Freddie deBoer against Identifying with your Disability

Cranky leftist Freddie deBoer has had enough of identitarian liberalism. From a piece titled The New York Times Attempts to Bully Elderly People Into the Disability-as-an-Identity Worldview:

I’m not joking! Paula Span has produced this particular bit of scolding for The Official Publication of Liberals Who Occasionally Look Up From Their Crosswords to Disapprove of Everyone and Everything. Span writes

Identifying as a person with a disability provides other benefits, advocates say. It can mean avoiding isolation and “being part of a community of people who are good problem-solvers, who figure things out and work in partnership to do things better”

Of course, you can enjoy those benefits without identifying as disabled, without allowing one unfortunate aspect of your life become an entire identity. But that doesn’t fly in the world of the brownstone liberals who fund and run the New York Times, who seem to believe that there is no such thing as a person, only beings that exist to function as sets of interlocking identities.

Here’s the maddening thing about this piece: it quietly smuggles in a worldview that has metastasized across the discourse, a worldview in which the biggest problem facing disabled people is that they aren’t eager enough to call themselves disabled. Not, you know, being blind or paralyzed or suffering from dementia or constantly wracked with chronic pain, no, all of that is subservient to the only question anybody seems to care about anymore, the all-devouring question of identity. The whole thing hums along with the cheery institutional conviction that the answer to every human frailty is more identitarian self-labeling. . . .

What’s infuriating is that the disability-as-identity movement now demands not only recognition but participation. It doesn’t merely want a world that accommodates impairments; it wants people to embrace their impairments as the core of who they are, to reorganize their sense of self around deficit, to declare disability a positive good rather than an unfortunate reality that any reasonable society would want to minimize. So we get this bizarre spectacle in which experts scold older adults for not calling themselves disabled, as though the great social failing is insufficient uptake of a label. When you tell people that disability is a proud identity, that it confers membership in a community, that it’s a site of resistance and empowerment, you create a perverse incentive structure: you reward pathology and make recovery, adaptation, or improvement look like betrayal. You create cultures where people compete for diagnostic prestige and moral authority through the performance of malady. You make suffering existentially sticky. The NYT wants you to believe the problem is that older Americans “don’t want to look disabled.” Is that really the problem for that 84-year-old in chronic pain who can barely walk? I think her problem is that she’s in chronic pain and can barely walk, and “identifying as disabled” won’t make the slightest fucking difference in her life. Meanwhile, our problem is that we’ve built an intellectual ecosystem in which more and more people want exactly that, a label, because being disabled has been reframed as a kind of sacred political laurel. . . .

Because behind all of the airy rhetoric about community and identity is a simple material reality: disability is bad. Disability is physically bad, emotionally bad, financially bad. It reduces freedom. It causes pain. It limits horizons. That doesn’t mean people who are disabled are lesser or that their lives lack dignity or value, obviously. It means that which afflicts them actually afflicts them. My controversial, offensive belief is that disability disables! But the new orthodoxy insists that saying so is taboo. The Times piece rattles through endless quotes about how older people need to feel empowered to call themselves disabled, yet never once confronts the obvious possibility that they don’t want to because they don’t want their lives defined by deficit. They want to soldier on, insist they’re that fine, preserve some continuity of self. Is that denial? Sometimes, sure. More often, I suspect, it’s a vestige of self-respect, a refusal to surrender one’s entire identity to the slow attrition of age and disease.

Recall that deBoer has suffered all his life from serious mental illness, but so far as I know has never once publicly used that as an excuse. He has certainly never tried to build his identity around it; on the contrary he has striven for a rational consistency in his positions. He spent years decrying the way wokeness was dividing the left and forcing people into extreme positions, thereby weakening the whole movement. Like everyone else who has ever thought about the problem, he understands that if people on the left want to move America in their direction, they must act together, as citizens.