, Clinton ran on a platform of identity politics and lost. But that’s not what I’m here to talk about. I’m coming to terms with the fact that I may have been a Marxist fundamentalist, believing that class is the only meaningful distinction in society. My thinking has been changing lately, in no small part due to the best of the left podcast. Recent developments have made the distinction of race more apparent than ever, and the nuanced and well articulated arguments made on the show have been making an impact.

Then when I got that “fuck you” that didn’t endear me to her side, it didn’t make me want to apologize and thank her for being so direct. It made me mad!

I find it a little disheartening that in all the episodes I’ve listened to, discussing everything from white nationalists to neoliberals to drug warriors, the most direct and contemptuous attack was reserved for me, a fellow leftist who just had a view that was different from hers. I don’t know. I just find that kind of talk divisive and not persuasive, and I wanted to get these thoughts out somewhere so here I am!

One of the most incredible acts of putting your money where your mouth is was the ACLU’s defense of the Waco klan member who refused to give his list of klan members to a court. A black ACLU lawyer represented the grand poobah and won, as he should have. http://www.nytimes.com/1993/09/10/news/a-klansman-s-black-lawyer-and-a-principle.html?pagewanted=all

I get that. I get Skokie. I get defending human speech, and defending hateful human speech is mandatory, you can’t have yours without letting them have theirs. It really is that simple. The answer to violence is to make the police do their jobs. That’s another subject.

Where I don’t agree with them is Citizens United, and I quit the ACLU for a lot of years because of it. They supported extending speech rights to corporations because, they said, unions are corporations, and Citizens United also protects union speech. But they could have argued that a for-profit corporation is not the same as a non-profit organization that represents the will of its members through voting. One person, one vote, is completely different from 10 shares, 10 votes.

I see that bright line. But I don’t see a safe way to tell supremacists they can’t rally because the event might turn violent without endangering everybody’s right to rally. That’s just too important to fuck with.