Trump has won the US presidency and Britain will leave the EU. The economic consequences are undoubtedly important but we have to wonder why the left, even if only the far left, have not made more explicit gains politically on the back of this neoliberal unraveling, not least in the US. The Democrats long ago moved to the centre right and betrayed even the basic principles of that portion of the political spectrum through their wanton pandering to corporate interests. In the UK, Labour is at war with itself as a result of a swing back towards ‘old’ Labour principles and its collision with Blairism. Why has this essentially economic problem morphed into a question of ‘making America great again’ or ‘taking back control’ along with a concomitant antipathy to minorities and migrants.
The genuine economic reasons notwithstanding an exclusive focus on economics obscures a consequential culprit in what has transpired. The economic analysis assumed too readily the homo economicus model of interest articulation and popular preferences, something unambiguously belied by the simple fact that for many the left offered no solution to their problems. Trump did. Brexit did. It’s down to Mexicans (or Eastern Europeans in the UK context), immigrants, Muslims. The appeal of nakedly xenophobic and anti immigrant political rhetoric, coupled with an underlying rejection of political correctness, hint at deeper problems than that of economic decline in the US rust belts and forgotten northern English towns. The emergence of white nativist politics is a direct result of the promotion of identity politics. Identity politics brought culture explicitly into political consciousness in a way that set up a dichotomy between ‘us’ and ‘them’ – and now as the economic equilibrium veers off center the world is confronted with its logical consequences.
Since the mid 1970s, following the publication of John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, the communitarian strain of political thought emerged in response to the putative atomization of post industrial societies by neoliberal capitalism. Communitarian thought is diverse and has its own spectrum. But it essentially contends that individuals within any society are not free standing rational actors. They are instead members of groups and the individual’s relationship to the state should be, depending on the specific formulation of communitarianism, mediated via membership of group identity. It was membership of ‘groups’ that embedded and nourished our sense of selfhood, our sense of identity and concepts of self worth. It was membership of groups that provided sections of society with a point of departure for opposing political oppression.
In the abstract, communitarian thought had a certain persuasive power, albeit that its philosophical antipode, liberal philosophy, was more frequently the victim of caricature than fair analysis. But in the teeth of western society’s rapid transformation in the latter part of the twentieth century identity politics appeared to tackle significant failings in western political governance: racism, gender discrimination being among the most prominent. But while it served to foster consciousness raising among oppressed groups it singularly failed to engage with the real root of growing political dysfunction. What identity politics succeeded in doing was deflecting critical attention from what Habermas referred to as the ‘legitimation crisis’. The identitarian critique of political malfunction in late-modern liberal capitalist societies did not engage with the pressing question of the institutional inadequacy of our politics. Instead, it latched onto the categories most affected by this dysfunction and fetishized and idealized their cultural distinctions. Rather than push for our political institutions to be more sophisticated it sought to define and exclude through exemption.
Through the hyper-construction of identities political theory ended up straying away for the most part from what actually needed to be done – strengthening political institutions through innovation to better reflect modern plural societies. Instead of critically examining the political architecture of liberal republican government it sought to entrench a series of exceptions and exemptions to that form of government for specific groups. Rather than, for example, abolish the extensive privileges of corporate Christianity in the west, it sought to appease other forms of corporate religion by disbursing concessions to them as well. Rather than challenge the normative hegemony of ‘heterosexual’ marriage it endeavoured to win the concession of ‘civil unions’ for gay citizens. By conceding the ground to the political status quo and instead seeking loopholes on the basis of category affiliations, identity politics lay the groundwork for socio-political differentiation. It might get festooned with phrases like ‘celebrating diversity’ and ‘multicultural society’, but it was in reality a nefarious neo-tribalism that gradually eroded civic consciousness.
The defenders of identity politics have contended that getting rid of it will merely expose those most affected by political oppression to the full brunt of a nativist backlash. But this fails to account for the core of the problem. The problem is not identity differences. The problem is politically entrenched differentiation between equal citizens. Liberal republicanism, far from seeking to erase differences, actually fully recognizes differences, yet refuses to ossify those differences into specific forms. The thinkers who developed these ideas of political accommodation recognized, above all else, that people are much more diverse than our limited categories can possibly imagine. It also recognized that people can change their mind. They can change their religion, or even not have a religion. They can change their nationality. They can even change their gender.
But this later modern retreat into cultural trenches quickly highlighted another significant problem. What if the oppressed culture was itself oppressive to its own members, or sections of them? As Susan Okin pointed out nearly two decades ago, what if multiculturalism was actually bad for women? Cultures, even minority cultures, can be just as oppressive as state actors. To box citizens of states into exclusive categories, or to elevate one category above others potentially undermines the value of the shared bonds of citizenship. The decidedly less than vigorous pursuit of criminal charges against forced marriages in the UK is one example, and the continued tolerance for Sharia courts there remains a betrayal of the liberal ideal.
