Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Liberal Privilege
I’ve wanted to write this for a while, and I haven’t heard or read anyone put these two words together before. My only hesitation is using this language of the left against them. Some say that is how you defeat them, others that it is how you become them. And nobody wants that!
We’ve heard a lot about privilege in the last four or five years. I think it is a real thing. We may not have always called it that, but I think we have always understood what it is. The populist wave sweeping the electorate this time around might talk about the elites and the people. The implicit dynamic is that the elites have something that they use to make their lives easier, and that the people lacking it have a much harder time achieving the same ends. Maybe its money, maybe its power, maybe its connections. Maybe its private schooling, a good credit history or growing up in a two-parent home. Whatever it is, it is undeniable that they have it and we don’t.
And maybe most of us don’t want to grow up to go to an ivy league school or run for the senate. But we’d like a job that puts food on the table. We’d like to marry a pretty girl, have appreciative children, and have a good long happy life. And that’s where the differences in privilege make the most direct impact.
We’ve all heard tons about white privilege, and male privilege, and even cisgender privilege. I think in certain context these things play an active role, and in some contexts can work against us. It sure is nice being a guy when you go to buy a car, because the salesman assumes you know enough to not let him completely rip you off. For a woman its different. But, if you’re a man going into a Victoria’s Secret to buy something for your wife, you’re not going to get that same benefit. Ditto if you’ve ever gone to pick your child up at school, and you become something of a terrorizing figure just being a fully grown man in a world populated by women and small children; you could be a pedophile!
Being white may help out when you’re going to buy a home. Thomas Sowell points out that the statistics that show that whites are approved for home loans more than African Americans hardly proves systemic racism, since Asian Americans are approved at rates higher than whites. But, when you’re being shown a home, a realtor’s knowledge of the statistics and their likely experience showing prospective homeowners various properties means that they probably are less enthused to show the homes they think their prospects can’t afford. Crossly, being white probably can work against you in other contexts, such as an athlete in sports where whites are under-represented. And I’m sure you can admit that in mixed racial company, white folk believe there are subjects that even when broached by others are inappropriate for themselves to contribute to.
But we all know these things, intuitively at least. There is a give and take. You have to hand it to muslim countries where they decided they were going to leverage the organizational strengths of men to suppress women, because everywhere else we’ve got a rich and complex balance between men and women. Women earn less money than men – naturally I think, rather than because of some calculated effort by men to short them – but women spend more money than men. Like the old saying, “for every dollar a man makes, a woman makes seventy cents. That only leaves the man thirty!” Ad-men in the 50’s realized this, and have catered their marketing to the women who were spending the family’s money at grocery stores and retailers. They earn less, but they have much more purchasing power.
There are plenty of kinds of privilege that go unnoticed. Being a fairly stout fellow I can attest that being short is a form of underprivilege. Women respond viscerally to taller men, all other things being equal. When I was in my 20’s I would sometimes wear platform boots to bars, and the response I got from women was paradigm-breaking. Sometimes they noticed the boots – not too difficult at 5-inches – and it didn’t even matter. Looking up into a guys eyes provokes a different chemical response inside them than the same guy five inches shorter. It’s also why women wear heels. In one of Malcolm Gladwell books he cited a study that had shown that for every inch of height difference between men corresponded to a $1,000 annual salary difference. On average, at 6’0″ you would make $10,000 more every year than a particularly unfortunate friend of mine at 5’2″.
If you still think privilege is bunk, consider anyone you know with an obvious physical deformity or handicap. The equipment manager for my high school baseball team didn’t have arms; he simply had hands where his arms would have met his shoulders. My sister – quite the bullying target herself – called him ‘Stumpy’. Do you think he was dating the captain of the cheerleading squad? (I actually did, but that was also eleven years after high school, and I compensate in many necessary ways.) The guy who made my sandwiches at the local Subway had pretty serious vitiligo on his face. I’m sure he gets some strange looks a lot of the time. One guy at my high school was as short as a dwarf, but didn’t have dwarfism. He was actually fairly popular in his circle, but he did have the nickname ‘Smurf’. Does it mean those guys can’t become president? No, but on average they have a rougher time of life than someone without those conditions.
