How modern social justice is problematic

Social justice ideology exposes a vulnerable flank to a vulnerable Democratic party

The success of 20^th century civil rights movements led to new movements
The six decades from the Brown decision in 1954 to Obergefell in 2015 saw successive overlapping waves of sociopolitical change caused by civil rights activism in which first African Americans, then women, then finally gay people gained social, political and economic rights, moving them towards social equality with the rest of society. The success of these movements is apparent. Black people today have had voting rights for sixty years and have achieved high status in the worlds of politics, sports, media, entertainment, academia, and the arts. Women now make up some 60% of college graduates and participate in most fields on an equal basis with men. Gay people can now marry and have become normalized in many places in America. It’s not perfect, but the improvements have been great.

By the beginning of the 1980’s, both political parties had eschewed economic arguments in favor of a politics based on identity. Given this and the success of the social justice movements referenced above, the stage was set for activism involving new perspectives on the older movements, or based on novel identities.

The rise of the abstract over material reality
The ideas powering the new social justice movements were fundamentally different from the earlier ones. The older movements were based on natural identities that have been acknowledged since antiquity and sought to rectify empirically-verifiable harms. If most of your ancestry is from sub-Saharan Africa, you are going to be dark-complected, making you “black” in America (though not in Africa). Your skin color is a biological fact; your “blackness” (race) is a cultural construct. Similarly, your sex is a biological fact while the social roles/behaviors/beliefs (gender) associated with your sex is a cultural construct. Your sexual orientation is again simply part of your nature, which manifests as sexual attraction and different kinds of sexual mechanics.

Harm from discrimination based on race, sex or sexual orientation were apparent. That black people could not vote in the South, lived under Jim Crow apartheid, and experienced discrimination through red-lining was apparent to all. When I was a teenager perusing employment ads in the newspaper, I saw how the ads were divided into help-wanted male or help-wanted female categories with the men’s jobs paying more. That men’s jobs paid more was just the order of things (i.e. the culture). Ditto for doctors being men and nurses female. People did not disagree on whether these phenomena existed, only on how serious of a problem they were. I tangentially touched upon this issue in an earlier post. Although activist movements of the late 20^th and 21^st centuries both focused on social justice, the older movements dealt with real things like those I described above, while the newer ones focused on abstractions derived from various theoretical arguments.

The harms derived from this abstract theory are not readily visible to third-party observers. For example, Ibrahim Kendi argues that the mere existence of different outcomes in things like income and presence in an occupation arises due to “systemic racism” a phenomenon that is not as easily verifiable as earlier racial discrimination. The feminist concept of patriarchy may involve a similar dynamic, defining patriarchy as a system of oppression of women whose expression is much more subtle than what had been seen in the past. The very subtlety of the harms that modern versions of the racial civil rights and feminist movements lead to disagreement not only on the severity of these harms, but on their existence.

The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement provides a good example of this subtlety. The movement began with viral videos documenting police shootings of unarmed black people. A series of demonstrations and protests accompanied these videos culminating in the 2020 George Floyd protests, the largest mass demonstration in recent times. The charge was that systemic racism led to police killing blacks more often than other races. When I briefly looked into this, I found it was unclear whether this was indeed the case. A study by Harvard professor Roland Fryer did find increased use of non-lethal violence against blacks and Hispanics, but no differences in the use of deadly force. Despite the damning videos, it was not clear that the issue at the center of BLM was a real thing. Since 2020 the movement has declined and we hear little about it anymore.

Progressives have a solipsism problem
In addition to more tenuous claims of harms to existing marginalized groups, new group identities have appeared claiming oppression and demanding redress. The most well-known of these is the transgender movement. These are people who identify as a gender different that the one associated with their biological sex and desire for society to accommodate their identity. Transwomen possessing male genes and sexual anatomy desire institutional acknowledgement of their identity as full-fledged women. For example, a person named Adam Graham was charged with of the rape of two women, after which they claimed identity as a transwoman and took the name Isla Bryson. Bryson was convicted and sought to be incarcerated in a woman’s prison in order to avoid being sent to a harsher men’s prison.

There is a solipsistic character to trans issues that strikes me as a person saying “I am special, others should acknowledge my specialness.” It has arisen notably when transwomen have competed successfully in women’s sports. Athletic competitions are segregated by sex because males have both physiological (muscle mass) and anatomical (frame size) advantages. For example, a quarter of the players in the NBA are as tall or taller than the tallest players in the WBA. An ordinary NBA player of this height could be a superstar in the WBA as a transwoman. Though hormones can eliminate the strength advantage for transwomen, they would keep their male stature. A transparent example of how a man could game the system by becoming a transwoman is chess. There exist many male players who are strong enough to win tournaments in women’s chess but have no chance in men’s chess. This creates a potential for such a player to claim identity as a woman in order to win prizes. For this reason, transwomen have been banned from the professional sport, which serves as an acknowledgement that transwomen are not the same as women.

