Jacob Levy on “identity politics” and Trump

Jacob Levy’s blog post today is a must read. The first half takes to task the pundit’s fallacy of “too much identity politics cost Clinton the election” and the second half makes the case for the vital necessity of identity politics for any kind of liberal politics. This is “read the whole thing” territory, but let me just highlight a couple of bits:

There is something particularly absurd in the post-election morality plays that say “whites [or white Christians, or white Christian men] have now learned how to do identity politics and how to vote like an aggrieved ethnic group, because that’s what other groups have been doing all these years.” White identity politics is a constitutive fact of American politics, and if an election in which the Republican got the normal share of the white vote counts as white identity politics in action, well, that suggests a deep problem, but it doesn’t suggest a new problem.

White identity politics has moreover been a constitutive fact of the illiberal expansion of state power. The effect of some of the oldest instances of this are still with us, as is seen in the recent struggle over placing the Dakota Access Pipeline on lands that were reserved to the Sioux nation in an 1851 treaty that was subsequently violated but never voided. The effects of the decades-long white welfare state and the redistributive subsidizing of white wealth accumulation through housing policy are very much still with us in the wealth gap between whites and blacks, to say nothing of the enduring effects of racially discriminatory housing and urban policy on the shape of American cities. But the most currently politically salient effect of white identity politics as a source of state power is the combination of policing, imprisonment, crime policy, and drug policy.

…..

The point generalizes. Until 2003, many states criminalized a variety of forms of sexual behavior between consenting adults. There were identity-neutral ways of describing the illiberal wrong of this. But the laws weren’t identity neutral in intent, and often weren’t even formally identity-neutral; they were criminal prohibitions on homosexual sexual activity that legitimized routine police harassment even when they weren’t enforced. The laws were unjust according to liberal principle, but would never have been repealed (in many states) and struck down (in the rest) without the identity-conscious political mobilization of gay and lesbian activism.

Identity politics at its best, in other words, isn’t just a matter of being on some group’s side. It’s about fighting for political justice by drawing on the commitment that arises out of targeted injustice, and about having the intellectual resources to let us diagnose that targeted injustice. It lets us spot the majority group’s identity politics rather than treating it as the normal background state of affairs, and to recognize the oppression and injustice that it generates.

Bold mine; this is the core insight. It’s often targeted injustice that helps to create, or intensifies and makes salient the very identities that provide the resources to fight against them. This essay has helped me think through and clarify in my own mind more precisely what I find so pernicious the anti-identity politics mode of left/liberal commentary, particularly in the politics of the nightmare political environment of the age of Trump. All such critiques acknowledge (usually very quickly, to get it out of the way) that of course identity politics has accomplished some very good and important things, the problem is just that it’s gone too far. This is unsurprising, as identity politics is a category so broad it ostensibly encompasses the 19th Amendment, the Civil Rights Act, and that one time some college students overreacted to a perceived insult. But in turning them into one big thing, and turning that thing into (primarily) an object of derision and contempt, and the unwitting cause of our nightmarish new normal, is particularly dangerous because of the circumstances of our new normal, in which core civil rights accomplishments themselves might be under serious attack. The rhetorical project of categorizing all anti-racism, anti-sexism, etc into a concept most frequently associated with perceived alienating excesses could end up helping to minimize and de-legitimize opposition to the rollback of the racial progress of the civil rights era. As some research linked the other day by aturner339 shows, white people, including liberal white people, can be swung to racist positions relatively easily, as long as it’s not overtly explicit. It’s clear enough that a great deal of public opinion is top-down, and there’s really very little reason to doubt that Trump’s presidency is going to not just make America a more racist place, but will also make the American public more racist. It’s relatively obvious and straightforward how this is going to work with respect to his followers, but the post-election boomlet of anti-identity politics may be giving us some clues about how that process will unfold amongst those who ostensibly oppose him.