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Originally posted by mikewhitney
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Because, as a progressive/ liberal myself, I don't think I've ever used the word. I typically watch about an hour of US progressive youtube a day, and the frequency with which they mention the word is perhaps about twice a year... i.e. close to never.
So if progressives aren't actually talking about it very much at all, but you're seeing it a lot, I'm guessing it was from conservatives who were actually the ones talking about it, presumably fear-mongering about it, and that the conservatives did ten times or a hundred times more talking about it than any liberals they were talking about ever did. Presumably they dug up an example of a single liberal somewhere in the whole of America referring to it, and then themselves talked about 10 times more than that obscure liberal person did.
This doctrine seems intent on increasing division and increasing dissatisfaction in this country.
Try stopping watching Faux News or whatever propaganda source you're listening to, it seems to be actively misleading you.
White men are supposed to be self-deprecatory about their 'privilege.'
Why is it great? One reason is that it makes a wide variety of things in life easier, and opens up all sorts of opportunities that I wouldn't have if I were a woman or a person of color. So I'm glad I'm white, glad I'm a man, glad I was able to get a great education, glad my parents are financially well off, glad I live in a country that is free and nice, etc. I've been able to achieve a lot in my life so far, and a lot of that would have been harder or even impossible if I hadn't had some of those advantages.
If I'd been born in a rural African tribal village, my life would probably have sucked by comparison. For starters, the lack of healthcare that I needed to save my life as a child and got for free because I live in a country where the government provides it, would have probably killed me in Africa. If I'd lived in America it might have bankrupted my parents, and probably I then wouldn't have been able to afford good schooling, and I doubt in the US I could have afforded the high-quality university education I was able to get here through government funding. Acknowledging privilege is about having the self-awareness of those sorts of things, and how they contributed to your life. The things I achieved, I achieved because I worked for them, but they would have been harder or impossible if I hadn't had certain advantages that some people don't have.
The least privileged are to be handed over the predominate voice and power.
The progressive view is that we have a moral obligation to help those less fortunate than us. That we have a moral obligation to correct injustice in the world where we can and to not be blind to it.
So in cases where the system as it currently exists is discriminating against minorities, where it is removing power they would otherwise have if all were equal, where it is making them less able to achieve things that someone in the majority, then morally we ought to act to right this injustice if possible.
It is certainly not true that the least privileged should be "handed over the predominate voice and power" - that would be horrendously unjust, and utterly against the basic equality of human beings that is the foundation of progressive moral values. Rather, the progressive ideal would be that the least privileged have, per person, the same voice and power that the most privileged have - i.e. ideally that nobody be more privileged than anyone else.
This is strong in virtue signaling -- showing how righteous you are by following the party line. The thing I see happening is that this is promoting groupthink -- that your decisions are not from you own intellect but are based on what values seem to be approved by the community. In its worst manifestations, people seem to be under mind controlled behavior
Liberals on the whole, do tend to be less influenced by these things than conservatives, but they can still be subject to them (liberalism/conservativism in politics correlates to a core psychology personality trait known as Openness to experience, with liberals on the whole tending toward being more likely to be curious, free-thinking, intelligent individuals, open to learning about new ideas outside of those they have been told before, while conservatives tend toward the opposite traits instead valuing firm commitment to what their group teaches and typically having a disinterest in exploring other ideas).
We may see this in the House where Dems aren't allowed to vote independently but are to follow what Pelosi wants.
She's certainly got the skill of what's known as 'whipping votes' (the term 'Whip' is the title of a person in a parliamentary system who tries to cajole people within the party to all vote in unison as much as possible). This is usually considered a desirable skill for someone in a party to have (within reason), and the Republicans in the House and Senate seem to be good at it too, themselves voting as a bloc most of the time.
Chuck Schumer, unfortunately, seems to lack that skill. In addition to having all the many failings of Nancy Pelosi, he's also utterly incompetent when it comes to whipping votes, with one retiring Dem Senator noting that never once had he put the slightest pressure on her to vote for a Democrat bill when she was trying to decide whether she was going to. As far as I can tell, there's nothing Chuck Schumer isn't bad at. Whereas, as actively evil as Mitch McConnell is in terms of his bills, his actions, his appointments, and his lies to the media, he at least seems competent at doing politics and running his own party. If I believed in God, I would pray for a Democratic senate leader who was at least a quarter as competent as McConnell at actually doing his job. Pelosi in the Senate would be great in that regard.
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