Thankfully, most western states have demurred in implementing some of the wilder versions of identity politics advocated by some of their more truculent standard bearers. But damage has been done. The problem now, of course, is that this identitarian version of human flourishing has come full circle. In effect, the pressure on policy makers to make concessions to ‘groups’ has had the effect of emphasizing cultural distinctions precisely when distinctions should have been secondary to the construction of common citizenship within the framework of a truly liberal republican polity. This is not to say that culture is unimportant or that states should implement assimilationist policies. To argue from this dichotomy is to miss the point entirely. The real point is that if the state is truly a democratic, liberal, secular republic then people will be able to immerse themselves within their respective cultural category while also recognizing two important shared values: the freedom of people to be part of a category and the freedom of people – all people – not to be forced into cultural boxes. Strong communitarian thinkers are decidedly ambivalent about the right of citizens to extract themselves from certain inherited cultural ‘groups’. There is a whiff of cultural tyranny in such thought, and the survival of the cultural group slips into first place, overtaking the imperatives of individual freedom.
Trump’s rise is attributable in part to the legacy of identity politics for this reason: the logic of identity works in all directions, not just that of minority or oppressed groups. The proponents of identity politics need to ask themselves a very tough question: in whose world was it ever likely that the ideas of thick identity claims, the claims of culture, tradition, of language and/or religion and ‘ethnicity’, would find any less traction among ‘white’, ‘Caucasian’, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ or ‘Christians’ publics as they did with minorities? By emphasizing ‘culture’, ‘tradition’ and ‘belonging’ promoters of identity politics lay the groundwork for the balkanization of public discourse, and the nativism we are now witnessing. Did none of the proponents of identity politics stop to think what the implications might be? Did they not realize that the logic of identity politics applies to people with white skin as much as it applies to non-whites? By opening the Pandora’s Box of cultural difference identity politics did not so much solve the legitimation crisis as help to create a nativist epidemic.
There were at least two reasons for the failure of identity politics to completely eliminate the nativist impulse among western publics. First, there was a missing dimension to identity politics and ‘belongingness’ that mattered fundamentally in the nativist revival: its connection to territory. Proponents of identity politics, perhaps given their emergence on the cusp of globalization, fundamentally failed to account for this variable. A defining feature of the ‘self’/ ‘other’ dichotomy is the relationship of a defined people to the land upon which they live. Long settled, ancient…or new arrival? Proponents of identity politics presumed naively an equal relationship between different groups. They presumed also that the state would be indifferent to the content of identity forms, regardless of their cultural affiliations or their origin. They assumed, naively, that the state would simply be a cipher, an empty vessel and a disinterested arbiter into which a putative and invariably benign mix could be poured. But as any small C conservative who has read Edmund Burke will know, no polity can be constructed from scratch. Polities are the accumulations of their lived and historical experiences, the accretions that bequeath their own modus operandi. This idealized pluralism was not the case in reality.
However, we are not bound by history or tradition. We can transcend it, and this is where the identity politics promoters made a second miscalculation. The second major flaw was the failure to invest sufficiently in the concept of civic citizenship and the promotion of commonality, rather than the promotion of differences. By working towards the elevation of group distinctions and group based pluralism, identity politics appeared ambiguous about the primacy of liberal democracy and the practical operation of political government vis-à-vis the individual citizen. Citizenship came to be seen – wrongly – as assimilation (or its less Orwellian variant ‘integration’). But citizenship is a much more capacious concept than that. Civic republican government, more fully realized, does not seek to eliminate cultural distinctions, but rather ensure cultural distinctions are moderated sufficiently to permit the functioning of diverse societies. But rather than try to promote cultural pluralism there is a strong case for the state to be culturally indifferent. Citizens should be seen as citizens, not bearers of ethno-religious or ethno-nationalist identities. If there is structural oppression then it should be dealt with through the prism of citizen rights, not group rights. France failed to be sufficiently indifferent with respect to its ethno-religious minorities. Its supposed ‘secularism’ was actually secular in favour of Christianity, specifically Catholicism. Britain went down the road of promoting ‘diversity’ through expanding the number of faith schools, entrenching cultural separatism through its education system.
A tried and tested political arrangement around common citizenship and common membership of states based on the separation of powers, the rule of law and equal rights and duties was the defining feature of republican government. The United States, for all the talk of ‘melting pot’, never really relinquished its White Anglo Saxon Protestant roots, and each ‘culture’ (African American, Latino, Irish and now Muslim) had to struggle against the dominant paradigm to overcome entrenched prejudice. But these identities were as much a product of their persecution as they were of their culture. Had the United States more fully embodied republican principles such reactionary prejudice and cultural defensiveness would likely be less prevalent. By emphasizing the distinctions between people through the culture fetish, and by engaging in what Freud called the ‘narcissism of minor differences’, identity politics sowed the seeds of its own crisis and gave birth to nativism. Melded to post-colonialism and anti racism, both worthy intellectual as well as activist movements, this resulted nonetheless in an implicit and often explicit derogation of western culture. Cultural defense has now kicked in. And the result is Trump, Le Pen, Wilders and Farage.
photo: Gage Skidmore
