Identity politics
Rejection of identity politics is part of American history
I’ve spent much of the past year hawking my latest book, “Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy.”
An interesting pattern has developed. Of the terms in the subtitle, everyone from my friends in rightwing talk radio to invariably polite liberal NPR hosts — and the audiences that listen to each of them — agrees that “tribalism” is bad. I think it’s because no party or faction has adopted the term, so each side thinks only its opponents are guilty of it.
Similarly, liberals tend to be sympathetic to 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 (or admit) 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 guilty of doing the same thing.
I’ve been mired in this conversation for so long that I’m always intrigued when someone from the other team, or tribe, breaks the pattern.
Enter former President Barack Obama. Last week, at an event celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Baker Center at Rice University, Mr. 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 Mr. 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 [wrote the] three-fifths clause and all that stuff. That was identity politics . ... Jim Crow was identity politics. That’s where it started.”
Mr. Obama is right — with two caveats. The three-fifths clause of the Constitution, which held that blacks in slave states be counted as threefifths of a white person for purposes of representation in Congress, is widely misunderstood (though it was part of the evil of slavery). It was the slaveholders who wanted slaves to be counted as whole persons. The anti-slavery forces, mostly in the North, didn’t want them to be counted at all, because to count slaves as citizens would empower the slave states.
Second, the framers didn’t “start” identity politics — it’s been around for thousands of years. Aristocracy was among the first forms. It derives from the Greek word for “rule of the best-born.” It held that some people were “slaves by nature,” and for thousands of years around the world, people believed that lower orders, or castes, were born to be peasants, serfs and slaves and that other people were born to be rulers.
Where Mr. Obama is right is more important. Slavery and Jim Crow were indisputably manifestations of identity politics. America’s system of legalized racism was just another form of aristocracy. It violated 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 far too long 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.