Understanding The Landscape Of The Left - David Pakman | Modern Wisdom Podcast 388

It seems reasonable to me that my experiences with antisemitism as a Jewish person would be relevant to the conversation. It would be hard to argue that they're not, particularly if nobody else really has any personal experience to add. That seems very reasonable to me. I think where it goes too far, and where I've been critical of it, is if I use my identity to silence the other nine people, to say that their opinions don't matter, shouldn't be considered, or are fundamentally flawed, and to suppress others on the basis of asserting my identity. That's what I think is destructive about identity politics.

David Pakman, welcome to the show.

Thank you.

I wanted to bring you on to kind of try and get an idea of the landscape between left and right at the moment, and get an understanding of sort of the internal situation on the left. I know you're someone who talks across the aisle quite a bit, so I figured you'd be a, uh, a good candidate to try and help me work out what's going on.

Sure, uh, I mean, uh, I guess it would be good to know maybe a little more specifically which, which aspects of it. Um, I know that even what is considered to be the landscape of the left would differ depending on one's perspective as to what's part of the left and what are the goals and priorities.

Yeah. So my understanding is that there's a movement on the left away from a focus on identity and some left-leaning thinkers are sort of grappling and working through the challenges that are associated with that. Do you have any sense of this?

I think that the idea that it's a move away from it is maybe not the right framing. I think that there's been, um, a contingent of the left that, that I think is actually really the bulk of it, um, of which I consider myself a part, that has never been about identity politics, et cetera, right? There's this kind of package that, that follows. Um, I think that the voices that were in favor of focusing on things like identity politics and oppression Olympics, et cetera, and I understand that's a pejorative term but I think we all sort of understand what I mean. Um, I think they were overrepresented for a period and appeared to be far bigger than they were. Um, reasonable people can disagree, for sure. I know that whenever I make a commentary like this, there will be people from the right who say, "You're completely wrong. The left has been completely taken over by that." And I say, "No, no. You think that because of what I'm describing." Um, but I think that particularly, I think the 2020 primary on the Democratic Party in the US was actually a really important signal to a lot of people that looking at Twitter and looking at Reddit certainly would make one believe that that wing is far bigger and far more powerful than it actually is. And, um, for all of the great things that I've said about Bernie Sanders for a long time and supported him in primaries, uh, I was suspecting that his level of support was much higher, uh, online than in reality. I think the 2020 primary really showed that. It was not by a little bit that Joe Biden won. And for a lot of people on the left, that started to, um, open their eyes to the fact that the left is a little bit different than what it seems when you look at Reddit and Twitter.