Salon: “Time to give up on identity politics: It’s dragging the progressive agenda down”

In Salon, Anis Shivani critiques his fellow Leftists’ obsession with identity politics, and the storm it has unleashed from unlikeliest of quarters (“Time to give up on identity politics: It’s dragging the progressive agenda down”):

I didn’t come around to disliking identity politics recently. Long before the 2016 election, 15 years ago in fact, I predicted the kind of white identitarian politics that eventually came to fruition in the last election. It had seemed to me inevitable, from the beginning, that white nationalism would arise as a necessary outgrowth if liberals kept up with their identity politics obsession, and that is precisely where we find ourselves…

Liberals have been on a relentless mission to transform people’s souls — to rid them of impure ideas about race and sexuality — for exactly the period of time that neoliberalism has deprived them of actual power to do anything about class inequality. The neo-Nazis are latecomers to this game; they have only recently adopted the cultural techniques that have already been mastered by the liberals.

When Richard Spencer, an originator of the term “alt-right,” discusses race as destiny, he is no different than liberals who have been articulating every aspect of identity, split into narrower and narrower niches, in precisely the same terms. Jared Taylor of American Renaissance, who has been trying to lend a respectable veneer to racism for more than 30 years, suddenly finds his thought in sync with the “alt-right,” his ideas gaining traction because he can now ask his audiences, “Isn’t what we white nationalists seek exactly what every other race wants in America?” And he’s right, on that score, because separatism, or the privileging of biological destiny, is a notion popularized by liberal identity politics…

What identity politics has ultimately led to is an uncontainable right. Through most of our modern history, the far right has been containable, because on the liberal side there was not a corresponding movement of mysticism and soul-cleansing grandeur, which is what identity politics is. The right, too, was forced to speak in the language of rationality, as was true of Establishment conservatives of every stripe following the successes of the New Deal. This went on well into the 1980s. But for the past 30 years, the right has not faced true opposition for its growing dream of nationalist mysticism, because liberals have been doing the same within their own communitarian splintering among various groups…

Furthermore, the rise of each group in terms of recognition encourages countervailing reactions amongst other groups, so that recognition becomes simultaneously self-inflating (breeding reactionism and irrationality) and an impossible ideal to attain. Again, the rise of white nationalism recently is a testament to this tendency, a natural corollary to the very logic of identity politics. Now we are truly in a zero-sum game, with the various liberal identity politics groups, constituting half the country, pitted against the white Trumpian half of the country…

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