The futility of arguing against identity politics
One of the things about getting old is that you find yourself increasingly able to remember things that people around you cannot. This is one of the reasons that I’ve been having difficulty getting too worked up about the current debates over identity politics. It’s because I’ve been through this once already. I’ve seen the movie, I know how it ends.
In other words, I have a living memory of the 1990s. In fact, I’ve had the same job since the ‘90s, and I can remember the zeal with which people fought over the exact same ideas, often in the exact same formulations. I derive grim amusement from young people pointing to some cultural product of the late ‘90s, like Maxim magazine, and saying “OMG they were so sexist,” or complaining that some Seinfeld joke is “problematic.” They don’t realize that these cultural products were successful because they were part of a backlash against the excessive political correctness of the previous decade.
I can recall being extremely puzzled the first time that I heard a millennial making a big deal about “intersectionality.” What I found strange was that she was treating it as though it were a new revelation – as though it had not occurred to anyone previously that, for example, Black women might be subject to certain tribulations that other women, and other Blacks, were spared. And yet, ever since Stokely Carmichael made his famously injudicious remark, back in 1964, this had been part of the received wisdom of the left (at least with respect to race and gender).
Just to make sure I wasn’t imagining things, I reread Iris Marion Young’s Justice and the Politics of Difference, which was published in 1990 and immediately because hugely influential. Sure enough, the basic point about intersectionality is right there:
From often heated discussion among socialists, feminists, and antiracism activists in the last ten years a consensus is emerging that many different groups must be said to be oppressed in our society, and that no single form of oppression can be assigned causal or moral primacy. The same discussion has also led to the recognition that group differences can cut across individual lives in a multiplicity of ways that can entail privilege and oppression for the same person in different respects. Only a plural explication of the concept of oppression can adequately capture these insights (p. 42).
Again I would like to emphasize that this was published more than 30 years ago. The “heated debates” that she is referring to occurred in the late ‘70s and ‘80s. The only thing missing in Young’s discussion is the handy catchphrase “intersectionality.” (On the other hand, a notable feature of Young’s work is that she tries explicitly to bring this politics of “group identity” into relation with traditional egalitarianism, and is troubled by the tensions that arise. This is something that contemporary theorists have put a great deal less effort into.)
The other thing that I can remember from back in the ‘90s is a lot of people arguing against identity politics, for pretty much the exact same reasons that people argue against it today. (I recently read David A. Hollinger’s Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism, published in 1995, which reminded me of how much of what is currently being said has been said before.) I couldn’t help thinking about this recently while listening to Yascha Mounk, who has been making the rounds to promote his new book, The Identity Trap. Politically, there’s not that much to disagree with in what he says. The only problem is that he tells a linear narrative, connecting up what the French refer to, derisively, as la pensee ‘68 (Derrida, Foucault, etc.) to the current excesses of the left. And yet this “boomer thought” is all stuff that was big when I was an undergraduate, back when Mounk was in kindergarten. Most of it subsequently went out of style. The question is why so many of the ideas that were superficially tied to it are now making a comeback. In other words, the question is why identity politics is turning out to be a “cockroach idea” (in Paul Krugman’s sense of the term: “a bad idea that you sometimes do manage to get rid of – for a while. But it just keeps coming back”). In order to explain this, we must take non-rational, non-ideational factors more seriously.
My suggestion would be that identity politics can most fruitfully be compared to nationalism. It is not so much a set of ideas as a sociopolitical strategy. It is, first and foremost, a way of mobilizing people to engage in collective action, and secondarily, a way of addressing some of the dilemmas around identity and meaning that arise in modern societies. This explains both its emotional appeal and its resistance to rational refutation.
The central feature shared by nationalism and identity politics is that they both involve activation of the powerful human psychological propensity referred to as “groupishness” (or less compactly, as the urge to divide the social world up into in-group and out-group members). The primary practical consequence of such activation is that it generates increased solidarity within the in-group (and thus improved capacity for collective action) combined with hostility (diminished cooperativeness, etc.) toward the out-group. (The extent to which these two effects can be detached from one another is the subject of lively controversy in social psychology.)
Historically, the group to which individuals owed their primary allegiance was their local community. The big discovery of the late 19th century was that this sense of loyalty and belonging could be transferred to a much larger political unit (i.e. the “nation”), in part through the use of mass communication technology (print, and then more powerfully, radio and television). The initial impulse of most adherents of traditional Enlightenment rationalism (which included most socialists) was to reject this sort of nationalism outright, for the obvious reason that it involved a sort of large-scale tribalism and moral partiality that directly contradicted their commitment to equality and impartial moral concern. They also had difficulty (at first) taking it too seriously, because it involved so many overtly fictitious elements. Thus they found themselves wrong-footed by the ease with which working-class solidarity could be fractured by nationalist appeals.
