One of my readers using the name Harland has twice now pointed me to this thought-provoking essay. It is a long and rambling piece, but its author, Scott Alexander, makes some interesting points, though he ignores some other interesting points. More on those in a bit.
Let me digress first and note that this Scott Alexander is not his full name, but a few months ago a NY Times reporter wanted to write an article about him and said he would include his full name. Scott Alexander balked and deleted his blog, claiming that if he were outed, his career as a psychiatrist would be destroyed. See here.
Anyway, what he does is to divide America into two groups, the Blue Tribe and the Red Tribe. He also acknowledges that there is a Gray Tribe of libertarians, but says they don’t count for much. Now near the beginning of his essay, he observes that the Nazis, while hating the Jews who lived among them, had no problems with the Japanese, even though they weren’t Aryans. (Probably this is because the Japanese had waged a war against the Russians back in 1905, and since Hitler felt antagonistic toward the Slavs, many of whom lived in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in which he grew up, he sided with the Japanese against the Russians.) Why would this be?
The author doesn’t explore the roots of this oddity, but he points out that many of us do it. We have in-groups and outgroups, and for the Blue Tribe, the outgroup is the Red Tribe, while their in-group is blacks, gays, Muslims, and so on. He also gives the example of the deaths of Osama bin Laden and Margaret Thatcher. The former event caused members of the Blue Tribe to condemn anyone from the Red Tribe doing any celebrating because he was a human being after all, and we shouldn’t be celebrating when anyone dies. But when Thatcher died, these same people who were supposedly respectful of all human life broke out into celebrations.
Now a couple interesting points he does not make are that, first, the Blue Tribe is perfectly happy with people from the Red Tribe, so long as they are Muslim. I have made this point endless times: Muslims are generally against what leftists are for (such as feminism, gay liberation, secularism, and so on). So, while the Blue Tribe gets livid at ordinary Americans who are against abortion, they pay no attention to the beliefs of Muslims about abortion. There is a lot of Blue-Tribe support for the Iranian regime, even though it is fervently anti-abortion. I’ve banged on endlessly on this subject, and yet somehow the Blue Tribe is unfazed.
The second interesting point to make is that the left didn’t used to be this way. During the era of communism, the communists hated all capitalists. It’s not the case that they hated the capitalists around them, but had a sneaking admiration for capitalists on the other side of the world. No, they hated with a fierce passion all capitalists. So, apparently not everyone is willing to think of their far enemies as their friends or as worth supporting.
So, what is going on? Notice, first of all, that it’s odd that a Jewish liberal (or libertarian) would begin talking about the Nazis as showing what is true of humanity, and in particular what is true of the Blue Tribe.
Secondly, when the Blue Tribe felt uncomfortable with those celebrating the death of Osama bin Laden, that wasn’t because (as their subsequent celebration of the death of Thatcher showed) they were uncomfortable celebrating the death of anyone. Nor was it because of some similarity with Nazis, who hated their non-Aryan neighbors, but liked them if they were on the other side of the world. No, it’s because they haven’t a clue about the nature of fundamentalist Islam. They seem to put Osama bin Laden into the category of “leftist who goes too far” or even “apolitical activist motivated solely by grievances” rather than “reactionary who is as anti-progressive as one can get and who wants to kill progressives because they don’t share his reactionary views.”
Thirdly, let me suggest that this oddity, this contradictory way of acting that affects both the Nazis and the Blue Tribe (and supposedly everyone else), is part and parcel of identity politics. That the Nazis were steeped in identity politics shouldn’t be too controversial, since their big thing was Aryanism. As Scott Alexander observes, their identity politics meant trouble for people who had thought of themselves as loyal members of the German volk but who turned out to have Jewish grandparents. Suddenly, they were the enemy. That’s the way identity politics works. Of course, today’s identitarians are horrified by the identity politics of the Nazis, not because it’s identity politics, but because they want identity politics of a completely different sort. They want to turn Nazism inside out. They want an identity politics based on acceptance and not rejection of the “Other,” and anyone who doesn’t accept their identity politics is beyond the pale. They don’t seem capable of understanding anyone (like me) who has ideological reasons for not wanting Muslims here. And I’ve had a hard time understanding them. This is identitarian politics versus ideological politics. Of course, it’s not that the identitarians are completely uninterested in ideology. It’s just that it seems to take a very distant second place for them.
