Here's a quick question: What was the progressive community outraged about last week? How about last month?
I'm not talking about real issues, like inequality or the Forever War we are engaged in.
I'm talking about the never-ending serious of petty outrages that the online community loves and can't do without. You know what I'm talking about.
The redneck small businessman or politician from Arkansas, or Florida, or Kansas who said something stupid, or racist, or misogynist, or whatever. Some petty outrage that has no effect on your life in the slightest, but everyone on DKos enjoys piling on in one-upmanship to show who is more outraged.

There's even a term for it in the Urban Dictionary: Outrage Porn.

Memes, news articles, TV segments, email forwards, or other forms of media that are designed to invoke outrage. This is especially true for political-related topics. Viewers of outrage porn often become addicted and spend many hours per day trying to seek new outrage highs.

Liberal: "The Daily Kos had some good outrage porn today. Apparently some conservative said something stupid."

Conservative: "I just read an email forward that said Obama is going to turn all of the white people into slaves and make us all Muslin!"

Note, the DKos example listed above is actually part of the Urban Definition. I didn't go looking for it.

It's funny that DKos is so well-known for Outrage Porn that it is part of the dictionary definition. How's that reflection in the mirror?

There are two problems with Outrage Porn:

1) It takes up the time and energy to be outraged about real things.

There are many things to be outraged about in this world. What portion of the real outrage needed to motivate people to solve some of our biggest issues is subsumed in the pseudo-outrage drudged up everyday by our biggest outrage porn producers? If we blow off steam by forwarding a story about a stupid racist comment, have we compromised our ability to mobilize assistance for the 2 million displaced Syrians or a struggling democracy movement in Iran? A little? A lot? I don’t know, except that it takes a toll.

2) It's totally artificial. You are being manipulated. It's as artificial and manufactured as the outrage at Obama on Fox News. It even feels like the 24-hour news cycle.
What's more, it has all the same feel and style of Madison Avenue marketing. I'm sure that if you dig hard enough, you will find that many of the people who sell you your weekly outrages used to work in marketing selling you your underwear.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I don't like having my emotions manipulated. Especially when the people doing the manipulating have goals that might be harmful to mine.

“I believe that in ways large and small, peaceful and sometimes violent, that the biggest threat to the future of our children and grandchildren is the poison of identity politics that preaches that our differences are far more important than our common humanity."
- Bill Clinton, link

I've lately come to realize that the Identity Politics that have come to dominate the political landscape of late, looks suspiciously like the Lifestyle Marketing that dominates the consumer culture.

What got me thinking about this was the excellent documentary series The Century of the Self by Adam Curtis.
While the series is largely about marketing, public relations and how psychoanalysis fit into that, he also addresses how politicians have used the same tools.

Consider for a moment car commercials. I remember growing up that car commercials at least mentioned what was in the car.
Now its difficult to determine what product exactly they are selling.
The reason is because they aren't selling a product. They are selling a lifestyle. Simply put, you are what you drive.

Adam Curtis identified the moment that this idea of marketing lifestyles to voters was adopted by politicians - Clinton's 1996 campaign. Like you being the car you drive, you are now the skin color, or gender, or sexual orientation, or other lifestyle defining attribute that you vote.
Naomi Klein noticed this trend years before I did.

Once we'd embarked on a search for new wells of cutting-edge imagery, our insistence on extreme sexual and racial identities made for great brand-content and niche-marketing strategies. If diversity was what we wanted, the brands seemed to be saying, then diversity was exactly what we would get. And with that, the marketers and media makers swooped down, air-brushes in hand, to touch up the colors and images in our culture...
The shift in attitude was not the result of a mass political conversion but of some hard economic calculations. According to Rocking the Ages, a book produced in 1997 by leading U.S. consumer researchers Yankelovich Partners, “Diversity” was the “defining idea” for Gen-Xers, as opposed to “Individuality” for boomers and “Duty” for their parents.

It's easy to dismiss this thinking, but the simple fact of the matter is that it works and we need to understand it.
We also need to understand how much further we've gone down this road.

First of all, we must define Identity Politics.

1. political activity or movements based on or catering to the cultural, ethnic, gender, racial, religious, or social interests that characterize a group identity.

There is a potentially positive role for identity politics. For instance, the civil rights movement of the 1950's and 1960's.
It was important for the African-American racial group to define themselves and form a movement to stop their discrimination.

