I have been ruminating on this for a while. Maybe too long. But we have an entire generation now of progressives (the millennials) who only understand politics through the fabric of identity politics.
Although identity politics had been in the air for a couple of decades already, it was in the late 1980s and early 1990s, that it really began to take off. The Cold War had just ended and capitalism needed a new ideological apparatus to keep things moving toward further concentration of power. What was at hand were the ashes of the 1960s liberation movements, all of which were at a loss as to where to go next. From this leftover hodgepodge, over time a sharply defined ideology emerged, which we can see today in the contemporary form of identity politics — complete with “intersectionality” and other terms of art.
Buried in law school as I was, I completely missed this. My political education comes from the early 1980s and before. Like many of my time, I grew up believing that human difference was not biological but primarily intellectual. We didn’t treat racial, sexual or other differences as inevitable, defined in stone, but fluid realities to be worked around. In fact, it was an insult, if you came of age in that time, to have to commit to a particular identity. Wasn’t that the antithesis of the American idea? How could reinvention take place if you glued yourself to a particular identity and stuck with it all your life? Life would be so boring.
It wasn’t that we were encouraged to be colorblind or gender-blind. It’s just that we all refused to define ourselves (and more importantly, define others) by immutable outward characteristics. I was a straight white man (or what today would be called a cis-gendered white man). But then, as now, I believe that represents so little of who I am. That identification puts me in the same boat as President Donald Trump and painter Bob Ross. And that’s largely the problem. A political framework that casts me, Donald Trump and Bob Ross in the same light, is a political framework so limited in its perception of reality that is destined for failure. Even worse, it is a viewpoint that is dangerous, because it legitimizes racism (defined here in the old school way as “making judgments about an individual based on race”)
But that was then. I realize that those who are in their 20s and 30s today have not known any ideological order other than “identity politics”. These millennials know no other means of self-understanding, artistic expression or personal solidarity. They can only be organized around this principle. They see the world strictly through this framework, not through some Enlightenment perspective of universal human rights irrespective of one’s biological identity. The trendy concept of “white privilege,” unmoored from class conditions, exemplifies this simplistic tendency, as does the new new re-definition of “racism” to be something synonymous with “oppression.” This isn’t to say there is no such thing as “white privilege”; it’s just that it is an oversimplistic worldview that bases privilege almost entirely on race and gender, while ignoring class (much to the delight of the Wall Street elites).
I realize that everything I’m saying here has a sense of futility about it, because when an entire generation is indoctrinated in a certain way of thinking, only a catastrophe of the first order can compel people to reconsider; we are certainly not at that point yet, and we may never get there. But for what it’s worth, let me mention some key points about why I think identity politics, wherever it has manifested, has been absolutely devastating to the cause of liberty.
- It stresses the culture war, instead of policymaking.My first point is that when you fight for identity, you’re giving up politics in favor of culture. And that’s exactly where the right wants you, fighting for your culture (or what you imagine is your culture), rather than in the arena of policies, where the real consequences occur. You may gain some recognition of your identity, but you may also have to pay the price of losing everything else that makes life worth living. Put another way, identity politics may make you feel better about who you think you are, but it doesn’t fix any of the real world problems, including (ironically) those which affect racial and gender strata.
Take, for example, the recent 2016 election. This was the first strong crash of identity politics, played out to the maximum on both sides. The irrational “alt-right,” based on white identity politics, had it out with the irrational alt-left, by which I mean not what neoliberal Democrats and Trump mean by it, but exactly the opposite: The identity politics-driven official Democratic Party messaging, which relies on magic and charisma and delusional thinking to bring about racial harmony, just as the “alt-right” does on the other side.
In the last election, the contest became mostly about Hillary Clinton’s personality — she’s a woman, therefore I must be with her — versus Donald Trump’s personality — he’s a misogynist, therefore I must oppose him. As if electing Hillary would end misogyny.
And that’s the problem with identity politics as a substitute for broad-based coalition politics. Liberals seem to be trying to cure racism at the metaphysical level — in people’s hearts and souls — instead of limiting politics to where it should be limited, i.e., the arena of democratic policymaking. But this can only come about when politics becomes again the explicit target of attention, so that obstacles to democracy — from gerrymandering to money in politics, from voting machine unreliability to widespread disenfranchisement — can be overcome.
What identity politics has done is to take the shine off the political process itself. This is more than a consequence of identity politics. It is because identity politics has garnered so much attention that political reform, which needs to be ongoing and consistent, has stalled for nearly 30 years. Instead of campaign finance reform of the McCain-Feingold brand, which sought to make a little advance toward taking money out of politics, we went, during the period of identity politics’ ascendancy, to the total capitulation of politics to money.
