As an aside, I was surprised by the repeated use of "climate hawk" throughout the article as an identity that we might be interested in taking on. Could they have said e.g. "people concerned about climate change"? I may just not know the term's history.
I find this focus on identity politics so toxic it's starting to make life miserable.
I'm currently driving a VW SUV company car in a german suburb and the amount of hate I receive because of it is ramping up daily. Even from people driving similar polluting cars, like high-powered station wagons.
The other day my wife was breastfeeding our child in our car while I was quickly grabbing something from a store when it was 36°C/96.8°F outside, so I naturally left the car running so the AC would keep them cool. I was barely a minute out of the car when a woman came knocking on the window, gesturing my wife to turn off the car, giving her the finger etc.
I can't imagine similar things happening even 5 years ago.
I wonder if it is fair to discount those people by calling what they're doing "identity politics".
Perhaps there's a move in the Overton window: as environmental issues are brought to the forefront of people's minds, the average person is becoming more hostile to what is perceived as being non-eco behaviour - not because of "identity politics", but because they're more aware of negative externalities coming from such behaviour.
That woman sounds like an outlier based on our experience so far, but perhaps that indicates that the window is moving and what is and isn't acceptable in our society is changing.
I mean, not long ago, slavery was widely accepted in our society and it took some violent societal transitions (at least in some parts of the world), to move to a world where slavery is highly frowned upon.
Interesting, I often hear this described as a peculiarly (or at least mostly) American phenomenon, but that's well beyond the type of thing I'd imagine happening in even the hyper-sensitive US city I live in. I know I'm being a little reductive here, but your story is a pretty substantial outlier relative to what I'm used to.
I know in Switzerland there was a story about some of the young left party going around putting stickers on SUV saying "I also am a tank" and they got a lot of flack for this 'property destruction'.
That's like saying "cooling a stationary house is littering". Operating a device for the comfort of the user is precisely why we make things like AC, whether it's in a car, a boat, or a house.
No, there is a huge difference. In a house, the AC is powered efficiently by electric power from the grid or even your solar cells. With the car, you keep a combustion engine , that could output 100kW or more running purely to power a 1kW AC unit. This is one of many advantages of electric or hybrid cars, that you can keep AC running.
In a house, you are cooling the entire volume of space enclosed so that wherever a human happens to go, they are comfortable. It is still littering, regardless of the scale.
It simply means the process of politicians or normal people identifying with a specific group (other then the nation as a whole) and making that groups interest its primary concern rather then the nation or humanity as whole.
Or even simple the process of making policy turns into what are you and what are you not, rather then what are your actions or lack their off.
I the simply fact that you are born gay, straight, polish or any other identifiable group is what defines you and therefore defines your life.
I think that most people mean "my (or whoever's) identity drives my politics. For example, the idea that I must vote Democrat because I'm black.
If you're black and want to vote Democrat, that's not identity politics. I don't even think that it's identity politics if you vote Democrat because you think everyone on the Republican side is a racist who hates you. It becomes identity politics when you vote Democrat because of course you're going to vote Democrat, because you're black. When it's unthinkable for a black to do anything else, then it's identity politics.
That, I think, is most peoples' definition. I have a different one. To me, identity politics is when politics becomes your identity. It's essentially tribalism. Instead of "I think this is the better policy" or "I like this better", you decide that your identity is Democrat/Republican/liberal/conserative. That's who you are.
Conventional media promotes strong opinions in the consumer about stuff they havent checked themselves. Those dogmas are then factionalized along and pre-judged with.
As an aside, I was surprised by the repeated use of "climate hawk" throughout the article as an identity that we might be interested in taking on. Could they have said e.g. "people concerned about climate change"? I may just not know the term's history.