I'm being made to sound like Nick Clegg over here! For the record, I'm probably about as left 'leaning' as Scargill.
It is, yeah. There's always going to be a tonne of caveats when you're talking about something as general as 'the left' or 'the right'. Would you disagree with the point I was making in doing so that there's been a big trend towards the kind of identity politics I'm describing in the past few years, though?
That's because the argument for that kind of politics is that it's anti-discrimination. Which it is. Therefore, by criticising it, I must be pro-discrimination. I'm sure if I used a specific example of a type of discrimination, I'd be merrily branded with the corresponding 'ist' or 'phobe', and that's it - opinion disregarded. My view is that it's not the best way to fight discrimination generally, and sure as shit isn't the best way to get any bugger who actually gives a feck about it anywhere near a position where they can make a meaningful difference.
Big fan of Corbyn, yeah. To me it's a case of 'right man, wrong time'. I think he got stuffed largely because he had a piss weak stance on brexit in an election that was always going to be about brexit. I think if brexit doesn't exist and that election is all about policy and message, it's a very different story.
On Sanders, I'm not familiar with the candidate selection process in the US, but my impression from afar is that the American system including the Democratic Party is set up in such a way that any fecker who isn't pro-capitalist, pro-corporate, and willing to play ball with the rogues' gallery from Apple to Zurich isn't going to be allowed to get anywhere the feck near the presidency.
The shit that happening in America right now is a good place to start. That if you're black, you're going to be x times more like to be targeted by police, and in America, gunned the feck down like a rabid dog. The fact that if you stick the name 'Alan Jones' on a job application, it's 5 times more likely to get looked at than if it's 'Kelechi Adebayo' or 'Mohammed Iqbal'. Basically anything that has a meaningful impact on somebody's life.
As opposed to getting League of Gentlemen taken off Netflix because Papa Lazarou's facepaint is the wrong colour.
I reckon a good illustration of the wrong focus is the story about Hulk Hogan a few years ago. It was largely "Look! Hulk Hogan is a racist piece of shit because he said the n word!". No he isn't. Hulk Hogan is a racist piece of shit because in that same report he was on record as telling his son "I hope when we die, we don't come back as a couple of blacks". Hulk Hogan is a racist piece of shit because he didn't want his daughter to have anything to do with the black fella she was dating, simply because he was black. Now he's been able to rehabilitate his image to a degree because all anybody remembers is "he said the n word that one time".