5 September 2018 — 1522 mdt
Identity politics is illiberal
Yesterday, the Democratic voters of Massachusettes’seventh congressional district decided by a 59–41 percent margin to replace ten-term Rep. Michael Capuano, a hard-working progressive to the left of Bernie Sanders, and a man who stayed in touch with his district, with Ayanna Pressely, a member of Boston’s city council. Pressely admitted she would vote the same way as Capuano, but said she would lead differently because she was black and female. The seventh, she argued, was a racially and ethnically diverse district with a white plurality, and should be led by a person of color, not by a white man.
That argument clearly prevailed. So too, I suspect, did the implicit argument that the best way to express differences with President Trump was to nominate for congress someone as physically unlike him as possible; to nominate a woman of color.
The choice of the seventh’s voters to cast identity votes was perfectly legal, and perfectly consistent with the notion that a decision arrived at democratically is legitimate. But it was also a repudiation of liberalism.
Few have drawn the distinction between identity politics and liberalism better than Stanley Fish, the immensely articulate deconstructionist whose ability to discuss all side of an issue (and sometimes, sides that don’t exist) is matched by few. Writing in the New York Times in February, 2008, when Hillary Clinton’s first identity politics campaign was beginning to falter against Barack Obama’s “we’re all Americans” inclusiveness, Fish defined identity politics with admirable clarity (if you prefer the academic respectability that a turgid discussion of the subject provides, see Stanford’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy):
You’re practicing identity politics when you vote for or against someone because of his or her skin color, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or any other marker that leads you to say yes or no independently of a candidate’s ideas or policies. In essence identity politics is an affirmation of the tribe against the claims of ideology, and by ideology I do not mean something bad (a mistake frequently made), but any agenda informed by a vision of what the world should be like.
An identity politics voter says, in effect, I don’t care what views he holds, or even what bad things he may have done, or what lack of ability he may display; he’s my brother, or he’s my kinsman, or he’s my landsman, or he comes from the neighborhood, or he’s a Southerner, or (and here the tribe is really big) my country right or wrong. … Rather than saying she’s right on immigration or he’s wrong on the war, the identity-politics voter says he looks like me or she and I belong to the same church.
Identity politics is illiberal. That is, it is particularist whereas liberalism is universalist. The history of liberalism is a history of extending the franchise to those who were once excluded from it by their race, gender or national origin. Although these marks of identification were retained (by the census and other forms of governmental classification) and could still be celebrated in private associations like the church and the social club, they were not supposed to be the basis of decisions one might make “as a citizen,” decisions about who might best lead the country or what laws should be enacted or voted down. Deciding as a citizen means deciding not as a man or a woman or a Jew or an African American or a Caucasian or a heterosexual, but as a human being.
One need not abandon one’s tribal identity to be a good citizen, but when casting a vote, one must subordinate one’s tribal identity to the larger identity of citizenship to be able to cast a principled vote for the greater good and one’s enlightened self-interest. Unfortunately, today’s Democratic Party no longer embraces that time tested wisdom. Consequently, the whole of the party is less than the sum of its tribal identity caucuses. That balkanization may not be fatal to the party in this midterm election, but it will in 2020 if not transcended by a strong and enduring sense of shared values and goals.