That is a headline in The Atlantic, which sub-heads the piece by Rabbi Shai Held, "A global pandemic doesn’t give us cause to treat the aged callously."
As someone tweeted at me earlier today, “To be perfectly honest, and this is awful, but to the young, watching as the elderly over and over and over choose their own interests ahead of Climate policy kind of feels like they’re wishing us to a death they won’t have to experience. It’s a sad bit of fair play.”
Notice how the all-too-familiar rhetoric of dehumanization works: “The elderly” are bunched together as a faceless mass, all of them considered culprits and thus effectively deserving of the suffering the pandemic will inflict upon them. Lost entirely is the fact that the elderly are individual human beings, each with a distinctive face and voice, each with hopes and dreams, memories and regrets, friendships and marriages, loves lost and loves sustained. But they deserve to die—and as for us, we can just go about our business.
And that point of view may well become federal policy: "Ezekiel Emanuel, tapped for Biden’s coronavirus task force, has controversial views on aging."
Emanuel’s role on the board has garnered controversy due to a 2014 article he penned in the Atlantic. In it, Emanuel wrote that he hopes to die at the age of 75, as he believed that life past that point “renders many of us, if not disabled, then faltering and declining, a state that may not be worse than death but is nonetheless deprived.”
In the article, he strongly implied, though did not outright state, that as a matter of policy, life-extending medical treatments should be withheld from anyone age 75 or older. Here is the article.
What Rabbi Held has not grasped (or maybe he really has) is that "the elderly" are being classified the same way as the non-elderly: by class identity. After all, why should they not be "bunched together as a faceless mass" when that is the only acceptable way to identify people in this age of identity politics? You are not you, singular, you are you, plural. You are not defined by yourself but by people who share mostly-superficial characteristics with you. And you have no choice to opt out of this identity-political classification.
The reason is that today, rights belong to groups, not individuals. Actually, rights do not "belong" to anyone or any group. Right are conferred upon us by those have gained social and political power to decide. That means that some groups have more rights or stronger rights than others. Which group enjoys more rights than others is simply a matter of which is strongest at any given time.
And that means that American politics is primarily concerned with gaining power.
The slide into power-politics began decades ago, but accelerated in the 1990s. But it was forecast long before then by President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
If a political party does not have its foundation in the determination to advance a cause that is right and that is moral, then it is not a political party; it is merely a conspiracy to seize power.
President Eisenhower at the Fourth Annual Republican Women’s National Conference on 6 March 1956.
No longer can we include American politics within a moral universe. American politics today does not seek to find and strengthen the things that unites Americans into common cause and shared citizenship. It dismisses that such things exist anyway, for in identity-power politics, there is only class struggle, not unity. To speak of "unity" among disparate identity groups is merely to adopt the supremacist, and therefore oppressive, language of the dominant ancestor group that invented the term to begin with. In America, of course, that means whites.
The need to cleanly distinguish between transgressors and innocents means that in identity politics, everyone must have an unequivocal group affiliation. My father's family emigrated from Lebanon; my mother's family emigrated from Wales, Holland, and Germany. I am Protestant, rather than Catholic. None of these descriptors – over which wars in Europe, the Mediterranean region, and America have been fought for several thousand years – matter to identity politics. Until and unless the category of MENA is given sanction by the US government, I am white – and therefore a transgressor. Nothing more.
Joshua Mitchell, professor of political theory at Georgetown University in his book, American Awakening: Identity Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Time, Kindle p. 72
"Unity," then, means one thing to the Right and an altogether different thing to the Left. But at bottom, Right and left agree (unwittingly) on this: They each think the other side promotes "unity" as shorthand for "do what we demand." But there is no reason to make such demands of other people unless power is what the demander is really after.
An illustration from the looming inauguration of Joe Biden as president will serve. The Biden transition team announced to fanfare that "America United" will be his inauguration theme. Well and good, who could argue that disunity should be the theme? Besides, as the AP points out, "Unity has long been a theme, and anxiety, for new presidents."
Maybe pursuing unity is why Mr. Biden decided to savagely compare Republican Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley to Adolf Hitler’s top propagandist Joseph Goebbels. Why? Because the two senators, along with about half the electorate (according to nonpartisan polls) still think there are too many unanswered questions about the integrity of the presidential vote. So they are Nazis, Biden wants us to think. Now there's a call for unity!
He might do well to consider Prof. Mitchell's warning, "Unity achieved by scapegoating another person or group is a cheap imitation of the genuine communion for which we long. Identity politics chooses the cheap imitation as a shortcut to the real thing. Always."