With the passage of time, many of those who rejected nationalism on principled grounds nevertheless figured out ways to live with it, in part because, as Yael Tamir has pointed out, no one has ever succeeded in institutionalizing a regime of liberal justice outside the context of a relatively nationalistic state. The explanation is not difficult to find: the only way to achieve redistribution on a large scale is to establish solidarity on a large scale, and the only known way to overcome our parochial tendencies on a mass scale is through nationalism. Most people will agree to shoulder one another’s burdens only if they feel that they have something more in common than just shared humanity.
But of course, this ability to “live with” nationalism was made possible by the success of a set of strategies aimed at neutralizing the obviously negative consequences that follow from the hostility toward out-groups. One of the most important lessons learned from the wars of the early 20th century was that the animosities cultivated by nationalism, left unchecked, can become an extraordinarily destructive force. Since then concerted efforts have been made to redirect out-group hostility away from militarism and naked aggression toward less damaging outlets such as sporting competitions.
The strategic calculation underlying identity politics is somewhat different, in that it is not concerned to extend the scope of solidarity, but rather to combat oppression by promoting more intense solidarity among those who are subject to it, in order to facilitate collective action aimed at resisting it. In other words, the strategy goes beyond consciousness-raising about the fact of oppression; it is aimed at encouraging members of oppressed groups to think of themselves as members of a distinct group, and thus to make this membership part of their identity. In addition to its practical effects, this sense of in-group membership provides many people with a sense of belonging that they crave (which the abstract universalism of liberal institutions fails to satisfy). Nationalism provides the same for many people, and yet majority nationalism is often seen as chauvinistic and intolerant, and thus incompatible with liberal ideals. Identifying as a member of the oppressed, by contrast, allows people to have it both ways. They can indulge their atavistic desire for group belonging while nevertheless convincing themselves that it is all in the service of justice. (The minority nationalism of separatist and anti-colonial movements provides the same superficial reconciliation.) It reduces the cognitive dissonance between one’s commitment to the abstract equality of persons and the desire for more intense, preferential affective bonding with one’s own in-group.
And yet, just as in the case of nationalism, there are obvious risks to the identitarian strategy, precisely to the extent that the heightened in-group solidarity is accompanied by out-group animosity. Indeed, the most powerful critique of identity politics is not based on the concern that it violates universalist principles (either moral or epistemological) – this much is obvious – but that it runs the risk of becoming self-defeating, because of its failure to take seriously the negative psychological effects of its own central strategy (or to claim innocence when these effects become manifest). In order for the “heightened solidarity” effect to be emancipatory, it must occur only among the oppressed and not among the oppressors. In other words, it requires that a fundamental asymmetry be maintained, a sort of “identity politics for me, but not for thee.” Specifically, it requires that only minority group members advance identity-based interests, while majorities refrain from doing so.
This asymmetry is difficult to justify (especially to teenagers, who often suffer most acutely from questions of social identity), leading to widespread accusations of hypocrisy. But even if it could be rendered conceptually coherent, the asymmetry is psychologically difficult to maintain, because the cultivation of out-group animosity among minority group members tends to provoke reactive animosity among those outsiders. It is in the nature of social categorization that it tends to generate symmetric group polarization. How could this avoid becoming counterproductive? (Thanks to social media, white Americans are now regularly subjected to racially abuse speech, which specifically identifies their whiteness as a negatively valenced characteristic. How could anyone be surprised that this generates increased white nationalism?)
As Mounk observes, many proponents of identity politics have been culpably naive when it comes to the likely consequences of their political interventions. Perhaps the most reckless has been the intentional cultivation of “whiteness” as a social identity (along with its academic correlate “whiteness studies”). This seems like taking an unintended negative consequence of identity politics and turning it into an intended consequence. The idea that one could cultivate a specifically racial identity among majority group members, and yet insist that this be adopted only as the basis of guilt and repentance, seems not just implausible but positively wild. The theory, of course, is that membership in an “unmarked” racial group constitutes a form of privilege, which can only be overcome through increased racial consciousness within that group. But this is a highly speculative theory, involving calculations that fail to take seriously the concern that cultivation of such an identity will generate negative effects for out-group members.
But there I go, arguing against identity politics, which is not what I want to do. My suggestion instead would be that we treat it the same way that most of us have learned to treat nationalism, which is to regard it as 1. essentially unprincipled, 2. psychologically obdurate, 3. instrumentally useful, with 4. potentially negative side-effects that need to be actively sublimated. In the case of identity politics, what we need right now is greater focus on 4. Specifically, progressives need to worry a great deal more about the possibility that growing exophobia in Western societies constitutes a strategic failure of the approach they have adopted to advance the cause of social justice.