Here’s a vote to get beyond identity politics
Minutes after the election results started coming in on Tuesday night, something interesting started to happen on social media, which is the most immediate barometer of the national pulse. Progressives who were elated at the fact that so many House seats were going blue also displayed a very obvious level of angst as it became clear that Florida was not going to get its first black governor, Texas was not going to get its trendy Democratic senator, and Georgia was going to deny Oprah her first female, African-American governor (“You don’t get a governor, and you don’t get a governor, and you don’t get a governor!”).
Apparently, according to the liberals on Facebook and Twitter, this was due to racism. I know that the majority of voters out there believe that the reason Andrew Gillum, Beto O’Rourke and Stephanie Abrams didn’t win was because a slim majority of the people in their respective states didn’t want them. But there was this inescapable desire to brand the failure to elect the Democratic favorites as racism, sexism and whatever other sort of bigotry they could latch onto for the evening.
This astonished me even more as states and districts across the nation elected women to office in large numbers, and even picked the first openly gay man to become governor, in Colorado. Identity politics had a number of victories it could claim on Tuesday night, so it seemed rather peevish of my liberal friends to lament the losses of two governorships and a senate seat. I mean, let’s not be greedy, folks.
But this is what our society has become. I watched in my own district in Delaware County as we were told how “historic” it would be that finally, we would send a female to Congress. Of course, many of those touting the historic nature of the race were hoping the Democrat would be making that history and not the Republican, and sure enough, Mary Gay Scanlon won the race. But everywhere you went in southeastern Pennsylvania you heard people rejoicing in the fact that women were finally engaged in politics (as if we had spent the last 50 years staying home and baking cookies) and attributing that phenomenon to hatred against Donald Trump.
As I’ve noted in the past, I’m not a fan of Donald Trump and I like women well enough, but I don’t consider ovaries, melanin or a specific ethnic history to be special qualifications for higher office. I’m not even convinced they add anything to the mix, which puts me squarely outside of that group that rejoices when people who “look like America” and reflect the diversity of the nation win their races. Good for them for winning, but I don’t care what they look like.
You might think that this is so 20th century of me, because we are now supposed to highlight our differences and, like all those liberal friends on Tuesday night, lament those instances when they are ignored. But let me explain to you why I think it’s important to put those blinders on when we select our representatives.
Two weeks ago, 11 people were murdered in cold blood as they sat praying to God. Eleven Pennsylvanians, 11 Jews, assassinated because someone else put a high price on their “difference.” Antisemitism derives from a senseless, visceral hatred of the “other,” an attempt to dehumanize people based on both their religion and, more importantly, their ethnicity.
Anti-semitism is the oldest form of racism, and predates the time when history was actually written down. It was the act of making someone lesser than, the creation of toxic myths about them, the desire to eliminate them.
Ironically, there is a great deal of anti-semitism on the “tolerant” left, and it is seen in the embrace of Louis Farrakhan by Linda Sarsour and other founders of the Women’s March (ironies abound). It became so obvious this year, that Alyssa Milano, no conservative, has decided not to join the Women’s March once again until Sarsour and her companions disavow Farrakhan. So far, she hasn’t done so, and it’s unlikely that she will.
In my immigration practice, I often represent people who are persecuted because of their identity. Just this week I accompanied a Pakistani man of Punjabi ethnicity to the asylum office to plead his case. In his native country, he has been attacked and beaten because of who he is. I know a few things about “othering” a person.
So this was what truly troubled me on Tuesday night. Calling people racist because they would not vote for someone of another race is racism. Praising people because of what they look like, not what they do, comes dangerously close.
In this era, the only identity that should matter is the measure of our humanity.