So, start with ideological politics. For the ideologue, your allies are those who accept your ideology, while your enemies are those who don’t accept it. It really doesn’t matter where they live (nor their skin color or gender or religious background, etc.). That is of no importance. All that matters is whether they share your ideology. In desperate times, you may have to accept alliances with people who aren’t committed to your ideology, but at other times, you can be more ideologically pure. Also, you may at times get angrier at those who are closer to you in terms of ideology but who haven’t quite seen the light than you are at those who are much more distant. Presumably, this is because you think that they have come halfway to your position, so what is stopping them from going all the way?
Now let’s consider identitarian politics, and I am going to consider pure identitarian politics that has no interest in ideology at all. The identitarian chooses to support certain groups because of something about them they generally can’t help: their skin color, their ethnicity, their gender, their sexual orientation, the religion they grew up with, or whatever. The identitarian claims that these are the good people, and that those who have the wrong skin color or whatever are bad. Right away, this is a problem since good and evil are not generally correlated with any of these. As Scott Alexander points out, some good Germans suddenly found that they were the enemy because they had the wrong ancestors, something they may not have even known about before. Today, we see the same sort of thing, with whites being vilified more and more by our elites, who claim that whites are hopelessly racist, while non-whites cannot even be racist. (That claim was proposed when the rest of us weren’t even paying attention, yet it is now part of conventional wisdom.)
We must accept the “Other,” no matter who that other is, or else we are racist (or sexist, or homophobic, and so on). So, the identitarian in America sees blacks, feminists, gays, and Muslims as part of the blue tribe, because those with power in America have been white, male, heterosexual, and Christian. And right away we run into problems because these groups do not mix well together. In fact, here are what might be called the contradictions of identity politics:
• The groups favored by the identitarians do not mesh well together, as I’ve pointed out many times.
• Identitarians turn ugly when one of their favored groups strays from the reservation. Strictly speaking, the logic of identity politics demands that such a person be supported, but in practice this seems to be impossible. Accordingly, blacks who end up on the right are vilified, conservative women are told they aren’t really women, and so on.
• Identitarians are confused when one of their favored groups attacks another. The conflict in Darfur back in the mid-2000s was one such episode. It was Arabs against blacks, and the identitarians never did figure out what they were supposed to think and do about it. They cast about helplessly trying to blame the Bush administration for the massacres, but it just didn’t work. Meanwhile, lots of popcorn got eaten by those of us laughing at their plight. Today, we have the Chinese putting Muslims in concentration camps. The identitarians have no idea what to do.
• Although the identitarians are supposed to be egalitarian, they can’t help but to construct hierarchies among their favored groups, depending on who has been victimized the most. As I have pointed out before, feminists have complained about being second-class citizens in society, but are now second-class citizens on the left, behind (for example) Muslims.
• The opposite of the “Other” is called the Subject, and the Subject is presumed to be white, male, heterosexual, and Christian. But obviously this can change. In fact, many of us think it has already changed. There are lots of women in professional positions, we’ve had a black president, Christianity’s power has faded tremendously from the years of my childhood, and so on. Accordingly, the identitarians seem stuck in a rapidly receding past. Those focused on blacks, for example, cannot seem to stop talking about redlining, a practice that ended about fifty years ago. And they believe in systemic racism, which was dismantled about the same time.
• Finally, most horrible of all, the Nazis ended up with death camps, and there is nothing to prevent our identitarians from ending up in the same place. It’s just that there will be a different group who will be in the camps. They are vilifying whites, and they are working themselves into a frenzy over mostly imagined problems. It doesn’t seem likely that this will end well.
So much for the “logic” of identity politics.