Another example of identitarian solipsism are claims of disability by people who see disability as an identity rather than a real restriction on their lives. Freddie DeBoer has written about disability rights activists who, focusing on those least impaired, claim that the chief problem faced by disabled people is stigma by the larger society as opposed to the physical or mental limitations they face. Such limitations are most apparent in severely disabled people, whose needs are sometimes disregarded by activists:

autism self-advocacy partisans are so insistent that having autism is not in any sense negative that they have to sideline those whose autism is clearly negative…Such people are an uncomfortable reminder of what autism specifically and disability generally can do, so they are marginalized by those who prefer to maintain a false positivity…The prototypical example of this dynamic is the 2022 incident where student activists forced Harvard to cancel a panel on autism because the panel’s description referred to treatment, which the activists rejected based on the logic that there’s nothing wrong with autism. The profoundly autistic could very much benefit from more and more effective treatment, as could their families, but they are definitionally not able to self-advocate in that way - the profoundly autistic don’t go to Harvard, [and] their families are dismissed through reference to standpoint theory. Anyone who can’t express themselves in a conventional way, whether thanks to cerebral palsy or autism or schizophrenia or any other condition, finds themselves written out of the debate.

Some disability activists, in DeBoer’s telling, “are rightly aggressive about defending the doctrine of reasonable accommodation” while insisting there is nothing wrong about being disabled; it is merely a different way of being for some people. They argue that accommodations should be offered to all those claiming disability. Some claim disabled status, that they are special (in the sense of special Olympics), but appear to lack the restrictions that actual special people live with. Accommodating them “leads to a discomfiting question about when accommodations for some students become an artificial disadvantage for others.”

Progressive solipsism hurts Democratic electoral prospects
This idea that people claiming an identity defined by a lack of accomplishment deserve what their more accomplished peers have is prevalent among Progressives. This is irritating to most people. I was talking with a friend about his stepchildren from his first marriage, which had been a toxic relationship almost from the start. The step kids were losers like some of the guys our former foster girls dated after they left our care. He said of his interactions with his stepchildren, “it is like they say ‘you have money—give some to me.’”

A movement based on advocating for those who do not manage their affairs effectively is politically problematic, particularly when its proselytizers are affluent people who have no people in their lives like this. In discussions with operators at work who were culturally working class, but economically middle class, I have found that many of them have losers in their extended families. Since they are successful and have never needed safety-net programs, they see Democratic programs intended to provide aid to the poor or some other marginalized group as providing aid to their no-good cousin or their niece’s loser boyfriend and think hell no, these people don’t deserve help from my tax dollars. So, they lean Republican on that issue.

While we are well-off and have never needed any safety net programs, these programs served their function for our foster kids while they were with us and afterword and have assisted five of them to move into the working or middle classes with six of their children clearly destined for the middle class. Helping to turn 11 people into assets for our society instead of liabilities shows that the programs do deliver results for many at the cost of enabling slacking by some. Many Christian people oppose efforts to write off those who cannot or do not manage well, who would otherwise end up hungry, homeless, or in prison.

But most people are not in our situation, nor are they the kind of Christian who cares about these issues. This means there exists a large number of working and middle-class people who achieved their level of life success largely through their own efforts and have little sympathy for those who have not. The old civil rights campaigns were about granting to everyone the right and opportunity to make something of yourself. It was about “the other” wanting to become more like the mainstream, which is implicitly saying they want to be like you—a flattering message. The new campaigns seem to be asking for advantages to be granted to other people’s kids—not yours. This is a hard sell at any time, but particularly when increasing numbers of Americans are dissatisfied with how the country is being managed.

It is true that some of the people who raise objections like these go way farther into racism, homophobia and sexism. It is understandable that well-meaning Democrats have supported these progressive ideas (as have I). But it is undeniable that ideas like defund the police, asserting that transwomen are women, or arguing for open borders present easy targets for Republicans to attack.

Democrats have failed to offer a positive vision that might offset their social justice vulnerabilities. Unlike Republicans, Democrats cannot mount an economic offensive based on boldface lies and have it validated by the media their voters consume. Democrats use and trust a larger number of more mainstream news sources who generally engage in factual reporting. Republicans are more likely to reject these news sources as biased in favor of sources who report Republican lies about policy without comment and sometimes amplify their message. For example, Republicans pass tax cuts for rich folks which they justify with “supply side” nonsense that these cuts would pay for themselves by generating stronger growth that would benefit all and this B.S. is swallowed by their base.

Now that this lie has come to be seen as blatantly ridiculous by most everyone outside the Republican base, they have shifted to talking about how tariffs would perform the same magic (but they keep on passing the tax cuts by incredibly thin margins). Because they can fabricate lies without political cost, they are free to pursue unpopular social policy (e.g. abortion bans) and still win. Democrats do not have this option and cannot afford the albatross of pushing for social progress when they are the political underdogs.