Identity Politics

Identity politics has become a central tenet of our current civic religion. Part of its popularity stems from the fact that for many normal Americans it remains a vague idea in their mind that they should help the less fortunate. We are told, with historical evidence, of harms done to various groups throughout history, and then we are told, and we tell ourselves, that it is our duty to help those groups when we can.

But there is a fundamental flaw with that thinking. As Kevin Slack explains in “The American Left,” identity politics understands people as members of groups rather than as individuals. Inevitably, this means we stop seeing people as citizens with inherent rights and start to see them as subjects who receive rights, privileges, and duties from the government based on their identity.

But how did identity politics take hold?

Dr. Slack explains that the identity politics movement rose as a critique of the neoliberal order that had amassed power through the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. Neoliberals had claimed to serve the least advantaged by providing universal goods, but critics on the left pointed out that some groups benefitted more than others. American history classes in public schools taught assimilation into the American way of life rather than celebrating individual achievements of “diverse” ethnicities, meaning non-European. Black incarceration rates were disproportionately higher than those of whites. The international institutions that were the pride of many neoliberals benefited America over other countries.

These Marxist critics concluded that the “universal goods” of neoliberalism were really white, heterosexual, Christian, male values that were now being pushed on everyone through global institutions. They claimed that this threatened to destroy diverse identities across the globe and within the culturally diverse society of America. So proponents of identity politics promoted consciousness raising—an exercise in which a person would become “woke” to one’s identity and the ways in which that identity was privileged or persecuted within the American system.

Identity politics thus introduced a new conception of justice. The Founders understood justice as the protection of individual rights, which Marxist radicals now saw as a euphemism for those rights that would benefit straight, white, Christian men. Throughout the twentieth century and culminating with the neoliberals, justice was understood as trying to provide uplift and aid to those less advantaged groups so they could enjoy the same goods that we enjoy. These new critics argued that this still rested on the premise that the values of straight, white, Christian men were better than those of other groups and required others to adopt these values to enjoy those goods. Instead, these new radical critics pushed an idea of justice as the duty to accept one’s obligations within a matrix of identity and to refuse any measures towards assimilation into a “traditional” way of life.

The idea of this matrix stems from Patricia Hill Collins’ organization of a “matrix of domination” in which groups are placed as either the oppressed or the oppressors. In every institution in society, certain races, classes, and genders oppress the others. Within this matrix, anyone who falls into the category of an oppressor not only has to accept certain moral responsibilities toward the oppressed, but they must admit that they themselves are an oppressor, which is why we see white members of Congress taking the knee in solidarity alongside the “oppressed.”

But this is all complicated by the fact that someone might fall into an oppressor group from one perspective and an oppressed group from another. Kimberlé Crenshaw introduced the concept of “intersectionality,” which demanded special treatment for people at the intersection of different oppressed groups. The more oppressed groups someone falls into, the greater a victim of oppression they are and the more preferential treatment they deserve.

This leads to the clear departure from any understanding of common citizenship and a common good. There can be no sense of a rule of law—or an equal treatment under the law—under a theory of justice that legitimizes preferential treatment for individuals based on their “oppressed group” status. Instead, an unequal rule of law is used to favor the oppressed and protect them from feeling any pressure to assimilate into the “oppressive norm”. In practice, this means that the oppressed groups are favored and protected, while those whose values align with traditional morality—straight, white, Christian men and traditional married families with lots of children—are now persecuted.

Equality can only be protected within society through the equal application of the laws. But today, the equal rule of law is seen as a tool of oppression. Thus, in today’s America it is noble to destroy the equal application of the law because it is oppressive. The American Left is leading us down a path to political discord the likes of which this country has not experienced in a long time.