This. The thinking also created structure of universal leftist conspiracy theory. You have oppressed class Red and oppressor class Blue. Blue people have access to some specific property, they call Privilege and restrict access to this privilege to oppressed group. They also create a system that perpetuates this dynamic indefinitely, lets called it privilegeism.
In traditional Marxism you have proletariat vs bourgeoisie. Bourgeoisie has access to privilege in form of capital and limits access of workers to it by creating system of capitalism that reproduces itself over generations. In feminist theory there are men and women, men have male privilege and create system called patriarchy to restrict access to this privilege. In Critical Race Theory you have Black and white people, white people have access to whiteness and use it to create system of white supremacy. In queer theory the oppressed are Queer/LGBT+ people vs cishetero people. The cishetero people have access to "normalcy" and deny that to queer people by creating and perpetuating the system of cisheteronormativity. The same simple conspiracy template then copies itself to basically all progressive thinking.
The point being that privilege has a specific meaning in leftist thinking, it does not signify an individual thing in common parlance. It has philosophical and metaphysical meanings, exactly like capital has different meaning to somebody about to start his business vs Marxist revolutionary.
America has already integrated a bunch of different nationalities and ethnicities into one country. We have done it successfully for 250 years. Successfully enough that we just lump "white" people into a single category. Europe has dozens of bloody and heated rivalries that were plenty active up until 50 ish years ago.
Yeah, if you account for actual civil war, forced boarding schools for natives and other populations, "educating" religion, culture and language out of their slave population, fierce fight against hyphenated Americans since WW1, it was remarkably successful.
USA is not exceptional in this sense, many other countries did the same forced assimilation, except we now use different words for those projects such as Germanisation, Russification, Magyarization, Italianization etc. If anything, there is actually a European "melting pot" project not unlike USA - France. In the past it was very diverse country of many smaller nations speaking different languages and having diverse histories: Occitan South, Celtic/Bretonian West, Flemmish and Germanic North East and various others. France pursued aggressive assimilation in form of forced secular republican tradition and generations of focused public school education. It worked beautifully so much so, that by 1951 French approved usage of local minority languages in schools, firm in their sense of victory after centuries of the project. It remains to be seen if it was not a hollow victory.
I absolutely agree that this works relatively well - although even there are many exceptions. There are some very tenacious ethnicities like Roma, or Basque etc. It however does not mean that it will work forever, there is equal number of examples of failed assimilations and ultimate splinter of states even in Europe.
To all the Adam Smiths of the world. Why is having an ethnostate good for the jews but not anyone else? Why don't jews benefit from diversity in their western style open democratic society like everyone else? Why doesn't the magic freedom dirt in Israel transform your third worlders into engineers and scientists like it allegedly does everywhere else in the west, who would be just as Jewish as anyone else in a few years. How is it possible to represent anything the Democrats have represented the world over and then believe this for Israel in the back of your brain?
This is not only supposed contradiction in Liberal Zionist thinking, but for the rest of progressives as well. The thing is that much of their sociology is driven by ideas similar to that of W.E.B. Du Bois, author of The Souls of Black Folk. He invented the concept that progressives use even today when they talk about Black folk. He is an interesting character as he was a black man who studied in Germany in 1890s. The word "folk" in his book is literal translation of German concept of Volk of second half of 19th century German romantic nationalism. Volk is an organic group tied by language, blood and shared history, it together creates Hegelian Volksgeist - this Hegelian Geist is what Du Bois means by Souls. By the way the modern Zionism is literally a child of the same movement, it is literal national awakening similarly to what happened in Europe around the same time.
Progressives can be viewed as continuation of romantic national awakening movement, they just want to carve out different nations. You have Black Nation and Native Nation and Queer Nation, that is what they mean when they use the term community. They also use the rest of romantic vocabulary; these nations have their own culture: Queer Culture and Black Culture, they have their own art and history and mythology. If it does not exist, then it is fabricated in the same way romantic nationalists created creation myths for their own nations. Some if these identities are literally related to blood such as Black or Native in the same way romantic revolutionaries viewed that. Of course there are important differences: progressives are generally integralists as opposed to romantic revolutionaries, who were all about separation and creating state to serve their definition of nation.
But the thing is still there, they just combine this idea of various nations living under benevolent roof of multicultural imperial state - of course led by learned, enlightened progressive people like Krystal Ball - which protects and arbitrates between these various nations living under its roof. She is not there to deny existence of Jewish nation, she is there as a bureaucrat in court of Austrian Empire arbitrating disputes between Hungarians and Slovaks and other acknowledged Volk to uphold multicultural intersectionality, while Adam Smith is something like Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson who is there to fiercely advocate for Slovaks. But it is not exactly against the whole idea, there are many literal Black Nationalists inside progressive coalition with their own fierce advocates. They just have to know when to shut up and give authority to intersectionalist beurocrats if they clash with other nation - e.g. religious Black Folk with Queer Folk. Liberal Zionists are in the same situation, they are advocates of oppressed group and that is fine. However they should just read the room and see that powers that be decided, that now is the time for Palestinian Volk and that they should bow down and make concessions.
It seems contradictionary: you have imperialist ethnonationalist progressives? Come on. But it makes sense if you take their ideology seriously. Moreover, living with contradiction is part and parcel of this ideology, it is at its core a Hegelian project which loves contradictions, synthetizing contradictions via philosophical "revolution" in a spiral is the core of what "progress" means, how we achieve the ultimate synthesis of all contradictions in progressive eschaton of ultimate Social Justice and true voluntary equity.
Sure, but this is not usually what is meant by the progressive privilege. It has a very specific intersectional structure and it has to be part of a system(s) of oppression and has to be less individualistic. Trailer white trash is still privileged by virtue of their whiteness.
This is unironically the critique people have today for progressives, who talk about privilege exactly in this manner. Celebrities like Michele Obama cannot stop talking about how hard they have it - such as when somebody told Michele that she is not Princeton material, that was obvious example of racism and misogyny.
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