"Rousseau was not a wholehearted supporter of democracy in practice. “Were there such a thing as a nation of Gods, it would be a democracy. So perfect a form of government is not suited to men.” He was thinking, of course, of direct democracy"

An Illustrated Brief History of Western Philosophy / Anthony Kenny / p.270

Identity Politics

Identity politics: a wide range of political activity and theory based on the shared experience of injustice by members of a social group. Their aim is to free the marginalised social group

Example: feminism, Black Civil Rights in the U.S., gay and lesbian liberation, and the American Indian movements (race, ethnicity, multiculturalism, indigenous rights)

Identity politics …. is intimately connected to the idea that some social groups are oppressed; that is, that one’s identity as a woman or as a Native American, for example, makes one peculiarly vulnerable to cultural imperialism (including stereotyping, erasure, or appropriation of one’s group identity), violence, exploitation, marginalization, or powerlessness (Young 1990).

Identity politics starts from analyses of oppression to recommend, variously, the reclaiming, redescription, or transformation of previously stigmatized accounts of group membership. Rather than accepting the negative scripts offered by a dominant culture about one’s own inferiority, one transforms one’s own sense of self and community, often through consciousness-raising.

A key condition …. for contemporary identity politics was institutionalized liberal democracy (Brown 1995). The citizen mobilizations that made democracy real also shaped and unified groups previously marginal to the polity, while extensions of formal rights invited expectations of material and symbolic equality.

Criticism

For many leftist commentators […. identity politics represents] the capitulation to cultural criticism in place of analysis of the material roots of oppression [e.g. capitalism for Marxists]

The marginalised social group identifies itself as being opposed to a dominate Other. “Such an identity [….] merely reinforces its dependence on this dominant Other, and further internalizes and reinforces an oppressive hierarchy.” {thus power is simply transfected from one group (redistributed) to another rather than eliminating its cause}

injustices of distribution require redistributive remedies that aim “to put the group out of business as a group” 

(Source: plato.stanford.edu)

"The art of rhetoric [for the Romans] was no simply a weapon of emperors. In its belief that all citizens must be taught to speak well, it was closely bound up with ancient Greek democracy. For the Greeks, a free man was one who was to be persuaded by speech rather than, like slaves or foreigners, to be coerced by violence."

Terry Eagleton | How to Read a Poem | p10

"Why do you hate democracy?”
“Only the greedy and the ugly people come to the top in a democracy,” she said”, “because they’re the only people who will push themselves there. Only degenerate races are democratic.”
…..
“I do want an aristocracy …. And I’d far rather have an aristocracy of birth than of money. Who are the aristocrats now—who are chosen as the best to rule? Those who have money and the brains for money. It doesn’t matter what else thy have: but they must have money-brains, —because they are ruling in the name of money."

D. H. Lawrence | The Rainbow | p254

"[American] settlers fought, traded and intermarried with self-governing native peoples who practised social equality, free debate in council and the rule of consensus. “Their whole constitution breathes nothing but liberty!” wrote James Adair, of the Cherokees, in 1775. Benjamin Franklin had made similar observations about the Iroquois Confederacy, which he urged the Thirteen Colonies to emulate. The whites were particularly impressed by the way dissenters would simply leave the rest of their nation and form an independent group. Here — spread before the eyes of colonists resentful of a distant crown — were freedom, democracy and the right of succession.
——
It was, and still is, not well known that native democracies were largely a post-Columbian development, booming in the open spaces left by the great dying of the 1500s. Most of the eastern farming “tribes” were remnants of once-powerful chiefdoms. Had the English come to America before the demographic collapse, they would have found a more familiar social structure: lords who lived in great houses atop hundred-food earthen pyramids, were carried about on litters, and were buried with slaves and concubines."

A Short History of Progress | Ronald Wright | p116

"In hunter-gatherer society (barring a few special cases) the social structure was more or less egalitarian, with only slight differences in wealth and power between greatest and least. Leadership was either diffuse, a matter of consensus, or something earned by merit and example. The successful hunter did not sit down beside his kill and stuff himself on the spot; he shared the meat and thereby gained prestige. If a leader became overbearing, or a minority disliked a majority decision, people could leave. In an uncrowded world without fixed borders or belongings, it was easy to vote with one’s feet.
The early towns and villages that sprang up in a dozen farming heartlands around the world after the last ice age seem to have continued these free-and-easy ways for a while. Most of them were small peasant communities in which everyone worked at similar tasks and had a comparable standard of living. Land was either communally owned or thought of as having no owner but the gods. Farmers whose effort and skill made them wealthier had an obligation to share with the needy, to whom they were bound by kinship.
Gradually, however, differences in wealth and power became entrenched. Freedom and social opportunity declined as populations rose and boundaries hardened between groups. This patter first appears in the Neolithic villages of the Middle East, and it has recurred all over the world. The first farmers along the Danube, for example, left only tools in their remains; later settlements are heavily fortified and strewn with weapons. Here, said the great Australian archaeologist Gordon Childe, “we almost see the state or war of all against all arising as …. land became scarce”."

A Short History of Progress | Ronald Wright | p48-49

"Abraham Lincoln had never been an abolitionist, and when he ran for president in 1860 he did not advocate ending slavery in the states where it existed. Rather, it was largely the “huge antislavery movement that pushed Lincoln into the Emancipation Proclamation — that pushed Congress into the 13th and 14th and 15th Amendments.”
——-
“We’ve never had our injustices rectified from the top, from the president or Congress, or the Supreme Court, …. No. The changes, important changes that we’ve had in history, have not come from those three branches of government. They have reacted to social movements."

Howard Zinn

(Source: commondreams.org)

"[W]ars get sold to Americans — especially to the young people who fight those wars — as efforts to spread liberty and democracy"

(Source: commondreams.org)

"Western “participatory democracy” is defective in at least three ways. It is anti-intellectual (politicians are condemned if they are too “professorial”). It is short-sighted, to the detriment of future generations. And, if democracy is applied in multiethnic societies, it can lead to discrimination and even violence against minorities."

(Source: thedailybeast.com)

"Capitalism is not loyal to any person, nation, corporation or ideology. It doesn’t care about the planet or believe in justice, equality, fairness, liberty, human rights, democracy, world peace or even economic growth and the “free market.” Its overriding obsession is maximizing the return on invested capital. Capitalism will pose as a loyal friend of other beliefs and values, or betray them in an instant, if it advances the drive for profit … that’s why it’s called the bottom line!"

Craig Collins

(Source: truth-out.org)