It's not relevant because the severity of the diagnosis makes no difference, the solution remains the same. Thatcherism could have been a lot worse. The Left were still unelectable. Turns out large chunks of the population don't mind terrible elected leaders if they're populists.
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Rather, in practical politics, class is just an example of identity, and politics always works through people grouping around identities. What changes, though, is the relative salience of such identities. 2/
Well, I'm not inclined to think of it in terms of class. But there's a difference between a politics that seeks to break down distinctions between identity groups, emphasizing what binds people together, rather than what separates them... 1/
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and perhaps uniting behind particular universal policy commitments - e.g., eradication of poverty, drive for equality, increased educational access - and a politics that seeks to preserve disparate identities, and valorizes those in political, moral & epistemic terms, making 2/
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them the organizing principle of any political engagement. The first can aim towards hegemony in the Gramscian sense (i.e., it seeks to build a single unified movement that dominates the ideological terrain). The second will inevitably flounder precisely in the relations...
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of inclusion and exclusion it fosters. The second is characteristic of identity politics. Hegemonic interventions don't have to be class aligned. For example, the sociologist Stuart Hall conceptualised Thatcherism as a hegemonic project (authoritarian populism).
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And I don't think you're ignorant, by any means. It's just identity and politics is the subject of my PhD so I think I have the advantage. Sorry, but there you go.
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And you obviously have loads more knowledge in that area. But we’re not having an academic discussion here, neither am I questioning your expertise. Also, your expertise in a discipline is separate from the discipline’s foundations. And I have a handy example...
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...because my own PhD is in the area of economics that models the economy as a collection of perfectly rational agents with perfect foresight. I’d say I know a lot about such models. Yet, if an intelligent layperson questions the very foundations of that theory...
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I take your point. But Weberian ideal types are not the same sort of thing as economics models (though they appear to be superficially). There's a brief discussion Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideal_type
End of conversation
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