So if other kinds of privilege exists that we don’t recognize, what about liberals? They seem to be the ones privilege-shaming everyone else, but have they taken a serious look at themselves? What does it mean to be a liberal, and to espouse liberal values publicly? Let’s get over the fact that they are wrong, and look at how it doesn’t even seem to matter. We conservatives often call them bleeding hearts. But implicit in that name is the fact that they care so much that it clouds their judgment. They are so empathetic to the needs of others that they become martyrs themselves. When some dumb celebrity says something liberal, even if its completely devoid of reason, we never question their motives. They’re wrong for the right reasons. And we often as conservatives assume the banner of harsh reality, being right for unfortunate reasons.
Being liberal means never having to apologize for being wrong. It means never being called bigoted. It means you can go see the latest Hollywood blockbuster and not have your values cast onto the villain. It means every musician in the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame agrees with you about corporate greed. It means you can go to wherever people are protesting, chuck a rock at a cop and take some crunchy granola gal home with you. You can ghost people who disagree with you politically and claim moral superiority. You can watch The Simpsons or Family Guy and not be insulted for your beliefs on every episode. You can look at any media outlet in the entire United States except for Fox News and hear voices that think like you do. You can take joy in vilifying Fox News or the GOP, because to everyone you’ve ever talked to they are legitimate evils trying to subvert civil liberties, stone gays to death and force women back into the kitchen.
If you’re a liberal, you don’t even see yourself as a liberal because to every public voice you’ve ever heard, you’re normal. It’s normal to think corporations are trying to poison your children for profit. It’s normal to think Donald Trump is the second coming of Adolph Hitler. It’s normal to think the government can legislate our country into perfect social equality. You can go anywhere and tell people how you think Obamacare is a miracle for offering insurance to so many people who didn’t have it before, because you’re normal. If anyone disagrees with you, it’s because they’re abnormal. They’re strange, angry, or white nationalists.
And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that in some regard, conservatives and other right-leaning folks have embraced this disadvantage, championing it even. We’re not normal! We want something different than what everyone else seems to want, even if only because its different. There’s a contrarian element, a desire to see popular ideas and entities as enemies. To some degree electing Trump was this element manifest. Why would so many people vote for someone that they don’t really agree with? Ignore the binary choice argument, because it didn’t turn out voters for Romney or McCain. People showed up to vote for the thing that the popular voices in America – the normal ones – didn’t want.
Just as a white man can walk into a 7-Eleven at 2am and not worry that the clerk will think you’re about to rob him, you don’t need to be a political savant to enjoy the benefits of liberal privilege. You don’t need to be a paid activist to subconsciously embrace the liberal privilege that is being offered ubiquitously in our culture. Every time someone parrots a talking point they heard on CNN at closing time at the bar, they get a smile from the person next to them, if only a polite one, and certainly not the argument you might get if you parroted Eric Bolling or Lou Dobbs. Positive reinforcement creates a feedback loop, and before you know it you’re holding a “Trump is a Nazi” sign outside an event with your fellow Bernie Sanders supporters kicking a man who dared disagree with you. And so there is a natural tide of the cultural ocean sweeping everyday Americans towards progressivism. They don’t even notice it; the beach was there just a second ago with their car keys and flip-flops, and now they can barely see them.
The fact that people in the midwest watch primetime television and not set fire to their TVs is because on some level we accept our disadvantage. We’ll grimace through the latest episode of SNL, and still buy a ticket to see Cher when she comes to town, knowing that if we boycotted every show and celebrity that insulted our values, we’d be watching re-runs of Gunsmoke and not much else. We can’t vote culturally with our dollars and clicks because our cultural purchasing power is comparatively minute.
