In his work in progress, Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression: On the Nature and Origins of Conservaphobia, Rony Guldmann writes:
* Notwithstanding their ostensible egalitarianism and pragmatism, the liberal elites are committed to their own particular brand of identity politics, complete with its own special kind of otherization. The “bitter clingers” who stand in the way of gun control are not merely criticized as misguided, but despised as occupants of a lower moral and cognitive order, atavisms of a barbaric past that liberals alone have superseded. Whereas now eclipsed traditionalist hierarchies revolved around perceived differences in things like sexual purity, work ethic, religious affiliation, family pedigree, and ethnic bona fides, the new status hierarchy of liberalism is rooted in “cognitive elitism” and centers around a morally charged division between those who are “aware” and those who are not. The former have the psychic maturity to accede to liberalism. The latter lack it and must be reformed. This kind of identity politics will always take refuge in some pragmatic-sounding pretext—e.g., the dangers of firearms or the drawbacks of home schooling. But conservatives dismiss this pragmatism as an elaborate façade for a status hierarchy that liberals refuse to acknowledge.
* The liberal virtues are in truth gestures of identity-assertion designed to come at the expense of conservative ordinary Americans.
* The modern liberal identity is not an unvarnished naturalistic lucidity, as liberals are wont to see it. For it embodies the contingent historical forces that first generated it, a new uniformization, homogenization, and rationalization that liberalism’s Enlightenment narratives conceal or discount.
* Given that the symbolic realism is invariably intertwined with the biological functioning of a symbolic animal, liberalism’s efforts to mark off a sphere of “real” harm-tracking morality from the realm of airy cultural grievances is necessarily parochial, the product of an ethnocentrism that cannot recognize how liberals and conservatives partake of a shared humanity one side of which liberalism discounts.
* the emergence of a conservative identity politics, a conservative politics of recognition. The tropes and ideals of the Left are being marshaled, not simply to advance one or another conservative cause, like ending abortion or untrammeled free markets, but moreover in defense of conservatives themselves as an unfairly maligned social group. This is what defines a conservative claims of cultural oppression.
* Social meanings can constrain us because they ground our identities. To preserve identity is to contain freedom—to limit the range of possibilities that one can seriously contemplate. This narrowness is the sine qua non of taking oneself seriously, which is what social meanings allow us to do.
* A biological male is within his rights to self-identify as a female and attach more importance to this inner self-conception than to his biological sex. But he cannot reasonably expect others—for who many such disjunction between biology and identity is foreign—do the same and recognize him as a female. His sexual self-identification is a private matter, but his biological sexuality is a public one, and others will respond to what they can see and hear. His perspective is legitimate, but so too is theirs. Both express equal but ultimately incommensurable frameworks of identity. He is on the losing end of this conflict, not because he is morally inferior, but because of a utilitarian calculus resting on 1) a social consensus that the sexes should use separate restrooms, 2) the fact that he is in the minority and3) the fact that the resources available for the construction of public restrooms are finite. Someone is going to be left feeling uncomfortable, and it is the greatest good of the greatest number that determines who this will be.
* The liberal identity is premised on the ethos of disengaged self-control and self-reflexivity, and this places it in direct conflict with those whose patriotism resists that ethos.
* most people’s need for cultural identity affirmation is largely defensive in nature…
