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Jens Heycke's avatar

The thinking of Foucault, et al is plagued by a terrible internal contradiction. It asserts:

1) Group relations are inexorably determined by group interests and power relationships.

2) The only recourse for historically marginalized groups is to "tribe up" and deny any shared interest or affinity with any other group.

But if #1 is true, pursuing #2 will inevitably end in failure, since these groups are--after all--minorities that lack power, and will thus inevitably lose out. When everybody "tribes up," minorities ultimately end up worse off, not better off. This is happening right now in parts of the Western world where there has been a majority backlash. For an example of how this can end, consider the former Yugoslavia.

The only truly viable solution for historically marginalized minorities is to acknowledge and emphasize that everyone in society has a great deal in common and use that as a basis for marching forward arm-in-arm with like-minded members of the majority and other groups. That is how the progress of the Civil Rights movement was achieved and it is the only way any future progress will be achieved.

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Timothy J Bartik's avatar

This excerpt is good, as is the whole book, which I just finished.

However, I think that Yascha Mounk could add an additional argument, which would appeal at the very least to empirically-oriented social scientists. The argument is: although obviously "marginalized people" have some knowledge from their lived experience that is valuable and can be learned from -- they have an intuitive grasp of how the social problem in question FEELS -- this does not mean that "marginalized people" have some special claim to understanding how best to SOLVE the social problem in question.

So, perhaps low-wage workers know more immediately how it FEELS to be working long hours at a low-wage dead-end job in which you are treated poorly. But this does not mean that any particular low-wage worker, or even a group purporting to represent low-wage workers, necessarily knows the best way to SOLVE this problem of too-low wages. Should the solution be a higher minimum wage? A higher earned income tax credit? Easier unionization? Macro policy to make the overall U.S. labor market tighter? Job training to help more people get into better jobs? Place-based policies to help bring better jobs to distressed places that do not have enough good jobs?

Of course, this does not mean that society needs to immediately defer to some empirically-oriented economist like me who claims some research expertise on these issues. We should listen to "experts", but not worship them, as often experts overstate what is truly known and what is merely regarded as plausible based on the current evidence.

But on the other hand we shouldn't assume that some annointed representative of the marginalized group knows the correct policy solution, or mix of policy solutions, that will be most cost-effective in addressing the problem at affordable costs.

In solving social problems, we clearly need to listen to diverse groups -- the groups most affected, social scientists, other groups -- and make decisions democratically, after debating the proposed alternatives. No one perspective should "trump" all other perspectives. We should not expect everyone to be "accountable" to some annointed representatie of the marginalized group in how we address the social problem. And we should be open to changing our mind based on new empirical evidence.

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