The problem that right-thinking folks have with the idea of privilege is two-fold. We didn’t ask for any privilege, and we can’t change the world to rectify those privileges. But that’s exactly what the left is doing. They are blaming everything under the sun and even climate change on cisgender white men. This distorts the cultural advantages those groups have enjoyed. Sam Roberts said on a recent Red Eye that the large push from liberals to castigate these groups to equalize these privileges provoked the Trump response. It was too much, too fast. Not to mention that some white men in the Appalachians are among the poorest most disadvantaged people in our country. And even spread out among the rest, no blue-collar fork-lift operator (my last job) shares the same level of privilege as Baron Trump. That they are being asked to atone for the benefits of people who share their race and gender is beyond the pale, and of course part of a long history of guilting insisted upon by the left.
The point is that we can change the privilege structure too, although not as efficiently as the left. That we have Kaitlyn Jenner and Rachel Dolezal is proof that people are moving in the direction of the greatest privilege, and that the privilege landscape is changing. African Americans speak derisively of “passing”, where a light-skinned African American will dress and act as if they are white, and assume the privileges that may come with it. Now, we have the opposite, and even though Dolezal is an extreme case, there is certainly a cultural shift where white youths are opting for a social role and identity that they see as more promising in black culture. You can hardly blame Bruce for seeing his step-daughters worshipped by the media and think that becoming a woman is an upgrade, even at the permanent expense of his manhood.
I don’t begrudge white nationalists and MRAs their plight, much as I’d like to, because they see a concerted effort to diminish their identities. And its being campaigned in negative attacks against the privilege-bearers, rather than for the underprivileged. Ideally, we’d all be social equals and never speak a word again about this, but its a rocky terrain and its easier to knock people down to see eye to eye than to build themselves up. And for any conservative who already has uneven footing for their politics, the prospect of losing any more cultural influence is daunting. I don’t like it, but I understand. Perhaps if we could move the line of scrimmage on the political front, we could concede these other privileges, and maybe in-so-doing our politics wouldn’t seem so toxic.
Published in General
This is so good…
… that it bears repeating …
My darling little sister is consistently, factually wrong about something which I find to be material to her liberal arguments… And, whether she has the capacity to concede it or not; no matter what… She has never forfeited any of her positions. Not one. In maybe 100 conversations, or so; spanning about 10 years, or so. There is not a doubt in my mind that it’s fueled by a distinctly low bar. She is lacking the requirements of old school, Aristotelian, classical logic. Her patterns of thought need not be sound. Her inferential leaps need not be near. They only need to fit her sentimentality.
Her thinking is, therefore, very magical.
And this, in turn, I believe, is the kindling necessary for the kind of smug arrogance which our dear OP alludes toward.
I have always been amazed at how often people who don’t know me simply assume that I agree with their politics.
For example, a few months ago I was leaving a museum in eastern Europe and got chatting with a couple from Cornell University. They immediately assumed that my politics would be as left wing as theirs and that I was an ardent Hillary supporter. Perhaps they thought that conservatives never go to museums?
When it finally dawned on them that I was not enthusiastically echoing their disdain for all the people who put out Trump yard signs in upstate New York, they seemed oddly discomfited. And also confused. As if a strange and uncomfortable idea was wafting toward them–”not everyone agrees with me”–but I think they quickly shrugged it off.
I suspect that conservatives are less likely to make that type of assumption. Or perhaps they do in very red states? Any Texans able to confirm this?
It happens in red states (Oklahoma). But not always – there is some caution and care.
I’ve taken to considering white privilege as cultural privilege… which goes past race while still including it.
A suburban black would be just as under privileged in a inner city black (or hidpanic) neighborhood as I would be. He might fool people longer, but not forever.
A white urbanite is just as underprivileged in a rural town as the country bumpkin is in the city.
Its all culture.