This carried on with latinos, native americans, and women's rights groups in the 1970's. Then finally with the gay and lesbian community in the 1980's.
All these movements did positive things and expanded civil rights for everyone.

"Identity politics enabled many formerly silenced and displaced groups to emerge from the margins of power and dominant culture to reassert and reclaim suppressed identities and experiences; but in doing so, they often substituted one master narrative for another, invoked a politics of separatism, and suppressed differences within their own 'liberatory' narratives."
- Henry Giroux

However, there is a natural limitation to what these groups can do, and even more importantly, there is a natural side effect from these movements: i.e. they are divisive by their very existence and definition.
What's more, they all exist on the liberal side of the political spectrum where there is more toleration for excesses.

And that's where the problem is, because the concept of the New Deal democratic tradition is based on a society of inclusiveness and working together for a common goal. Indentity Politics is incompatible with this idea.
Historian Arthur Schlesinger writes that "movements for civil rights should aim toward full acceptance and integration of marginalized groups into the mainstream culture, rather than...perpetuating that marginalization through affirmations of difference."
Todd Gitlin explained it this way.

MR. GITLIN: Okay. The other thing that I think a person of the left affirms is that values of solidarity, of social responsibility, of commitment to the common good are of great importance, and that among the most grievous forces that work against the realization of those values are the drastic inequalities in human society. So somebody on the left is committed to the undermining and opposition to those inequalities.

MR. WATTENBERG: And you think the left now has taken their eye off the ball. Is that more or less the idea?

MR. GITLIN: I think that many people, perhaps most on the left, or at least most who are visible, have gone down a path in which theyare obsessed with what differs between them and one -- one crowd and another. They are more obsessed with what divides them than what they have in common with the rest of humanity.

I think the obsession with differences is a very self-destructive movement overall. The most obvious example of this self-destructiveness is the tendency of these identity groups to "eat their own".

"I'm not a big fan of identity politics and sort of picking one thing and defining yourself with it."
- Andrej Pejic

One of the best examples of identity groups eating their own is Peter Tatchell.
Peter Tatchell is a human rights campaigner, a member of the gay rights group OutRage! and the left wing of the Green party. He was active in Stop Murder Music against music lyrics allegedly inciting violence against LGBT people, and was leading member of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF).
Tatchell has been fighting for LGBT rights for 40 years. He's been beaten unconscious and been given death threats for his efforts, so you would think he's earned some street cred' from the liberal community.

However, all it took was for Tatchell to sign his name to an open letter which "called on universities and other organizations to stand up to attempts at intimidation and affirm their support for the basic principles of democratic political exchange" after some feminist and trans-activists were “No Platformed” for speaking unpopular political positions, for all of Tatchell's accomplishments to be forgotten.

Then, in an irony so profound it could make your temples throb, trans activists and their ‘allies’ — people who follow them on Twitter — went berserk, describing the letter as an intolerable assault on their feelings and going after all who signed it. In short, they showed their anger about a letter that branded them illiberal by behaving illiberally. Two people in particular got it in the neck: Mary Beard, who said she felt so ‘battered’ by the liberty-allergic trolls that she went to bed; and Tatchell, who has been bombarded by 5,000 tweets, many of them insulting, some threatening.
How do we explain this tirade of abuse against someone I would describe as the grandfather of gay rights if I wasn’t worried that the use of such a gender-specific title might earn me a tsunami of online abuse? Why are people so incredibly thin-skinned? I think it’s down to the politics of identity. I think the more we’ve made the personal political, the more we define our social and political outlook with reference to what’s in our underpants or what colour our skin is, the more we experience every criticism of our beliefs as an attack on our very personhood, our souls, our right to exist.

The excesses of Identity Politics are not limited to any one group. For instance, the excesses of modern, third-wave feminism has created a mini-backlash of Women Against Feminism.
Lena Dunham, creator and star of the HBO series Girls and proud feminist publicly disagreed with the Women Against Feminism.
So it is with great irony that Dunham wound up on the feminist hit list just a few months later.

It began with The National Review's Kevin Williamson arguing that passages in Lena Dunham's memoir, when a 7-year-old Dunham checks out her little sister’s vagina and masturbates near her in the same bed, amount to child abuse. That Williamson would target Dunham is not surprising—attacking feminists in particular and women in general is his main beat. But the critique gained ground when many feminists agreed with him. On private listservs and public social media, they eviscerated Dunham and attacked anyone, including other feminists, who dared defend Dunham’s actions as normal—or, at least, not criminal—childhood behavior. This culminated with one feminist writing a public letter to Planned Parenthood asking them to drop Dunham as a spokesperson due to her “pattern of coercion that happened over the course of years, and the near-pornographic and remorseless way Dunham describes these incidents as an adult.” There is a hashtag, of course: #DropDunham.

