Prolific writer, researcher, thinker, and close personal friend of the Dorx Lisa Selin Davis is an old-school Leftist who developed an “exciting new interest in reality,” subsequently putting her on the wrong side of many a Brooklyn dinner party. We ask: What does it mean to be on the Left? What is Feminism? Do Gender Critics engage in “hugboxing”? How does one remain curious and empathetic while talking to ignorant a-holes? Do Conservative women give fewer effs? Is Corinna wearing “woman-pit”? What is Lisa’s next book about? It’s a party in the rabbit hole as 3 disagreeable friends agree on just about everything.
Links:
Housewife: https://lisaselindavis.substack.com/p/its-time-to-pre-order-my-new-book
Skokie (film): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skokie_(film)
BROADview: https://lisaselindavis.substack.com/
Lisa on Twitter: https://twitter.com/LisaSelinDavis
GENDER WARS Playing Cards: https://store.ninapaley.com/product/gender-wars-playing-cards/
Hi, I’ve newly discovered your show (through learning of Alice Dreger and reading and loving Galileo’s Middle FInger, through reading and loving Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, and listening to your interviews with Alice), and am really enjoying it. So first, thank you both — also the Gender Wars playing cards are hilarious.
Lisa brought up some great points about the current Left, its tribalism and focus on power instead of justice, its elitism, and I think she hits the nail on the head there. And these are things the philosopher Susan Neiman eviscerates in her new book Left Is Not Woke. In it she argues that tribalism is the core of the Right and universalism is the core of the Left (and backs that up with loads of evidence), and that this is where today’s Left has gone off the rails. She blames Foucoult for the ‘power is all there is so let’s give up and go home bullshit’, and traces it into woke-ism via Todd Gitlin’s Letters to a Young Activist:
“Your starting point is that your identity has been singled out for victimhood. You didn’t choose it, but you refuse to walk away from it.” But the primordial passion that fuels identity politics proves to be its weakness: “However often it makes the blood race, [identity politics] often enough glosses over a profound impotence.” For, he argues, identity politics confuses grand passions with minor irritations, while mocking broader goals as mere rhetoric.
“On this view, the goal of politics is to make sure your category is represented in power, and the proper critique of other people’s politics is that they represent a category that is not yours… Even when it takes on a radical temper, identity politics is interest-group politics. It aims to change the distribution of benefits, not the rules under which distribution takes place.” (Pages 20 -21, Left Is Not Woke)
It’s a fantastic book and I highly, highly recommend it to all three of you. She rips the craziness a new one.