The Blog

2020-

2020-12-12 c
LEFT TURN INTO OBLIVION III
"Identity politics rejects the model of traditional give-and-take politics, presupposing instead that the most important thing about us is that we are white, black, male, female, straight, gay, and so on. Within the identity-politics world, we do not need to give reasons—identity is its own reason and justification."

The Identity-Politics Death Grip

Democrats’ abandonment of their traditional blue-collar constituency is bad for their party—and for the country.

Last June, despite being outspent by nearly $10 million, Republican Karen Handel won Georgia’s sixth congressional district in a special election to fill the vacancy left when Tom Price became secretary of Health and Human Services (a position from which he has since resigned). Democratic supporters of Jon Ossoff believed that the election would serve as a referendum on Donald Trump’s presidency; instead, it proved to be a verdict on their own party. After Handel’s relatively easy win, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway tweeted, “Laughing my #Ossoff.”

If these were normal times, the Democrats’ continued setbacks in such races—to say nothing of their demoralizing loss in November 2016—would have provided an opportunity for rethinking. But these are not normal times. The most remarkable fact about the postelection months has been the absolute certainty of Democrats that they have a right to rule in America, that Donald Trump is not a legitimate president, and that there is a need for resistance (now dubbed “the Resistance”) of the sort unseen in America since the 1960s.

Normal politics—liberal politics, classically understood—involves speech, argument, and persuasion, followed by voting on ideas or proposals that can be overturned in the next election cycle. Normal politics presumes that we can rise far enough above our small-group attributes—our race, class, gender, ethnicity, religion—and that we can arrive at a political arrangement that works well enough for us to live together as part of a larger polity until the next election, when we commence the process again. But for the Democrats, absolute certainty has prevailed over normal politics—and the certainty, at bottom, rests on a single idea: identity politics.

Identity politics rejects the model of traditional give-and-take politics, presupposing instead that the most important thing about us is that we are white, black, male, female, straight, gay, and so on. Within the identity-politics world, we do not need to give reasons—identity is its own reason and justification. Because identity politics supposes that we are our identities, politics does not consist in the speech, argument, and persuasion of normal politics but instead, in the calculation of resource redistribution based on identity—what in Democratic parlance is called “social justice.” The irony of identity politics is that it does not see itself as political; it supposes that we live in a post-political age, that social justice can be managed by the state, and that those who oppose identity politics are the ones “being political.” What speech does attend this post-political age consists in shaming those who do not accept the idea of identity politics—as on our college campuses. In the 1960s, college students across the country fought so that repressed ideas would receive a fair hearing. These days, college students fight to repress all ideas except one: identity politics.

Thoughtful Democrats see that identity politics is a dead end, but fear to speak up.

... When identity politics provides the lens through which one sees the world, changing the perspective is regarded as self-blinding. The suggestion that this outlook might be harming the Democratic Party is thus denounced as racist, as insensitive to gender issues, and as inattentive to the purported needs of various identity groups. Identity politics can’t self-correct; it can only double-down. Here is the strangeness of our current moment. Untreated, diseases don’t heal; they metastasize.

... Identity pertains not simply to the kind of person that we are. People have been sorted (and self-sorted) into kinds throughout history. Identity is different. First, it carries a determination about guilt or innocence that nothing can appreciably alter. Its guilt is guilt without atonement; its innocence is innocence without fault. No redemption is possible, but only a schema of never-ending debts and payments. Second, this schema is made possible because identity politics is, tacitly or expressly, a relationship—something quite different from sorting (and self-sorting) by kinds. In the identity-politics world, the further your distance from the epicenter of guilt, the more debt points you receive. What is the epicenter of guilt? Being a white male heterosexual. (Throw in “Christian,” and the already-unpayable debt mounts still higher.) The debt points are not real currency, but they offer something that mere money cannot: a sense of moral superiority.

... Once, the Democrats were the party of the middle class, attentive to how it might be lifted up—or at least, kept from falling. But during the 2016 election, the Democrats offered the middle class nothing—Americans counted only insofar as they belonged to this or that identity group. And when the Democrats lost, they blamed white members of the middle class who voted for Trump and who had had enough of identity politics.

... As for the poor, a half-century of federal payouts, introduced with Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society, has not eased their burden. These government programs proved so unsuccessful, in fact, that Democrats have needed to create new narratives to explain their failure: perhaps the real reason for poverty in America, they came to conclude, has nothing to do with money, which politics can presumably fix, but with fault and guilt. The poor are poor because of their identity, the Democrats now say: they are innocent, finding themselves in adverse circumstances because of the irredeemable fault and guilt of others. The Democrats will champion the faultless and guiltless, calling out white privilege, male privilege, heterosexual privilege. With the new economy of identity-politics debt points, conjoined with massive federal spending, the Democrats position themselves as the vanguard of the innocent.

This new symbiosis has been a catastrophe for both the Democrats and for the poor.

... It may be that the only way that the Democratic Party can rise, Lazarus-like, from its deathbed is if African-Americans call out identity politics as the disaster that it has been—for them and for the country. If the party cannot find a cure for its confusion, it will expire in the paroxysm that identity politics produces. (read more)

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