SNA (Tokyo) — Shingetsu News Agency President Michael Penn wrote about my previous column:

“Debito found a way to provoke them again, and I must say that I don’t understand the way a lot of people think these days. Those who read the article and interacted with what was written tended to say on social media that they largely agreed with it. But there was a more vocal cohort who, not really disagreeing with any specific arguments made, were outraged on the basis that Debito, a white man, had dared to give any advice to Naomi Osaka. Apparently, we are now supposed to live self-contained within our own little tribal identities, and universal humanity is no longer recognized as sufficient grounds to express an opinion, even for a news columnist whose job is to comment on public affairs.”

There’s a lesson here.

Yale historian Timothy Snyder said recently in a television interview, “The Left loses for the right reasons; the Right wins for the wrong reasons.”

One of the reasons why the Left, particularly the Progressives who have not enjoyed much power worldwide for more than a century, keeps losing is because of their fractiousness.

Just as soon as they gain an advantage or start making headway in the policy arena, they lose focus and begin turning on themselves. They alienate natural allies because they are not ideologically pure enough, or worse yet, as seen above, the wrong skin color.

Granted, the Left has always had a tougher time mobilizing people than the Right. To paraphrase Bill Clinton, the Left wants leaders they can fall in love with, while the Right wants leaders they can fall in line with.

Let’s unpack that. Voices from the Left are discordant and diverse, and expectations are high and sometimes uncompromising. It’s also a lot tougher for a Leftist leader to gain and sustain the “love” of their supporters since, no matter what else happens, there will always be winners and losers with every decision they make.

But for Rightists, it’s a lot easier to “fall in line” behind an ideological camp whose basic organizing principle is money (and the shameless acquisition of it). And once they gain enough of it, money in itself not only buys power, but also, oddly enough, credibility.

How often do we find ourselves admiring and lending our ears to people as policy leaders whose only expertise is that they are rich? If you doubt that, remember that Donald Trump had no other qualifications whatsoever to become president.

Measuring successful worldviews by money is, alas, far less complicated than the Left’s need to make sure everyone is equal in terms of race, creed, color, class, etc. (which is, of course, a noble goal). And to do so, one must dismantle structures and symbols that perpetuate inequality, and moreover remove the people from power (generally perceived as white people, which isn’t always the case) who sustain that inequality.

The problem is, all reformist movements must understand how power flows in order to harness it. Again, it’s a lot easier to measure power by money than by race, class, gender, socioeconomic status, etc.—all factors largely assigned at birth and hard to escape. This necessarily leads to a more fractious sense of identity politics, easily divided and conquered.

Sadly, that’s why the Right understands power better.

And because of that permission to focus on money making, the Right can use their money in the media to divert attention away from their own radical excesses (e.g., fascism). On a daily basis, they scare people away from Progressivism by pointing to Leftist revolutions that ultimately went too far in the name of ideological purity (the French Revolution, Mao’s China, Stalin’s Russia, Pol Pot, etc.).

A common tagline is “Do you really want Socialism to make our country into Venezuela, China, or North Korea?” Leftism isn’t just portrayed as an ideological camp; it’s a gulag.

But that’s Right vs. Left. Now let’s talk about Left vs. Left, and how they undermine themselves.

Progressives in Japan, as seen in the reflexive castigators of my columns, keep falling into similar fractious ideological traps. How dare I, a white man, write anything about Visible Minorities in Japan, or anywhere? The assumption is that whites enjoy White Privilege anywhere they go, including Japanese society, so they’re somehow part of the problem.

Actually, the problem is, as Michael Penn wrote above, that resorting to tribalism in order to fight Japan’s tribalism is precisely the wrong strategy.

Yes, the point is well taken that white people enjoy special privileges in Japan. Indeed they do. But Japanese society is very complicated in how it treats its minorities, with all sorts of shades of discrimination, as I’ve described in detail in my book Embedded Racism.

So assuming that whites are immune to, or even contributing to, discrimination in Japan simply by dint of their skin color is to—again—misunderstand how power flows.

Remember, the binary in Japanese society is that you’re either a Japanese (wajin) or a foreigner (gaijin). From this paradigm flows all shades of differentiated treatment both in society and in the law.

That “othering” process even includes Japanese citizens who happen to be white—or any phenotype that deviates from the hada iro (skin color) crayon found in Japan’s grade school supplies. Once you are phenotypically deemed to be “not Japanese,” you likely won’t get equal protection under the law, or be allowed into the public establishments with “Japanese Only” signs and rules around Japan.

In this society, citizenship and skin color are conflated.

The point is, as Visible Minorities, by definition we are all visible in Japan, and being visible in a society as conformist and presumptively microaggressive as Japan is usually visible in a bad way.

But remember, white residents and their kin qualify as “Visible Minorities” in Japan too. And they suffer from discrimination and disenfranchisement in Japan as well. It’s not exactly the same kind, but we’re all in the same boat as minority residents of color and diversity. We’re all “othered” and constantly told that we don’t really belong here.

So if anyone chooses to push for Progressive changes in that dynamic, their efforts should be recognized positively, not merely dismissed because their skin color matches a historical grievance.

Especially for Progressive editors and columnists who just happen to be white, and have established their credibility by spending decades fighting discrimination in Japan. To put it in more hip language, “We’re not the droids you’re looking for.”

The ultimate irony here is castigators who suffered discrimination are basically resorting to the same strategies that their discriminators used: Using skin color to exclude others from the debate. Thus the bullied become the bullies, and the cycle continues. This is not the cure for racism.

So here’s the lesson: remember who your allies are. Don’t alienate and exclude them. Being internally tribal against those also fighting Japan’s racialized tribalism is precisely the wrong strategy.

It doesn’t just mean, as Snyder might say, that Progressives lose for the right reasons. It means they lose for the wrong reasons too.

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