Tuesday, November 13, 2018

Identity Politics: America’s ‘Pre-Existing Condition’, and the Cure

A guest column by Tom Deignan published in the 10/14/18 New Jersey Star-Ledger points out that identity politics has always infected American society. In “‘Identity politics’ has always attacked one of our strengths — diversity” (not, at this writing, available online), Deignan cites several politicians and writers, saying “All of these folks — not to mention President Donald Trump — have a real problem with ‘diversity,’ as well as its trouble-making offspring ‘identity politics.’”

Deignan uses a quote from Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch’s article published in The Wall Street Journal as a springboard to make his point:

And finally, in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, Hatch lamented that Americans “increasingly ... sort each other into groups, making sweeping assumptions based on binary labels: Democrat or Republican, black or white, male or female.”

Things, Hatch said, were not always so.

“For more than two centuries, we have been able to weave together the disparate threads of a diverse society more successfully than any nation on earth. How? Through the unifying power of the American idea that all of us — regardless of color, class or creed — are equal.”

This is a variation on a popular theme which arguably provided crucial support to Trump in 2016, and continues to resonate in the heated run-up to the 2018 midterm elections.

It’s certainly not hard to find instances — silly and serious — in which activist professors, eager students and earnest folk in general wildly overthink the importance of some hifalutin thing known as “their identity.”

So easy, in fact, that we forget that, for centuries, powerful elites engaged in a far more ugly style of “identity politics,” because they, too, had problems with American diversity.

Deignan goes on to recite a list of ugly examples of identity politics in recent centuries, including Jim Crow and eugenics, concluding with this interesting observation:

All of this goes a long way toward undermining Hatch’s naive claim that the “unifying power of the American idea” has always been more powerful than “identity politics.”

Of course, there are people for whom “diversity” and “identity politics” have become both silly games and big business. But at least acknowledge that there have been far more painful pre-existing conditions within the American body politic.

I left these comments:

“Pre-existing condition” is the key phrase.

Deignan is right that identity politics has always reared its ugly head in America. But Hatch is right that the “American idea”, individualism, is the answer to tribalism. America inherited tribalism. The identity politics described in the article is the reactionary pushback of history against the American Idea.

In a sense, the American Revolution hasn’t ended. The American Idea is that the individual is the standard of moral consideration, possessing his own mind and free will, with the inalienable right to further his own life. An individual’s life, Americanism holds, belongs not to any group but to himself. America is the first country Founded explicitly, philosophically on individualism. But tribalism didn’t go quietly. American history is really the battle between individualism and the powerful remnants of tribalism; i.e., collectivism. That battle continues to this day. The winner of that battle will determine the survival of America.


Yes, American history is laced with identity politics. But the American Idea has always been, until recently, more powerful. Today, the fight is more important than ever. Today, identity politics/collectivism/tribalism masquerades in a new, more sophisticated form--diversity, the notion that a person’s identity is wrapped up primarily in his race or gender rather than her character, values, and actions. There is definitely collectivism across the political spectrum. But today it resides mainly on the Left, where it is ubiquitous. Identity politics is not apart from diversity. Diversity is identity politics. America’s strength is neither. It is individualism. Let’s hope the “unifying power of the American idea” ends up to be more powerful than today’s “identity politics.”

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