Good article. Some people don’t learn what you did about reality. Best discussion of inherent differences in our minds and approach to the world that blinds some to your insights is Thomas Sowell’s The conflict of Visions” A good discussion of what we really mean by privilege is Mancur Olsen’s, The Rise and Decline of Nations, or his first work and dissertation, “The Logic of Collective Action”. The latter is far less well known, is wonkish and has some jargon and abstraction, but the upshot is all organization, all efforts to organize, build relations, form groups are efforts to create privilege and the means for defending it. All business seek monopolies but neither monopoly nor structural privilege endure if there is freedom and competition. Being White or male is not a structural privilege unless embedded in some law, or defended by government or professional group, union rules or any clique with state backed power and the means to enforce the rules. I mention Sowell’s Conflcit and Olsen together because one of the groups Sowell identifies never learn that monopolies or structural privilege endure precisely because of their unrestrained illusional vision and the thing they say they hate most, freedom under clear laws.
Yes privilege exists. The Great American Experiment was designed to give those of less privilege opportunities to change their position. It was designed to reduce privilege as much as possible.
As we regress toward socialism, opportunities are reduced and gap between the elites and the people becomes wider and wider.
We said and I agree, but I have to comment on one small thing: I don’t think I’ve ever encountered the word “crossly” unless it meant “angrily.”
It seems to mean “on the other hand” here. Is that right? Is it a regional usage or idiosyncratic?
Excellent post. Privilege is a thing but it doesn’t tend to work the way people who wave it around like a sword seem to think it does. You really did a great job unpacking it.
Talking about liberal privilege, I think about some of the emails I’ve received on my school mailing list and they are just so convinced that no one would disagree with the very obvious liberal bias in them. And its strange to hear the third-hand discussion of conservatives and Republicans. Its as though they only know about conservatives from Vox and the NYTimes (meaning this may be active misinformation). Do they not have conservative or Republican friends? Not all of them are uniformly so dismissive. But it is the dominant dynamic and it is kinda shocking. Because they would never talk that way about other groups. And if they heard someone doing so they’d probably be offended. Oh well.
In any case, great post.
“We can’t vote culturally with our dollars and clicks because our cultural purchasing power is comparatively minute.”
I disagree with this. We actually could make a difference. And soon enough, we wouldn’t be left with only reruns of “Gunsmoke” to watch.
I think we (right wing, cultural conservatives) will continue to be marginalized if we don’t fight with the most powerful of influences, the pocketbook.
I suppose that we have been psychologically defeated by the sheer volume of stuff we would have to boycott, and furthermore lack the organization, discipline, and apparently the will. I don’t understand this.
I would love think there are a growing number of people like me, who refuse to knowingly give a penny to entertainers and companies that hate and openly work to destroy anything that doesn’t toe the liberal line.
Excellent essay!
This is why I’ve dropped out of using facebook, I get tired of seeing people say offensive things about me without even knowing it.
Great post. Like so many topics, “privilege” is much more complex than social media makes it out to be. I’m really afraid that my generation and younger (I’m 29) has lost its ability to understand nuance, because it can’t be stuffed into a meme.
I thought this was a very well-written post. And you’re absolutely right to say, “privileged in what way?” (Another word we might use is “blessed.”) I think it can simultaneously be true that life is easier, in many American contexts, if you hold banal left-leaning political opinions and that life is easier, in most American contexts, if you’re an attractive, tall, white man with a beautiful wife, no?
I think we also naturally, and correctly, differentiate between qualities people can’t help and qualities people choose. (Let’s leave aside hard philosophical problems about free will.) I think most people intuitively find it unfair to be biased against people for qualities people can’t help. This is true even if they share the judgement — as most women do, for example, in the case of short men, or as all humans do, in our instinctive aversion to the aged and the infirm. No?
I had not previously thought about liberal privilege. I do content there is a very real black privilege enshrined in affirmative action and protection from criticism by any what who does not want to be accused of being racist.
I had not thought about all the other ways of looking at privilege suggested by the OP. Quite thought-provoking.
Same. Also, there is so much division (and its a “both sides” thing) that being overtly political on Facebook may actually have legitimate costs for me. That, and I really only have so much time and I’d rather use it on Ricochet.
I’ve had the thought that if a young person asked me if they should be a Democrat or a Republican, I would say, “Be a Democrat – your life will be so much easier.”
