Left-Identitarian Purification Agenda at the APSA Conference
Why the woke agenda is self-serving, undermines academic standards, and does not protect women with different viewpoints
Yesterday I engaged in the following Twitter conversation that got some wider attention. As a consequence, I started this blog to give a more detailed perspective of my views:
When I read the tweets by Benjamin Guinaudeau, the concept of Identitätslinke Läuterungsagenda or left-identitarian purification agenda by Sandra Kostner came to my mind. It works the following way: Society can be broadly divided into two categories, the victim groups and the guilty side. “Debt entrepreneurs” from the guilty side are trying to regain moral authority through a purification agenda in which they usually blame their own group and demand some form of social change. As explained by Kostner, there is usually some kind of self-interest agenda involved as well for the debt entrepreneurs.
In the case, Guinaudeau – as a white male debt entrepreneur – ranted that he attended a panel at the APSA conference in the midst of old white males. He proclaimed he felt uncomfortable about this fact alone, and did an analysis showing that there are more male than female participants at the conference. This is followed by the demand to explicitly target women for invites, citations, and recruitment, and several colleagues came out on Twitter in support in the form of likes and comments.
I see the left-identitarian purification agenda in action here, because if the gender imbalance of attendees or in academia in general is so crucial for Guinaudeau and his white male supporters, they could easily reduce it by putting their money where their mouth is and incur personal cost, for instance by not attending and using their personal travel grants to quietly fund the attendance of more women, by giving up their own promotion in favor of a woman, etc. But, instead, they personally benefit by gaining social capital through public virtue signaling. This purification agenda gives them the moral authority to fall into a different group than the other “old white males,” implicitly allowing them to be involved in some form to implement gender equality for women.
I have called this out rather harshly, because the purification strategy becomes more and more removed from reality, and this purification agenda is a particularly terrible and harmful one. Firstly, the call out of the guilty side: Old white men attending a conference panel. Their guilt? Being old, being white, being male – there were no further reasons given, which is apparently enough nowadays to get the purification agenda rolling! To highlight again, Guinaudeau felt uncomfortable about them not because of their character, their ideas or agenda (given that this is APSA, it is highly likely that they actually share Guinaudeau’s own ideological beliefs to some extent) – at an academic conference that is supposed to be about the exchange of ideas.
Secondly, we have the observation that there are less females at APSA than males, and why is this a social problem? Because according to woke orthodoxy, we apparently should expect perfect gender equality outcomes across all strata in society (well no, actually only for desired positions, such as board executives, less so for plumbers…). If the outcome deviates from the 50/50 parity – well actually, only in the case of more than 50% males – then it has to be a case of discrimination or implicit gender bias against women – any other explanation is heresy or at least suspicious, and undeserving of any further academic inquiry.
This orthodoxy – as ridiculous as it sounds given the individualization of personal choices and career paths and differences in preferences between women and men – has to be defended at all cost, as seen in some of the inquisitorial responses I have received. Why? Because complete gender parity across all (desirable) outcomes is a utopia in a free society. Real world deviations from this doctrine are essential for the continuous application and viability of the purification agenda for debt entrepreneurs.
Still, debt entrepreneurs appear to run out of actual purification agendas, as they are applying it now to participants at a very open and welcoming conference of an organization that is one of the most liberal in the world, deeply concerned with gender issues, and which has various programs in support of women for quite some time already. Unsurprisingly, they cannot name any clear gender discrimination at APSA, but as usual have to evoke nebulous concepts, such as “implicit biases” or some structural term that is difficult or impossible to falsify. In addition, any actual falsification attempt would probably be seen as heresy. Nonetheless, the conference’s gender disparity is used to justify an agenda that is incompatible with the foundation of science, namely that science should be value free and based on evidence. I’m very well aware that academic practice often deviates from it, but that doesn’t render these principles obsolete. To the contrary, they are important guiding principles that are the core to distinguish science from theology.
Finally, and crucially, it has become more and more apparent recently that the debt entrepreneurs of the purification agenda do not really care about gender equality or having more women in academia in general. To be more precise, they may like to see more women or other minority groups in academia – but only if these colleagues have the right opinion! If female academics deviate in some form from the current orthodoxy of wokeness, they get cancelled or threatened as well, as it happened with Kathleen Stock at the University of Sussex last year, or with Marie-Luise Vollbrecht's talk at Humboldt University Berlin two months ago. Unsurprisingly, neither Guinaudeau nor his supporters came out at that time in support of these women – as this type of support for women is not at all beneficial for their own career advancement in modern day academia.
In conclusion, the left-identitarian purification agenda has been repeatedly successfully used by debt entrepreneurs to advance their own career interest. With a very rigid labor market in academia and a huge over-representation of left-wing academics, younger academics desperately try to find new purification agendas to collect virtue signaling points for their own career advancement, while academia tends to fail to support women with non-woke views. But as negative externality, this process undermines the basic foundation of scientific research, academic freedom, and viewpoint diversity. We may have reached a point in the academic profession where there is little public support for the core principles of science if these are widely perceived to be in conflict with woke principles.