In his recent essay “We All Live on Campus Now,” Andrew Sullivan argues that a “cultural Marxism” gestated on college campuses has erupted into the mainstream: a perspective in which “the core truth of our society is a system of interlocking and oppressive power structures based around immutable characteristics like race or sex or sexual orientation,” in which the whole concept of an individual who exists apart from group identity is slipping away, and whether the idea of “individual merit [. . .] is increasingly suspect.” This sort of critique of academia is pretty long-standing, but the change Sullivan identifies is the way this campus framework for viewing the world is gaining wider acceptance outside universities. I don’t intend to be dismissive when I say I don’t have the expertise or interest to engage fully with the scope of his claims — but I do wonder about Sullivan’s claim that Donald Trump’s embrace of white identity politics has helped create an “equal and opposite reaction” from other groups. Although he doesn’t really explore what this reaction consists of — I can only assume the increase in the idea that people of a certain race or gender are tending to primarily identify themselves by that group identification — I would suggest that the real world response to Trump that I’ve experienced and observed demonstrate that fears of this sort of balkanization of the American people are overblown and pessimistic.
First, when a president deliberately targets particular groups — Hispanics, African-Americans, women — for special contempt and blame for our nation’s ills, it’s inevitable that people who belong to those groups would grow even more aware of belonging to those groups. A reaction along these lines isn’t perverse or necessarily damaging to our democracy, but common sense. Indeed, we could argue that recognizing your common interests with others is a key building block in democratic politics.
This gets at one of the things about critiques of “identity politics” that staggers me. There is a sense from writers like Sullivan and others that African-Americans, or gays, or Filipino Americans, or any other group that has sought to advocate for issues as a group, does so out of a fundamental sense of perversity, out of a wish to tear down a sort of melting pot harmony which is our country’s natural state. But it seems obvious that people organize along lines of ethnicity, national origin, or what have you specifically because they have been discriminated against or otherwise not fully included as equal citizens and members of our society, not because they’ve decided to abandon their identities in a Borg-like collective.
I understand Sullivan’s concern about the individual subsuming him- or herself to a particular group identity. In theory, this sounds horrifying, the opposite of every person being a free and equal actor in our society. But in actuality, is there a single American who truly puts a particular group identity over their sense of being their own person? I don’t buy it. Individualism is so strongly woven into our culture that it’s like the air we breathe. We literally can’t even see it.
The most telling evidence that the term “identity politics” obscures (and slurs) more than it illuminates is calling women’s efforts to gain full equality in our society a form of identity politics. A movement that would advance the rights of literally more than half the U.S. population might more accurately be called “politics.” That women have interests not inherently shared by men — calls for equal pay, full health care that includes female-specific medical concerns — only makes those interests “special” or “factional” if we take men’s interests to be the normal, baseline interests that a citizen is to subscribe to.
I can’t help delving a bit into the identity politics question because it’s been purported to be the source of a split in the Democratic Party, against those who would rather talk about economic or other supposedly neutral issues everyone can rally around. It seems to me, though, that no particular group has one issue that concerns them, and that many of the issues that do concern them share broad commonalities, like a wish for economic fairness and to be treated fairly under the law. You are simply not going to stop people from caring about what their situation in life — based on race, economic status, gender, or sexual identity — forces them to care about.
And it’s here again that the slams against “identity politics” seem to be all about a strawman argument. Critics act as if people are randomly or perversely choosing to identify with a particular group, when the truth is that a great deal of that impulse is the result of our society and political system having long denigrated those people, hammering into their heads that their identity is indeed deeply entwined with being a poor African-American woman or a Mexican immigrant.
Rather than the Trump Administration accelerating trends towards a harmful balkanization of our society, there are in fact signs that many Americans are not being split apart, but brought together in healthy ways. The Trump administration may indeed be a stress test of sorts for American social cohesion, but I’d hazard most Americans are passing the test fairly well. When Donald Trump says Mexican immigrants are rapists, or casts aspersions on African-American football players who take a knee to protest police violence, members of these particular communities may feel a tightening of internal bonds — but these attacks also are causing many, many Americans to feel sympathy and, yes, identity with the groups under attack. For other vulnerable groups, the attacks arouse sympathy, because they know what it is to be targeted by the most powerful man in the land. And for those who don’t necessarily feel threatened or that they might be targeted, there’s still an impulse to sympathy, and to stand with the vulnerable.
I also think that a particular dynamic is playing out in how white people are reacting to Donald Trump’s threats against minorities. Donald Trump may be the de facto leader of a white identity movement in America, a dangerous mindset that would have us believe that whites as whites are being oppressed in this country — a racist and refutable notion if there ever was one. When he identifies minorities as threats to American stability and prosperity, these threats are in fact an important way of rallying white people to his racist cause. What’s been less noted, though, is the way this explicit appeal to white identity has the potential to expose to scrutiny and repudiation the white supremacist thinking that underlies it (and that in fact constitutes its true identity), specifically by alienating and indeed repulsing many millions of other white Americans.
For all that he’s managed to con so many Americans and appeal to the darkest impulses of the citizenry, Donald Trump has reminded millions of others of the evil and immorality of racism and misogyny. He’s one of the worst spokesmen for backwards beliefs that you could have wished for, a person in whom stupidity and prejudice can be observed in full, noxious synergy. For many white Americans specifically, to look upon Donald Trump is to look upon a model of how you would never in a million years want to be, and to entertain or embrace the idea that you have more in common with minorities in America than with other white Americans. And crucially, for millions of white women, Donald Trump undermines his appeals to white solidarity every time he lets his misogynist freak flag fly, implicitly telling them that the white supremacist movement is also a male supremacist movement; if you are not a white male, then you are not a full American citizen. Conversely, this rampant misogyny subverts Trump’s possible appeal to white males who aren’t down with the president’s gross and gropy hatred of women. There’s a dynamic playing out that refutes Andrew’s Sullivan’s fear that being aware of your “identity” is an inherently bad thing. If Donald Trump is making millions of Americans more aware of their whiteness, and reminding or causing them to realize that they don’t want to be white like him, then this is progress for America.