The same process has held true in every arena of policymaking. Even issues like climate change are framed in cultural terms — i.e., as identity politics, because today culture cannot be spoken of without being defined by identity politics — and therefore overwhelmed by paralysis.
- Not only politics, but economics is taken out of the equation. It’s astonishing how few liberals, even activists, are able to define our economic system with any sense of accuracy. They keep acting as if the fight is still on between the old New Deal liberalism (laissez-faire economics slightly moderated by some half-hearted welfare programs) and a right that wants to shred those welfare mechanisms. In fact, both parties are committed to slightly different versions of neoliberalism, and their transformation proceeded apace with the rise of identity politics. Politics was freed to take its course, because culture became the site of contestation, and this meant an unobstructed opportunity to redefine economics to the benefit of the elites.The result was the evisceration of the Democrats as a party with even a rhetorical claim to the working class, as it has become a club for egotistical, self-branding urbanites who pay lip service to identity politics while having no sympathy for, say, real wealth redistribution. Remember Occupy Wall Street? Yeah. Nobody does.
- Identity politics always breeds its equal and opposite reaction.Identity politics is in fact the father, or the Great Mother, of white nationalism, rather than white nationalism being an independent force that has arisen from quite different sources. At root, both identity politics and white nationalism share the same particularistic, extralegal, extra-constitutional, anti-democratic, metaphysical, folkish impulse. They play on the same ball field. Both movements try to read people’s hearts and minds in the hopes of winning of their souls, or chasing away perceived impure notions of race (or gender). We
cannot be readers and interpreters of people’s hearts and minds; such a venture has no business in politics.
When Richard Spencer, an originator of the term “alt-right,” discusses race as destiny, he is no different than millennial liberals who have been articulating every aspect of identity, split into narrower and narrower niches, in precisely the same terms. Can anyone see any light between what white nationalists want in America, and what other identity groups want in America? Take, for example, the alt-right complaint about speech infringement or outright censorship on college campuses. These are traditionally progressive causes. But the progressive identarian has ceded the ground on this, not on some moral or constitutional principle, but simply on the grounds of who gets to speak. The result is that the ACLU, for perhaps the first time in its history, was widely chastised by progressive groups for taking the “audiacious” position that Neo-Nazis should be allowed to demonstrate peacefully. Peacefully. And we’ve in a world marked by the absurd position that civil liberties only apply to some, but not others — and now it’s just a fight for who is up and who is down.
Through most of our modern history, the far right has been containable, because on the liberal side there was not a corresponding movement of nationalistic mysticism, which is what identity politics is. But now they have an enemy — the new breed of liberals who have been doing the same within their own communitarian splintering among various groups.
And here’s the biggest problem with that — the progressive identity movements won’t win. The rise of each group in terms of recognition encourages countervailing reactions amongst other groups, so that recognition becomes simultaneously self-inflating (breeding reactionism and irrationality) and an impossible ideal to attain. Again, the rise of white nationalism recently is a testament to this tendency, a natural corollary to the very logic of identity politics. Now we are truly in a zero-sum game, with the various liberal identity politics groups, constituting half the country, pitted against the white Trumpian half of the country, as matters of economic privilege are redefined in terms of identity.
How do we know this? You can see it already. Identity politics on the left has flourished and will continue to flourish on the basis of the constant calling out of offenses among liberal stalwarts who had strayed from the politically correct parameters of discourse. Meanwhile, the right has decided — and this really explains so much about the alt-right and its allies — to keep liberals occupied full-time. They did that first with right-wing talk radio, with its barrage of offenses, starting at the same time as identity politics among liberals took hold, i.e., around 1990. Then came Fox News and the many internet venues that flourished in the 2000s. So the liberal “broad coalition” takes the bait, and instead of working for economic political and social justice, it transforms itself into a slug-fest (or smug-fest) of divisive groups furiously defining each other — and brow-beating each other — and correcting each other about proper terms — and inventing new vocabulary — and so on. Meanwhile, the right and alt-right sail into the seats of power. That’s how Trump got to be president.
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Identity politics — in all the forms it has shown up, from various localized nationalisms to more ambitious fascism — desires its adherents to present themselves in the most regressive, atavistic, primitive form possible. The kind of political communication identity politics thrives on is based on maximizing emotionalism and minimizing rationality. Therefore, the idea of law that arises when identity politics engenders a reaction is one that severs the natural bonds of community across differences. Until identity politics dies an overdue death, we play for teams now. Which, ironically, makes the concepts of justice and equality obsolete.