The overreach and oversensitivity of feminists sometimes drifts into the realm of the absurd.

For instance, consider this comment by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg when asked why he likes to wear plain gray t-shirts. “I’d feel I’m not doing my job if I spent any of my energy on things that are silly or frivolous about my life.”
Sounds pretty innocuous, right? Not to some feminists.

“Is it just me or does the mindset of the Silicon Valley Power-Schlub imply that caring about clothing or how you look invalidates your ability to work?”
“Of course, male CEOs are far too focused on changing the world or building the next Big App to care about something as 'silly' or 'frivolous' as dressing professionally—they’ll just leave that to Marissa Mayer.”

Mic's Ellie Krupnick, meanwhile, claimed Zuckerberg’s comment “reinforces a sexist double standard.”
Really? It couldn't be that Zuckerberg was only talking about fashion and nothing else? And even if he was talking about something more than just the concept of fashion, that it was a jab at male CEO's and not female ones, which would have made a lot more sense?

What gives these feminists the ability of ESP to see inside the minds of other people are determine their "true motives"? It's fair to compare this pursuit of purity of thought is an echo of another age, when the target was heretics and the objective was to purge our society of sin.
The narcissism and Identity Politics go hand-in-hand. Statements that appear on face value to be about something entirely different, are actually all about you and something that offends you.
What's more, the hurt feelings of any one person becomes more important that any form of political debate by the greater society. Not only that, the offense doesn't even have to be real because the hurt feelings are real and that is the only thing that matters.

“People who think with their epidermis or their genitalia or their clan are the problem to begin with. One does not banish this specter by invoking it. If I would not vote against someone on the grounds of 'race' or 'gender' alone, then by the exact same token I would not cast a vote in his or her favor for the identical reason. Yet see how this obvious question makes fairly intelligent people say the most alarmingly stupid things.”
― Christopher Hitchens

It's not like this is the only example of feminists letting their outrage drown out the bigger picture.

After years of effort, the European Space Agency's lander Philaelanded on a comet 300 million miles away. At first, people were excited. Then some women noticed that one of the space scientists, Matt Taylor, was wearing a shirt, made for him by a female "close pal," featuring comic-book depictions of semi-naked women. And suddenly, the triumph of the comet landing was drowned out by shouts of feminist outrage about ... what people were wearing. It was one small shirt for a man, one giant leap backward for womankind.
The Atlantic's Rose Eveleth tweeted, "No no women are toooootally welcome in our community, just ask the dude in this shirt." Astrophysicist Katie Mack commented: "I don't care what scientists wear. But a shirt featuring women in lingerie isn't appropriate for a broadcast if you care about women in STEM." And from there, the online feminist lynch mob took off until Taylor was forced to deliver a tearful apology on camera.

Not everyone agreed. One female space professional wrote: "Don't these women and their male cohorts understand that *they* are doing the damage to what/whom they claim to defend!?"
Or as Chloe Price put it: "imagine the shitstorm if the scientist had been a woman and everyone focused solely on her clothes and not her achievements."
It seems that an unprecedented achievement in space exploration takes a backseat to some people's perceived slights.

This oversensitivity has gone to such levels that it is harming the people that want to support it. Consider this blog essay where someone who is genuinely progressive minded is emotionally torn by what can be described as abuses against "good people pushed out and marginalized in left-wing circles because they didn’t use the proper set of social and class signals to satisfy the world of intersectional politics."

Imagine for a moment that the current President was white.

Now imagine that the poverty rate for whites between 2009 and 2013 had gone from 25.8% to 27.2% according to the Census Bureau, while the percentage of blacks in poverty remained flat. Imagine that the wealth gap between blacks and whites has hit a 24-year high, and the homeownership rate for whites had dropped from 46.1% to 42.1%.
Now combine these numbers with an epidemic of police brutality in white neighborhoods, but a reluctance on the part of the federal government to step in and bring civil rights lawsuits after the black officers got off without spending time in jail.

Now imagine that this president had a 90% approval ratings among white voters. Does that makes sense? Would white voters be acting in a way that promoted their own self-interests? Has their loyalty been rewarded in any tangible way?

