The Identity Politics Trap Has Weakened The Democratic Party Without Achieving Worthwhile Goals

This morning when I woke up I saw something either on my Twitter feed or in an e-mail or in something I read, about EMILY’s List endorsing Monica Tranel to run against Ryan Zinke in the less red Montana congressional seat in the western part of the state. My reaction was ugghhh, another identity politics candidate from the ultimate purveyor of identity politics. I made a mental note: “Ignore.”

Later in the day, it floated back into my consciousness and I felt badly and decided to look closer. Yes, then I remembered, she ran in 2022 and she was a terrible candidate. An overly-polite, stick-in-the-mud— indicative of the way the Democratic Party has changed (“we’re not one of those ugly foul-mouthed MAGAts or dirty socialists and we drive Mercedes”)— and an ex-Republican, she lost last year by over 3 points and she’ll probably lose again next year— despite her identity politics endorsement.

On Tuesday, The Atlantic published an important, if somewhat obtuse, essay by Yascha Mounk, Where The New Identity Politics Went Wrong. He conflates wokeism with “a more neutral term, the ‘identity synthesis’, which right-wingers “deride as a form of ‘cultural Marxism,’ which has substituted identity categories such as race for the economic category of class but still aims at the same old goal of communist revolution. They invoke wokeness to oppose anything they dislike, such as sex ed and insufficiently patriotic versions of American history. On the other side, many people in media and politics claim that wokeness is simply a matter of justice and decency: a willingness to acknowledge the cruelties of America’s past and a recognition of the ways they still shape the country. ‘Being woke,’ Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman who became a vocal critic of Donald Trump, has said, ‘just means being empathetic.’” Mounk doesn’t buy into either characterization.

Very much not like a Tranel-Democrat in their Mercedes, Mounk asserts that what it means to be left-wing has been radically transformed in recent decades by writers, activists and scholars who “have melded a diverse set of ideas inspired by postmodernism, post-colonialism and critical race theory into a new worldview that animates today’s progressive movements.

He traces the origin story to French ex-communist, pessimistic philosopher Michel Foucault; anti-colonialist Palestinian American literary theorist Edward Said; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, an Indian literary scholar; and activist Black civil rights attorney Derrick Bell. Slowly their ideas about identity “gained traction in different parts of academia, including law schools. A new generation of legal scholars set out to question long-held beliefs about the judiciary, such as the idea that judges made decisions based on fine points of legal doctrine rather than on their own worldview or self-interest. But one member of this emerging tradition who proved especially influential argued that it had a crucial blindspot of its own: race. Bell wrote that “Racism [is not] “a holdover from slavery that the nation both wants to cure and is capable of curing”; rather, it is “an integral, permanent, and indestructible component of this society.” The civil-rights movement might have succeeded in making discrimination “less visible,” but, he wrote in the early 1990s, racism had become “neither less real nor less oppressive.”

Much of today’s progressive politics is a popularized version of what I call the “identity synthesis.” To a remarkable extent, the ideas, norms, and practices that have become so prevalent on social media and in corporate diversity trainings owe a debt to these four thinkers in particular. They are rooted in a deep skepticism about objective truth inspired by Foucault, the use of discourse analysis for explicitly political ends taken from Said, an embrace of essentialist categories of identity derived from Spivak, and a preference for public policies that explicitly tie the treatment a person receives to their group identity, as advocated by Bell. (Kimberlé Crenshaw, the Black feminist legal scholar who coined the idea of “intersectionality,” which has since taken on a life of its own, might be considered another key member of this progressive pantheon.)

…The identity-synthesis advocates are driven by a noble ambition: to remedy the historic injustices that scar every country, including America. These injustices are and remain real. Although social movements and legislative reforms can help address them, the practice of politics, as the sociologist Max Weber famously wrote, is the “strong and slow boring of hard boards.” It rarely provides remedies as quickly or as comprehensively as hoped— leading some to conclude that a more radical break with the status quo is needed.

The appeal of the synthesis stems from promising just that. It claims to lay the conceptual groundwork necessary to remake the world by overcoming the reverence for long-standing principles that supposedly constrain our ability to achieve true equality. Advocates of the identity synthesis reject universal values like free speech as distractions that conceal and perpetuate the marginalization of minority groups. Trying to make progress toward a more just society by redoubling efforts to realize such ideals, its advocates claim, is a fool’s errand.

But these ideas will fail to deliver on their promises. For all their good intentions, they undermine progress toward genuine equality among members of different groups. Despite its allure, the identity synthesis turns out to be a trap.

As the identity synthesis has gained in influence, its flaws have become harder to ignore. A striking number of progressive advocacy groups, for example, have been consumed by internal meltdowns in recent years. “We used to want to make the world a better place,” a leader of one progressive organization complained recently. “Now we just make our organizations more miserable to work at.” As institutions such as the Sierra Club and the ACLU have implemented the norms inspired by the identity synthesis, they have had more difficulty serving their primary missions.

The identity synthesis is also starting to remake public policy in ways that are more likely to create a society of warring tribes. In the early months of the pandemic, for example, a key advisory committee to the CDC recommended that states prioritize essential workers in the rollout of scarce vaccines rather than the elderly, in part because “racial and ethnic minorities are underrepresented” among seniors. Not only did this policy, according to the CDC’s own models, have the probable outcome of increasing the overall number of Americans who would perish in the pandemic; it also placed different ethnic groups in competition with one another for lifesaving medications.

When decision makers appear out of touch with the values and priorities of most citizens, demagogues thrive. The well-founded fears roused by the election of Trump accelerated the ascendancy of the identity synthesis in many elite institutions. Conversely, the newfound hold that these ideas now have over such institutions makes it more likely that he might win back the White House in 2024. The identity synthesis and far-right populism may at first glance appear to be polar opposites; in political practice, one is the yin to the other’s yang.

Many attacks on so-called wokeness are motivated by bad faith. They fundamentally misrepresent its nature. But that is no reason to deny how a new ideology has acquired such power in our society. In fact, it’s imperative to recognize that its founders explicitly saw themselves as rejecting widely held values, such as the core tenets of the civil-rights movement.

The lure of the identity synthesis to so many people is a desire to overcome persistent injustices and create a society of genuine equals. But the likely outcome of uncritically accepting this ideology is a society that places an unremitting emphasis on our differences. The effect is to pit rigidly defined identity groups against one another in a zero-sum battle for resources and recognition.

Critics of the identity trap commonly claim that progressive activists are “going too far.” But what is at issue is not having too much of a good thing. The real problem is that, even at its best, this ideology violates the ardent aspirations for a better future to which all of us should remain committed.