gracchusdixit

I recently spent a couple of weeks at the University of Oxford, where I took two courses in political philosophy.  One of my classmates was a Labour Member of Parliament from Australia, who had a wicked sense of humor and was an unapologetic Marxist.  This unlikely combination—a communist with comedic talent, as if Karl and Groucho Marx had been rolled into one—was hard to resist. In any event, we struck up a friendship that led to numerous sidebar conversations, not only about our coursework, but also about political events in general.  During one of these exchanges, my funny friend cast humor aside to express the worry that “identity politics”—based on race, gender, religion or culture—poses a serious, perhaps a fatal, threat to left-leaning political parties throughout the western world.

His observation instantly struck home, since scarcely a day goes by that we do not hear of the Democratic Party’s internal struggle to define, or redefine, itself in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s defeat.  Some say that the party should try to recapture the white, working class voters who have been deserting it for decades, like a tide that goes out but never comes back in.  Others say that it should focus on minority and millennial voters, who are more receptive to its philosophy and policies.  Still others say the party should try to fashion an overarching “economic message,” bypassing the differences that divide the various constituencies within its purportedly “broad tent”.  No final or definitive answer has yet emerged, and as the days go by, it seems increasingly unlikely that one ever will.

Such conundrums are not confined to the Democratic Party in the United States.  The Labour parties of Britain and Australia, as well as the Socialist parties of Europe, are grappling with similar questions.  All seem increasingly unanchored and adrift—estranged from their traditional constituencies, uncertain about their fundamental principles, at odds about their policies and priorities.

And even within the United States, the problem is not limited to Democrats.  A different kind of identity politics—one based on ethnic, religious, and gender grievances—has taken hold of the Republicans, who increasingly seem to be at war with themselves regarding ideology and identity.  This is a conflict that has been smoldering from the first day Richard Nixon decided to exploit the racial grievances of white Southerners for the sake of electoral advantage.  This old, scabrous wound of white racism did not begin with Donald Trump, but it undoubtedly got worse after his election.

The foremost American critic of “identity politics” may be Mark Lilla, who teaches at Columbia University and is one of our country’s leading public intellectuals.  In countless lectures, interviews, opinion pieces, and books, he has railed against the dangers posed by the politics of identity, not only to Democrats and liberals, but to liberal democracy itself:

We need a post-identity liberalism, and it should draw from the past successes of pre-identity liberalism. Such a liberalism would concentrate on widening its base by appealing to Americans as Americans and emphasizing the issues that affect a vast majority of them. It would speak to the nation as a nation of citizens who are in this together and must help one another. As for narrower issues that are highly charged symbolically and can drive potential allies away, especially those touching on sexuality and religion, such a liberalism would work quietly, sensitively and with a proper sense of scale.

Lilla is a man of great learning and even greater generosity of spirit.  But even such a man can fail to recognize when history has turned a page.  He fails to see that liberalism can no longer to “speak to the nation as a nation of citizens who are in this together and must help one another,” because our political institutions, even when liberals are in charge, increasingly fail to represent the most deeply felt needs and interests of those to whom sexuality and religion, race and ethnicity, are in no sense “narrow” or merely “symbolic” issues.  For millions of Americans, these are the only issues that truly matter.  This is not because they are being willfully selfish; it is because our society has given them no other choice.

Why, for example, should black Americans, after nearly 400 years of slavery, segregation, and suppression, put their faith in a conception of citizenship that still relegates them to the back of the bus?  Why should they subordinate their racial identity when the society in which they live wouldn’t allow them to escape that identity even if they wanted to?

Why should Mexican immigrants, whose ancestors once owned a large swath of this country and whose labor now feeds much of it, put their faith in a government or a president that denounces them as criminals, rapists, and murderers?  Why should they subordinate their ethnic identity to a citizenship that many of them will never be allowed to attain?

Why should women be asked to surrender their identity as women when, a century after they were given the right to vote, they continue to be paid less for doing the same job as a man, when a cabal of 13 white men in the Senate of the United States can still gather in secret and presume to tell them how they should make their reproductive decisions?

Why should gay, lesbian, and transgender Americans be asked to set aside their sexual identities when they continue to be denounced as sick or sinful from countless podiums and pulpits across the land, when the President of the United States seeks to deny some of their number the right to serve this country in the military even as they themselves are willing to put their lives in harm’s way?

If we are to be honest with ourselves, we must ask why such people should be expected to put their faith in an abstract. purportedly greater concept of “citizenship” that fails to deliver on its most basic promises.  How long should we expect them to wait patiently until our democracy finally decides to treat them as true equals, with the justice and respect they deserve, not only as “citizens,” but as fellow human beings?

Our governing institutions, our two main political parties, indeed our entire political and economic system are in trouble, because they have grown deaf and blind to such realities.  A recent study by Harvard University found that a majority of millennial voters see little value in capitalism, and a third would prefer to live under socialism—a finding that would have been utterly unthinkable when I was growing up and a clear signal that something has gone fundamentally wrong with politics as usual.  Asked about this finding, the Democratic Leader in the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, proclaimed:  “We’re all capitalists, and that’s just the way it is.”  Her response tells you all you need to know about the underlying problem.

The shop-worn ideological clichés of politicians like Nancy Pelosi and Paul Ryan are no longer relevant to millions of Americans.  Their promises and principles not only lack credibility, they no longer matter.  That is why their respective parties are in turmoil.  And that is why those parties are struggling to define, or redefine, themselves.  It is all too clear that they are struggling, not to “speak to the nation as a nation of citizens,” but merely to hang onto power.  The time has therefore come for these moribund political parties to go.  Like the great extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, identity politics may turn out to be the instrument of their destruction.   I, for one, would greet their extinction, not with dread, but with relief.