Backlashings
Michelle Goldberg rejects the rejection of “identity politics.”
We are going to spend the rest of our lives arguing about the precise mix of economic desperation and cultural grievance that drove the calamitous election of Donald Trump. Already, however, there’s an emerging consensus that the Trump apotheosis can be blamed in part on “identity politics” and “political correctness.” In Sunday’s New York Times, the liberal Columbia University historian Mark Lilla proclaimed “the end of identity liberalism.” In the libertarian magazine Reason, an essay was headlined, “Trump Won Because Leftist Political Correctness Inspired a Terrifying Backlash.” Bill Maher lectured liberals, “You’re outrageous with your politically correct bullshit and it does drive people away.” A Politico piece argued, “To many Trump supporters, Clinton … was merely another ‘PC’ liberal griping about ‘micro-aggressions’ and ‘triggering’ language.”
So we should go back to calling people niggers and kikes? (We never stopped calling women cunts and bitches, so there’s no back to go to.) Goldberg agrees there are problems with the “rhetoric of identity” but is not interested in any trips back.
There is truth in this analysis, but also a very real danger that it will be used to dismiss demands for equality for women and people of color. We are entering a moment of reaction that will reshape not just our politics but also our culture. Liberal assumptions that had become part of the atmosphere—that female leadership is desirable, that dismantling racism is an urgent social imperative, that diversity in gender expression constitutes progress—will likely fall out of fashion.
It already has in some circles. Breitbart is popular, and that predates Trump.
Trump himself gives every indication of thinking that his victory was driven by rage at what we might call woke culture rather than by inequality. Consider the fact that, on Nov. 15, he snuck away from his press pool to have a $36 hamburger at the 21 Club in midtown Manhattan. The well-heeled patrons applauded him when he arrived, and he was recorded promising to lower their taxes. No one considered this to be a gaffe. If any of Trump’s economically anxious supporters felt betrayed to see their savior gladhanding plutocrats, they’ve been pretty quiet about it.
Contrast that reaction with what happened on Friday, when Mike Pence attended Hamilton. At the show’s conclusion, the actor Brandon Victor Dixon delivered a message to the vice president–elect, asking for respect for the groups targeted by Trump. “We, sir—we—are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents, or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights,” he said. Unlike Trump’s trip to the 21 Club, this sparked screeches of indignation about New York elitism. There was a viral #BoycottHamilton hashtag campaign, and a threat from Bikers for Trump to blockade the Richard Rodgers Theatre. Trump himself tweeted a number of attacks on the Hamilton cast’s lèse-majesté. He seems to understand that a good portion of his followers are more inflamed by assertive cosmopolitanism than by capitalists luxuriating in their wealth, power, and access.
Yup. Slash taxes on the already very rich? Yessss, go for it!! Ask Trump to stop spewing sexism and racism? Omigod it’s the end of all our freedoms!! That makes sense coming from rich people, but others, not so much.
I certainly won’t mourn if the more illiberal aspects of social justice politics wither before the Trump juggernaut. Campus leftists who formerly disdained free speech will learn its absolute importance when faced with a regime that attacks protesters, the media, and dissenting artists. Perhaps progressive activists, newly aware of how many Americans reject their intellectual priors, will stop responding to clumsy questions with a sneering, “It’s not my job to educate you.” I’d like to see the language of privilege jettisoned altogether in favor of civil rights or equal justice, since the number of people who want to see their own privilege dismantled is vanishingly small. Maybe Everyday Feminism, the website that encompasses everything insufferable about social justice culture, will finally be revealed as an elaborate right-wing psy-ops campaign.
Ha! It has to be.
If you want to see Everyday Feminism at its worst, check out 5 Reasons Why We Need to Stop Saying That ‘Women Are Half the World’s Population’ from a couple of days ago for some right-wing psy-ops:
If we want to make a case for women’s equality around the world, we need to do it in a way that doesn’t erase or harm people of other genders and identities. We need to be bringing in a more intersectional approach.
Yeah – it’s always women who are erasing other people. Isn’t that strange? That this kind of thing is always aimed at women, and only women?
1. It’s Ridiculously Cisnormative
Let’s be real: This phrase isn’t logically correct. When we’re saying that women are half the world, what we’re actually saying is that roughly half the world is assigned female at birth.
We aren’t talking about gender (and therefore, women) at all. We’re talking about sex, and assuming that everyone assigned female at birth must identify as a woman.
This is totally cisnormative – reinforcing the assumption that being cisgender is the default, and centering the experiences of cisgender people, effectively erasing transgender people – and makes this phrase really problematic.
Think about it: This “statistic,” focusing on birth assignment, technically includes me – someone who doesn’t identify as a woman, but was assigned female at birth.
And more importantly, it doesn’t include trans women. Since this is a percentage that relies on assignment at birth, we’re inherently excluding transgender women – who have a different birth assignment – in favor of propping up cisgender women.
There it is, that chronic rage at women – “in favor of propping up cisgender women.” On a site that calls itself feminist! Right-wing psy-ops for sure.
But you know who is no help with that? Trump, that’s who.
It’s a bizarre argument, because the existence of trans women does not change the general fact that women are half of the world’s population. I’m pretty sure most trans women are happy to be included within that half.
