“The identity synthesis is a trap. If we collectively fall into it, there will be more, not less, zero-sum competition between different groups. But it is possible to oppose the identity trap without becoming a reactionary.
To build a better society, we must overcome the prejudices and enmities that have for so much of human history boxed us into the roles seemingly foreordained by our gender, our sexual orientation, or the color of our skin. It is time to fight, without shame or hesitation, for a future in which what we have in common truly comes to be more important than what divides us.’ –Yascha Mounk, “How to Argue Against Identity Politics without Turning into a Reactionary,” The New York Times. September 23, 2023.
I was fairly surprised to see the New York Times publish this article, since it seems to me it’s pretty clear that identity politics are a contemporary and traditional mode of population governance. Modern liberal identity politics divide non-elites by the reified identities of race, gender, and sexual orientation, which are deployed by liberal parties in governance and in various campaign strategies including electoral.
Aligned portions of elite universities and Human Resources departments reify these categories and coordinate institutional reforms to reproduce them–particularly to oppose labour organizations. Institutionalized identity politics presumably make settler countries safer for global elites, and secure ties between them and the liberal parties.
This elite constituency-building strategy is quickly seized upon by liberal parties’ rivals in conservative parties, and on behalf of their own identity politics, conservatives like Ron Desantis and the Florida legislature use their political power to expropriate liberal institutions, such as the New College. This is a true pity and also telling, because New College was not a liberal identity politics institution but rather an effective engine for working-class human development and social mobility in Florida. (Recognizing Florida Republicans can’t as easily target it, Evergreen State College in Washington, with its Whites-exclusion day and Saudi DEI administrator, is more the archetypal liberal identity politics bastion.) The routing of New College and its brute overhaul into a publicly-funded Christian football school demonstrates once again that Republican patronage replaces working class capacitation and autonomy, not elitist Democrat Party institutions.
So it’s interesting that a liberal party-affiliated newspaper like the New York Times would publicize Mounk’s thesis, that however soft-pedaled, institutionalized identity politics are too crude and brutish a tool, forcibly and unnecessarily ejecting too many citizens into the right-wing political network. After all, if identity politics are required for access to the security of the liberal network, banished citizens will have to look to some network for social affirmation and economic protection in a Gilded Age like this.
Liberal community expulsions are overdetermined because liberal identity politics are built primarily for rival political party branding keyed to elite prejudices, and have serious validity problems. My democratic colleague, an economist at an Albertan university, recounts his struggles as a union leader with the pitiful political and institutional misreading fostered by the liberal identity dogma his White colleagues feel compelled to subscribe to and parrot. These White academics talk, he says, as if they were lords and ladies, thoughtfully, magnanimously patronizing immigrant colleagues misrepresented as the vulnerable global poor, “when in fact, immigrants at the university are mostly global elites just like me.” Global elites receive the liberal identity discourse quietly with bemusement, and take advantage of the political naivete fostered by the liberal identity dogma, but most immigrants at the university do not consider modest-income, modest-wealth, older-settler White-identified academics to be their social, moral, intellectual or economic equals–let alone overlords, but rather part of the global servant class. This tracks with my findings from the discussions I have with my diverse students about their felt consumer entitlements at university.
It seems likely that as identity politics are keyed–following US finance–to global elite interests, they further an excessive callousness toward nonelite American citizenship and most of the people who carry that citizenship. Like all conservative politics, they propose that justice will be served when an elite elects to patronize a marginalized group threatened by an inhuman mob. (We have the Romantics to thank for sustaining that vision through the democratizing moments.)
While backed by prestigious elites and cemented in institutions by professionalized identity managers, and though they seem neatly symmetrical to conservative party identity politics, liberal identity politics have begun to undermine liberal party strength, Mounk holds. In too-enthusiastically and stridently securing non-elite division, these incomplete but sacred identity brands hazard excessive electoral and intellectual exclusions from the liberal community. For example, having first abandoned rural citizens to the Republicans and now abruptly abandoning rust belt citizens, the Democrat Party’s metropole-surburban-only strategy is vulnerable on many tactical fronts, including via the atavistic geographic distribution of US political power, but as well the new exodus of middle-class human capital from expensive global American cities and the Republican strategy to deport homeless, traumatized, addicted, and impoverished populations to the Democrat cities.
Liberal parties could probably better serve global elites with a bit of independence–using democratic principles to moderate elites’ divisive political patronage strategies and so maintain a wider political coalition. Liberal parties could probably also use a reality check: Global elites are not deeply invested in the viability of liberal parties. The relationship requires more subtle management on the part of liberal parties than the jejeune carte-blanche sponsorship of identity politics. Perhaps low liberal party capacity is an outcome of extreme economic inequality, as patronage and comms come to exclusively select liberal party leadership.
Mounk suggests a return to the liberal solidarity of the Civil Rights Era and–if I may reframe this a bit–its forgotten virtue, organizing to expand democracy upon democratic footholds, ideological and institutional (as opposed to identity reification and balkanization. Mounk’s ideal democratic foothold is the US Constitution). I broadly agree with Mounk but, following the abandoned advice of the Civil Rights democrats cut down by policing, I would rather suggest the return of 1930s-style working-class solidarity and its democratic Enlightenment ideological and organizing foundation, because inequality has gone to seed, Anglo-American law is not a democratic foothold, and the democratic footholds have crumbled. Between Mounk’s liberal political intervention and the strong socialist argument forwarded in, for example, Kenan Malik‘s Not So Black and White: A History of Race from White Supremacy to Identity Politics (2023), there may be a rare current opportunity for liberal-socialist coalition to fight out of the dismal antidemocratic corner in which political party identity politics have trapped citizens, the working class, youthful imaginations, bureaucrats, scholars, unions, non-elite universities–and liberal party strategy.
Either way, the confluence of structural opposition is serious, national and international: principally, the financial inequality and undemocratic ruling institutions that both liberal and conservative parties serve, and as well a noxious dose of elitism overlaying Anti-Americanism.
The Indomitable Neoliberals FC 