Rejection of identity politics is part of American history
the idea that populism is bad, largely because they so closely associate it with Donald Trump, though a few remember that Bernie Sanders is a populist, too, and so want to offer caveats about “good” populism and “bad” populism. The same holds for conservatives, only in reverse.
On nationalism, I get the most pushback from the right and the least from the left.
On identity politics, it’s the other way around. It’s hard for many liberals to understand that there might be something pernicious about dividing everybody up into categories of race, sex, ethnicity, etc. Meanwhile, many on the right struggle to see how their side might be doing the same thing.
Enter former President Barack Obama. This week he said something very interesting. At an event celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Baker Center at Rice University, Obama decried “politics based on a nationalism that’s not pride in country but hatred for somebody on the other side of the border. And you start getting the kind of politics that does not allow for compromise, because it’s based on passions and emotions.”
Former Secretary of State James Baker interjected, saying, “It’s identity politics.”
To which Obama responded: “Which is why, by the way, when I hear people say they don’t like identity politics, I think it’s important to remember that identity politics doesn’t just apply when it’s black people or gay people or women. The folks who really originated identity politics were the folks who said three-fifths clause and all that stuff. That was identity politics . ... Jim Crow was identity politics. That’s where it started.” Obama is mostly right. The framers didn’t “start” identity politics — it’s been around for thousands of years. Aristocracy was among the first, and most pernicious, forms of identity politics. It derives from the Greek word aristokratia, or “rule of the best-born.” It held that some people were simply born better than others.
Where Obama is right, however, is more important than where he is wrong. Slavery and Jim Crow were indisputably manifestations of identity politics. America’s system of legalized racism was just another form of aristocracy under a different name. And as such, it was a violation of the best ideas of the founding. Perhaps the single most radical thing about the American Revolution was the decision to reject all forms of hereditary nobility.
It took longer — too much longer — to recognize the rights and dignity of all Americans, but the idea that you should take people as you find them, and judge them not as a member of a group but as individuals, remains perhaps the greatest part of the American creed, regardless of whether you’re a liberal or a conservative.