Not to mention, Emily, unless the number of trans gendered is a lot higher than the figures I’ve seen, the number isn’t high enough to really budge that number, which isn’t exactly half anyway.
Failure to understand statistical averages doesn’t constitute an argument for your position.
A point I heard recently on Mike Pesca’s podcast The Gist: (paraphrased) be suspicious of anyone who claims that the election results prove that Democrats/liberals/progressives/the left should do exactly what the author has always said they should.
Admittedly, I have been avoiding a lot of these post-election navel-gazing and/or finger-pointing articles, but I have yet to see or hear of one that doesn’t fit this description. Nobody is writing, “you know, I always believed that Democrats should do X, but now that Hillary lost narrowly in the electoral college despite a significant popular vote lead, I have now learned the error of my ways and think X is bad/tactically unsound.”
Oh, and as to this specific claim: arguably there was no state where “identity politics” were at issue more than in North Carolina, where the governor’s race was to a large extent about the HB2 bill that attacked LGBTQ rights. And yet Democrats did better in that governor’s race (a very narrow win, subject to the GOP’s attempts to steal it) than in the presidential. So one could easily argue that Hillary should have campaigned more on identity issues.
@ 3 Screechy Monkey
You speak truly. Confirmation bias is a thing.
(Lo, in these very pages.)
And the fact that a movement gets backlash is not evidence that a movement is wrong. That’s the problem; if there are people who don’t like what we’re asking for, and those are the people who have always been in power, they will push back. Then we are told, oh, no, you must stop asking for those things, because…reasons…which usually boils down to the fact that someone is upset, offended, or just plain angry that someone who they have always considered themselves to be “over” in the hierarchy is now getting recognized as asking to be looked at as legitimately equal.
If that is incoherent, I’m sorry. It’s late, and I’ve been working on my time off again.
It is, of course, entirely possible that I have misunderstood the concept of “identity politics” (come to think of it, I’m not sure I have ever seen an actual definition of the term), but from reading people like Nick Cohen, I assumed it had something to do with sorting people into different boxes called “identities”, treating each box as essentially homogeneous (e.g. assuming that all Arabs are Muslims, and all Muslims are pro-sharia etc.), and advocating different norms/standards of treatment for people in different boxes. In this mode of thought, “equality” means that everyone has the same right to be treated according to the rules appropriate to the people in their particular box. This always struck me as a reactionary view, and more closely related to right-wing ideology than my idea of “equality”, which I always held to mean rendering all these different group identities irrelevant with respect to how people are treated.
Bjarte – most of the people who talk about identity politics talk about it as the idea that there should be laws protecting marginalized groups. They protest that this is giving “special rights” to these groups and privileges over other groups – meaning white men. Recently those groups have expanded and identity politics seems to have become a bit of a monster, in the way you describe, with all this nonsense that involves erasing women, but I don’t think that has much to do with the way most right wing pundits calling for the end of identity politics are using it.
Iknklast, I see, thanks for the clarification.
In truth despite being an Anglophone I’m not really sure what any given use of “identity politics” means at this point, because so many people use it for such different purposes.
One thing it means – I think Goldberg says this – is switching from a class analysis to one based on race and sex (“gender”). But it’s also, for instance, just a synonym for “political correctness” which is a synonym for “social justice warriorism” – and so on.
There certainly are so many ways in which we could define “Identity Politics” both good and bad.
Personnally, but also from a very external perspective (I’m not Anglophone), I’d really go with the view of Bjarte Foshaug @7. I really experience online ID narratives as an enforced boxification and stereotyping of actually lose categories in the most reductive way: ID sounds like resulting from a shift in social interactions norms that so strongly relies on simplistic and inflexible typification that it is completely reactionnary, regressive and backwards, and all that with the apparence of progressism (and that’s very tedious).
This is a trap, since once you fall in a collective designed box/label it is very hard to actually stand outside what onlinees expect you to say or think, and you eventually do it with the feeling of being a fraud, of being unfair to your inner self (whether true or not, and all while you could have personal reasons to behave fully individually and not hold onto expected behaviour from a purely folksy social typification range).
The idealisation of strongly sided and sidelined identities is at core not only wrong but bad, and it is actually marginalising those that don’t align with the current dominant narrative and definition of boxes (I’m not far to say that IDP is a modern but strongly western construct, i.e. a new narrative but still coming from the historic dominant steamline orientation). (Also because that narrative has become intrusive and dogmatic beyond what’s possible to imagine or wish for self).
Certainly there are issues with box purity itself, but another major fail is that boxification is strongly limiting genuine self diversity in what identity means both for self and because of perception imposed by peers as to what should define yourself as an individual in a society.
Even if it comes from a genuine attempt at evolving social interactions toward more respectful ways, too son IDP has turned into flagship and rags for validating one’s importance and righteousness to the crowds and clubs (yes, IDP is often restrictively communitarian and often in the worst ways). The new norms became dogma-normative before they reached full maturity, and very interestingly (as it speaks length as to the nature of the current culture shift), it is based on assuming the intent behind mishaps is malevolent rather than clumsy.
Eventually (hopefully), it is an infertile attitude and it will evolve soon toward fluidity, parasympatry and parasympathy, and stop claiming borders cannot permeate.