I could concede that as a conservative living in a very blue state that I may get more of this than a conservative in a red state, and that liberals in red states probably have this same problem. But like I said, because of the popular culture, people don’t even see certain issues as political issues; so the people in the middle might find themselves parroting the beliefs and truisms of their favorite talk show host or sitcom character and not even realize that they’ve bought into progressive notions.
I’d also like to think that conservative-leaning folks who typically embrace religion a bit more and recognize it as a taboo topic might extend this respect to politics as well. But again thats only if you understand your belief to be political in nature, the line of which is blurred by a blatantly proselytizing media.
I flew in to Omaha last year to serve at my reserve unit and was astounded by the woman at the rental car desk. When she heard I was from the Washington/Baltimore area – the Freddy Gray riots being at their peak – she went on a whole spiel about how she felt for the poor African Americans being abused by police in Baltimore. I didn’t want to tell her that even white liberals in Baltimore had no sympathy for Gray, nor for the protest-rioters.
When white privilege was trotted out in the Brock Turner case I had to shake my head. He happened to be white, but the reason he received the sentence he did was because his family could afford an excellent legal team. A man of any other race with the same legal team would have been treated just as lightly.
I take a relaxed attitude towards the exact definition of adverbs. I am an idiosync.
I have toyed with an idea for a few years now, but lack the time or discipline to see it through. A website that reports solely on the latest television and movies, with the duty of evaluating the level of bias, so conservative consumers can decide before spending their money having their values insulted. My ex walked out of “The Lorax” because she said they just sledgehammered the environmental message; and onto children! As a conservative parent you might want to think twice about having your kids indoctrinated at the movie theaters.
I think much of modern progressive thinking takes this too far. They are now deciding that choices that people actively make are beyond their control. In Sam Harris’ book “Free Will” he starts out basically saying that a person born in a poor area to a single parent working three jobs isn’t going to get the kind of nurturing necessary to stop him from joining a gang and living a life of crime. We can lock him up to save ourselves, he says, but its not justice because that man could not have ended up any other way given his circumstances.
And of course now we have Kaitlyn Jenners offered as examples of people who don’t have a choice. He identifies as a woman, he can’t help it, so he had no choice but to transition and should be off-limits to criticism. I suppose NAMBLA is next.
African Americans are certainly overcoming the privilege differential. I once worked with an African American lesbian who talked often about transitioning. She had a disgusting habit of going to clubs and doing what Trump said in that Access Hollywood hot mic video. But she honestly thought she would still get away with doing that as an African American man. Sometimes it helps to see the world from someone else’s point of privilege.
Well, I identify as a conservative and I can’t help it either. (I was born deplorable, dontchaknow.) Maybe they’ll leave me alone too?
But do you think Harris is in any way representative of mainstream thought? I mean, philosophical defenses of determinism have been around since the presocratic philosophers, but do you think anyone’s actually changing his or her life or political opinions because of a book by Sam Harris? In reality, I’ve never met anyone who behaves, in real life, as if they truly don’t believe others have free will. So I don’t think anyone deep down believes that — it remains an “impress the undergrads for an afternoon” kind of argument.
I don’t think anyone needs to read Sam Harris to think this way. I agree that people in life don’t behave as if others lack free will; nobody holds their tongue at the jerk who cuts them off in traffic because they believe the combination of atoms that make up that other person simply misfired at a perfectly random time. But we’re talking about liberals, who don’t think of groups of people as a collection of individuals, but people who share circumstances and experiences in common that define their collective identity.
Inner city youths share similar upbringings and values in common – and discrimination from the police, too! – that might make them more susceptible to criminal activity, and we should forgive them that. Gay men and women are as they are for simply biological reasons, above reproach. Transgender people have a completely legitimate gender identity that can’t be argued and squared. And so on and so on.
Conservatives, on the other hand, are the only people whose beliefs and actions are explicitly the result of their choices, and therefore are perfectly suitable to the absolute vitriol visited upon them by liberals.