No, they’re not, but the narratives often are (which is why they’re useful for people who need to motivate or be motivated). What I was going for there is that the oversimplified modern narrative of “Republicans racist/bad” and “Democrats progressive/good” is at odds with the narrative of a century or so ago, and that the current speed of politics and information exchange is going to churn through such narratives much more rapidly, making them far less useful.
It wasn’t my intention to mock at all, and if I managed to do so anyway, it was with a certain amount of affection - I spend a lot of time there. You’re absolutely correct, overall tumblr user demographics skew younger than any other social media platform (something like 6% adult users, vs. ≈67% for Facebook). But I don’t think that the members of this young cohort are necessarily asserting their own identities “independently of the definitions they’ve received,” [emphasis mine] I think that many of them are assembling their identities based upon the plethora of finely-detailed definitions that they’ve received. Their grandparents had “Republican/Democrat;” their parents had various shadings of left, right, progressive, and conservative; and they’ve grown up in a world where, for example, the “gay rights” identity nomenclature of the post-Stonewall era has been parsed into an initialism that includes (when I last checked) eight different shadings of sexual orientation and gender identity, some of which are at each others’ figurative throats.
The issue with continuing to define a broadly polarized “left/right” split fundamentally in terms of oppression is exactly what we’re seeing now: people are fighting over what it means to be oppressed while living in the most dominant country on the planet, because in many ways, “oppression” has become a coin of legitimacy. There are without question obvious and unequivocal forms of oppression baked into the system under which we all currently labor, and there’s also been quite a lot of bleed-through from “oppressed” into “aggrieved” and even “uncomfortable.” So when obvious oppression gets lumped in with - or at least put on the same shelf as - somewhat questionable projects like “microaggression” and “triggering,” you get the odd and disturbing spectacle of white male gamers and MRAs clamoring about their own “oppression,” when what they really are is uncomfortable and aggrieved. I guarantee you you’d find some in the so-called “Redpill Right” who’ve adopted the same terminology of solidarity and oppression…just not in the way you’re using it.
Which is the thorny problem, for everyone: it seems to me that a lot of energy is being siphoned off to defend traditionally leftist linguistic postures from folks who - basically - have co-opted them. My suggestion is that any reliance on polarizing terminology - e.g., this properly belongs to “the left,” that properly belongs to “the right” - is indicative of a deeply problematic, fundamental flaw in the entire political discourse (and beneath that, the philosophical discourse, but I’ve already rambled on far too long here).
So yes, I can understand what you mean by it. I just don’t think it’s particularly helpful or useful anymore - if it ever was.
