America's Original Identity Politics

"We hear a great deal these days about how the right’s hostility to “identity politics,” inflamed by advocates like BreitbartNews, its erstwhile editor Steve Bannon, and Fox News, enabled the rise of Donald Trump. In this framing, the election of 2016 was a populist backlash of ordinary voters against an increasingly aberrant left that has allowed itself to be distracted by narrow questions about groups whose niche concerns do not rightly pertain to the proper functioning of democracy. Their identity-based complaints are marginalizing the left, leaving it out of touch with the troubles of Middle Americans, who primarily worry about how to pay the bills, but who are also concerned with the degradation of national values. Identity politics—according to this telling—fosters a series of peripheral grievances that, in travestying political norms, pose a dangerous threat to these values.

This argument is made not only on the right. Liberal academics like Francis Fukuyama at Stanford and Mark Lilla at Columbia have recently chided progressives for championing causes like Black Lives Matter and transgender rights, thus provoking a “whitelash” among the “left-behind” Trump voters. The counterblast from these left-behind Americans will, they argue, defeat progressivism, which needs to get practical and focus on regaining power through calls to commonality, rather than difference. Their argument is that a proactive sense of white identity was “triggered,” in effect, by an over-emphasis on racial and social identity in political discourse. Lilla, for example, urged in a 2016 New York Times op-ed that America return to a time of “pre-identity liberalism,” because identity politics “absolves liberals of not recognizing how their own obsession with diversity has encouraged white, rural, religious Americans to think of themselves as a disadvantaged group whose identity is being threatened or ignored… they are reacting against the omnipresent rhetoric of identity, which is what they mean by ‘political correctness.’ Liberals should bear in mind that the first identity movement in American politics was the Ku Klux Klan, which still exists.”

Similarly, when The Economist published an interview with Fukuyama and excerpt from his book last year, it headlined the article, “Can liberal democracies survive identity politics?”, and offered a highly typical definition: “identity politics describes when people adopt political positions based on their ethnicity, race, sexuality or religion rather than on broader policies. Though it started on the left, it has been more potent on the right: it fueled Donald Trump’s election and Britain’s vote to leave the European Union.” The Federalist Society tweeted in October 2018 in similar, but even more baleful, terms: “Identity politics aims for the end of America itself.” That certainly sounds bad. . ." https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/02/07/americas-original-identity-politics/

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The good news for anyone feeling perturbed is that it simply isn’t true that identity politics represents the end of America or of liberal democracy. Nor is it true that identity politics began on the left, or that the Klan was America’s first “identity movement.” As historians like Fukuyama and Lilla should know, the United States 

was founded on identity politics, per The Economist’s description: political positions based on ethnicity, race, sexuality, and religion. There are no pre-identity politics, just as there are no pre-identity economics, in a country in which political, economic, and legal rights were only ever granted to some identity groups and not to others. The only thing new about “the omnipresent rhetoric of identity” is the voices that have been added to it, reshaping it in ways that alarm and affront those who used to be its sole authors. But it was always omnipresent.Virtually every major event in the long and troubled history of the United States was a direct consequence of identity politics. Start whenever you think America begins, and power struggles based on identity will be staring you in the face, starting with the genocide and forced resettlement of
indigenous peoples by European migrants. A handful of those
migrants, traveling on the Mayflower, called themselves “Separatists” and decided to start a new society based on their religious beliefs, in which church membership would be a requirement of political representation. That’s identity politics. . ." https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/02/07/americas-original-identity-politics/