By David French
Wednesday, September 20, 2017
In the days following Donald Trump’s surprise election
win, progressive Columbia University humanities professor Mark Lilla published
a thought-provoking, viral essay that took direct aim at identity politics:
In recent years American liberalism
has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity
that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a
unifying force capable of governing.
Lilla’s essay became a book that has sparked debate,
withering reviews, and general disdain across wide swathes of the political and
academic Left. Yet as I read the attacks on Lilla, I was struck by the extent
to which his critics were either ignorant of or indifferent to the way in which
conservatives and many moderate white Americans experience identity politics.
They do not know the face that identity politics presents to Americans outside
the progressive bubble.
To Lilla’s critics, minority identity politics is a
defensive response to white identity politics (sometimes outright white
supremacy) that is necessary for achieving a measure of justice and fairness in
society. Sure, there are excesses, but they’re mainly confined to the fringes
of the academy, where outrages are exaggerated by the likes of Fox News. Here’s
the New Yorker’s David Remnick making
that case in his interview with Lilla:
And one of the things right-wing
media does is take some examples of exaggerated identity politics, in your
terms—cartoonish moments—and blow them up on Fox or Breitbart or the rest, and
make it seem as if every student at Columbia or Oberlin or the University of
Chicago is inflamed with this. Am I wrong?
When I read words like that, I think they just don’t know. Or maybe they know — but don’t care — the
extent to which a hostile, illiberal brand of identity politics has seeped into
every nook and cranny of American culture. It’s not the case that conservative
Americans sit ensconced in their immense privilege, raging at an irrelevant
fringe hyped up by Fox News. Rather they experience identity politics at their
jobs, hear their children and grandchildren describe experiencing it at school,
and find it so omnipresent on television and online that they can’t seem to
find any space (aside from conservative media) where someone isn’t mocking
their values or accusing them of being complicit in historical atrocities.
At colleges, immersion in identity politics begins on Day
One, when countless students start their orientation-mandated “privilege walks”
designed to teach white kids who don’t have a racist bone in their body that
there is something inherently wrong with them. People are treated as members of
groups, not individuals, which leads to the absurd spectacle of poor kids’
being mocked as “privileged” by the wealthy, powerful children of doctors and
lawyers.
Oh, and the outrages are not limited to the very few
cases that make Fox News. For every embattled student group we hear about,
there are dozens more that suffer in obscurity. Would you know from watching
Fox that hundreds of Christian student groups have been forced to fight for
their campus lives simply because Christian organizations want Christian
leadership? For every incident like the one that derailed Charles Murray’s
speech at Middlebury, there are countless unreported shout-downs,
cancellations, and acts of petty censorship at universities across the U.S.
Then, students graduate and work for companies that have
jumped with both feet into the sexual revolution — to such an extent that
Christian Americans are terrified of openly discussing their views of religion
and morality at work. Diversity trainers and human-resources departments set
the rules, and the rules increasingly say that dissent from identity-politics
orthodoxy represents “discriminatory harassment.” This isn’t just in Silicon
Valley or in Manhattan. It’s in Nashville. It’s everywhere.
Conservative Americans aren’t making up the fact that the
race-obsessed Left imposes the worst sorts of double standards. It speaks with
true venom about “whiteness,” “white privilege,” and white people. And things
are getting worse. We’ve reached a point where an orthodox-Jewish, Never Trump
conservative can’t speak at one of America’s most elite universities without $600,000 worth of securities
expenditures. Why? Because he’s a “fascist” or even a “white supremacist.”
Conservative Americans aren’t making up street violence
in St. Louis, Atlanta, Baltimore, Charlottesville, Portland, Minneapolis,
Berkeley, and many other cities across the United States. Nor are they making
up the fact that identity-politics activists will excuse that violence or
dismiss it by calling protests “mostly peaceful” while the bricks are still
flying or the fires are still blazing.
Here’s Ta-Nehisi Coates, arguably the most influential
black intellectual in America, writing in the midst of the Baltimore riots:
When nonviolence is preached as an
attempt to evade the repercussions of political brutality, it betrays itself.
When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time
out, it exposes itself as a ruse. When nonviolence is preached by the
representatives of the state, while the state doles out heaps of violence to
its citizens, it reveals itself to be a con. And none of this can mean that
rioting or violence is “correct” or “wise,” any more than a forest fire can be
“correct” or “wise.” Wisdom isn’t the point tonight. Disrespect is. In this
case, disrespect for the hollow law and failed order that so regularly
disrespects the community.
Did conservatives make that up? Or are we now to dismiss
a recipient of a MacArthur “Genius Grant” and winner of a National Book Award
as “fringe” and “irrelevant?”
I’ve noted this before, but practitioners of identity
politics constantly make “motte-and-bailey” arguments. In ancient times, the
“bailey” was the place where people lived and worked, while the “motte” was the fort they retreated to
when enemies arrived. In arguments, the bailey is your big idea. The motte is
the point you make when you’re attacked.
Far-left progressives are constantly making sweeping,
stereotypical, and hateful arguments about those outside their own tribe.
They’ll speak with venom about white people. They’ll act as if “whiteness” represents
a malicious, cultural monolith — lumping together a senator’s child with a
foster kid living in a double-wide. They’ll behave as if orthodox Christians
are bigots who adopted their theology to justify their hatred.
When called on a level of hatred they’d never tolerate in
others, they retreat to their motte, their fort. Love trumps hate, they say.
All we seek is racial equality, dignity, and justice for the marginalized. But
as soon as the crisis passes, they march right back out to force students to
make their privilege walks, silence Christians in the workplace, and hector
Americans from every available platform and media outlet.
None of this justifies white identity politics. And
nothing I write should be construed to deny the reality that racism still
exists in American life and inflicts real harm on American citizens. But
treating people who are not racists
and not bigots as if they’re evil —
and then sometimes even attempting to suppress their liberties — is often the
very essence of modern identity politics, and it is exactly as divisive and
destructive as Lilla says.
It’s pretty simple, really. Progressives cannot make
false accusations of hate and expect support. And they most definitely cannot
seek to restrict another person’s most fundamental rights to speak or practice
their religion and expect compliance. Yet that is how conservatives experience
identity politics. In such circumstances, can the Left expect anything other than condemnation from its
targets?
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