Now change the word "white" to "black" and you have reality today.

“If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him”
- Cardinal Richelieu

The examples of Identity Politics, and its tool Political Correctness, are nearly endless, especially on college campuses.

Take the University of Iowa, for example. This past fall, a visiting associate professor from Turkey displayed a provocative anti-racist piece of art in the center of campus with the intention of creating a discussion about racial issues in the United States. Anyone taking a minute to honestly look at the art or, certainly, to talk to the artist, would have understood that the art was intended to criticize racism. But in the face of student outrage, the university ignored and dismissed the artist's intention. This willful misunderstanding was again on on display at Purdue University following the creation of a music video by engineering students that parodied white rapper Macklemore's "Thrift Shop." The students, who use the video to geek out about engineering, were accused of racism, despite the fact the video is so tame it borders on adorable. Even the ironic Internet meme #thanksobama was not safe for one cartoonist at the University of Alabama after he drew a cartoon jokingly blaming Obama for Alabama's loss in their rival football game against Auburn University.
But rarely has the instruction to willfully misunderstand been made more clear than it was by one administrator at Bucknell University, who proclaimed "that the context really doesn't matter" in an ongoing case where students were expelled for allegedly using racial slurs on a radio show. Bucknell, a private university in Pennsylvania, has refused to reveal any additional information about the students and what they said. But if they were, for example, using racial slurs in order to mock racism and racists, like the late and great comedian Lenny Bruce used to do, then context is absolutely pivotal. The idea that "context doesn't matter" is not something a scholarly institution should be teaching anyone. Context always matters.

Speaking of Lenny Bruce, this is where Identity Politics, Political Correctness, intersectional politics, or whatever term you want to use for what is happening on the progressive side of politics today has gone totally off the rails:
It's lost its sense of humor.

This to me is a line in the sand. Any political movement that can't laugh at itself is not a political movement worth being associated with.
So what proof is there that Identity Politics progressives have lost their sense of humor? Ask almost any professional comedian out there.
Bill Maher and Dennis Miller
John Cleese
Jerry Seinfeld
That's just to name a few.
Oh, wait. Those are all white males, so that disqualifies them, right? No. What would disqualify them is if they aren't funny. They know comedy, so their opinions on comedy matter.
But in case that logic isn't enough for you, consider what Chris Rock said.

I stopped playing colleges... [it's] their willingness not to offend anybody. Kids raised on a culture of “We’re not going to keep score in the game because we don’t want anybody to lose.” Or just ignoring race to a fault. You can’t say “the black kid over there.” No, it’s “the guy with the red shoes.” You can’t even be offensive on your way to being inoffensive.
...This is not as much fun as it used to be.

I remember making fun of conservatives back in the 80's and 90's, and telling them how they were typifying the stereotype of the "humorless conservative". Progressives have shot themselves in the foot by giving away one of their most powerful weapons.

Lastly, there is also a word of warning that the loudest members of Identity Politics community will probably fail to heed at their own peril.

The left’s obsession with cultural signaling reflects the absence of a proactive political agenda, and “is only possible at certain moments: when liberalism seems to have failed but the right is not yet in charge.”
But one day conservatism will be culturally ascendant again, and the left will find itself attacked by the very tools it once employed.

You don't need a lot of imagination to think of what this might look like. Conservative Christians are already convinced that they are victims and under attack by the current culture (think War on Christmas).
But in case you still can't picture what this will look like, consider this example.

Last September, a coalition of leftist Columbia University student groups had a party to welcome incoming freshmen. The party was held in Potluck House, a special-interest housing community dedicated to food and conviviality, and the decorations were appropriately sans culottes.
One student attending the party, however, thought the mockup of a bloody guillotine went a bit too far, and submitted a complaint to the Office of Residential Life. The party’s violent imagery and anti-liberal language, the student said, “threatened [their] identity by creating an unsafe space for capitalists.” Potluck House was officially sanctioned.
This is ridiculous. There are few “safer spaces” for capitalism than an Ivy League university located in a global financial hub.

It is ridiculous, but progressives have already proven that ridiculous is not part of the context worth considering, and so whether a claim is ridiculous doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is if anyone claims to be offended.
Many of the most effective ideas and weapons of the right were originally created by the left and then warped and twisted to be used against the people they were supposed to have helped. Don't be surprised when they censorious nature of Identity Politics and Political Correctness is adopted by the right and used against us before long.