From 2017:
Time to give up on identity politics: It's dragging the progressive agenda down
"Long before the 2016 election, 15 years ago in fact, I predicted the kind of white identitarian politics that eventually came to fruition in the last election. It had seemed to me inevitable, from the beginning, that white nationalism would arise as a necessary outgrowth if liberals kept up with their identity politics obsession, and that is precisely where we find ourselves.
Identity politics always felt like snake oil to me...
Although identity politics had been in the air for a couple of decades already, it was when I was in college, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, that it really began to take off. The Cold War had just ended and capitalism, recharged as neoliberalism, 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.
My generation was the last to have escaped the full brunt of this pernicious ideology. We 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 took your spot along a particular identity and stuck with it all your life? Life would be so boring, so predictable, so deadly...
those who are in their 20s and 30s today have not known any other ideological order. Identity politics — the brand of communalism it flows from, i.e., multiculturalism, and the brand of expression it leads to, i.e., political correctness — is existentially unassailable for the young. They 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...
It’s not surprising that both Sachs and Summers went on to rebrand themselves as progressives of a sort, with help from the compliant media, because if neoliberals can say the correct things about race and gender, then their economic positions do not matter...
identity politics, wherever it has manifested, has been absolutely devastating to the cause of liberty.
1. It privileges culture, instead of politics...
Obama was immune to liberal criticism, because he fit the identity politics matrix so perfectly. He may have ruthlessly deported millions of people, kept in place and strengthened the entire extra-constitutional surveillance apparatus, and escalated illegal drone attacks and assassinations, but the color of his skin provided immunity from real criticism.
2. Not only politics, but economics is taken out of the equation...
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...
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...
I find the “we can do both” argument a cop-out. I have never known anyone whom I consider typical of the identity politics strain of activism — i.e., engaging in call-out culture for various racial, sexual and cultural offenses — also be engaged with such fights as the preservation of privacy and anonymity, the end to the surveillance state and the dominance of the intelligence agencies, or economic redistribution on a meaningful scale, not just limited to the populist idea of the living wage.
The identitarians, if pressed to the wall on this, will say that these emphases are not exclusive, but in reality they never do it, because there is no mental space left to pursue classical economic issues... Identity politics, it should be noted, is not an outsider’s movement; it is the ultimate insider’s game...
3. Identity politics always breeds its equal and opposite reaction.
4. Identity politics is not winnable...
This is because liberals are rhetorically dedicated to pursuing a goal which can never be realized in practice, i.e., the complete self-realization of each identity. This should be evident across many different dimensions. The more a particular group becomes validated in the broader culture’s eyes, the less it feels satisfied with the recognition, and the more it feels it needs more of that rush of acknowledgment and credit based on identity alone. There is no end to it...
5. It leads to spectacle, rather than legislative accomplishment...
Identity politics was conceived and executed from the beginning as a movement of depoliticization. Feminism has become severed from class considerations, so that for the most part it has become a reflection of what liberal identitarians themselves like to call “white privilege.” Feminism, like the other identity politics of the moment, is cut off from solidarity with the rest of the world, or if it deals with the rest of the world can only do so on terms that must not invalidate the American version of identity politics...
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 (which is the most ironic yet predictable result of identity politics) and makes of the law an inhuman abstraction.
This depoliticization has gone on so long now, about 30 years, that breaking out of it is inconceivable, since the discourse to do so is no longer accessible. For anyone trained to think outside the confines of identity politics, those who operate within its principles — which manifests, for example, in call-out culture (or at least it did before Trump) — seem incomprehensible, and vice versa. We are different generations divided by unfathomable gaps, and there is no way to bridge them. The situation is like the indoctrination in Soviet Russia in the 1930s, so that only an economic catastrophe that lays waste to everything, resulting from imperial misadventures, can possibly break the logjam. Short of that, we are committed to the dire nihilism of identity politics for the duration of the imperial game."
