By David French
Monday, January 08, 2018
If you live long enough, you learn a simple, sad fact.
Individual adversity does not necessarily build individual character. In other
words, spend enough time in the real world and you’ll see people experience
enormous challenges — like the loss of a spouse, the loss of a job, or severe
illness — and quite simply collapse. They’ll disappear into the fog of
depression. They’ll succumb to addiction. They’ll nurse a permanent sense of
grievance that renders them incapable of maintaining functional human
relationships.
In other words, the old phrase, “That which doesn’t kill
you, makes you stronger” is often a lie. A positive reaction to adversity isn’t
inevitable. In fact, when we see people respond to adversity with courage and
dignity, we applaud often because
it’s extraordinary. We highlight and admire those who’ve come through the fire
and emerged wiser and stronger because they offer insight and inspiration
that’s often rare in American life.
Similarly, group adversity does not necessarily build
group virtue. Again, this should be painfully obvious. We’ve seen oppressed
populations abroad respond to adversity and pain by doubling down on vengeance
and violence. At home, it’s hardly the case that membership in a historically
marginalized community builds special strength and virtue in every member of
that community. Indeed, in a country as large and diverse as ours, not every
member of a historically marginalized community has faced meaningful adversity,
and not every member of a historically powerful community has enjoyed
privilege.
These truths should be self-evident, but they’re not.
Consider this tweet from the Democratic party’s official account:
Let’s elect:
✅Black women
✅LGBT women
✅Muslim women
✅Disabled women
✅Jewish women
✅Latina women
✅Millennial women
✅Jewish women
✅AAPI women
✅More.
Women.https://t.co/V2ihKEZjRY
— The Democrats (@TheDemocrats)
January 7, 2018
Obviously inspired by the #MeToo movement, the #Resistance,
and the Women’s March, this sentiment illustrates what’s wrong with identity
politics. Is it really the case that membership in any of these groups renders
a person more qualified for public office? Can we presume that more women in
politics will mean a better government and better nation? Do we presume that
the victimization of some women makes all women’s voices more valuable?
Our progressive culture certainly doesn’t apply that
logic to men — even though men face large-scale adversity as well. Men are more
likely to be victims of violent crime than women. They’re more likely to be
killed at work and at war. They have shorter lifespans. They are less likely to
attend or graduate from college. They have much higher rates of suicide and
illicit drug use. In other words, in multiple key areas of American life men as
a group face greater adversity than women as a group. Yet to the extent our
progressive culture ascribes a group identity to men, it’s all too often as
toxic oppressors — not as humans facing their own unique challenges.
Social movements go awry the instant they move from
justice to identity politics. Movements like #MeToo are immensely valuable when
they can lead to awareness and — crucially — accountability for the individuals
who commit legal and moral wrongs. Reliably imposing individual justice on
predators can have just as profound a positive cultural effect as permitting
predators to victimize women with impunity can have negative effects. In other
words, justice is a culture change —
especially when justice has been systematically denied.
Identity politics, however, exploits suffering for the
sake of power. Ambitious politicians hitch their wagons to other people’s pain.
It’s odd that Democrats would argue that a person’s life experience as a Jewish
woman, a black woman, an LGBT woman, or a Millennial woman should drive them to
the same conclusions about health-care policy, gun rights, abortion rights,
foreign policy, economic policy, and tax rates. It’s odd how Democrats would argue
that those shared views would render, say, a wealthy LGBT woman who’s never
experienced sexual harassment as a more “authentic” standard-bearer for women
than a conservative woman who’s an actual rape victim.
It’s simple, really. Membership in a particular
demographic group does not always produce suffering. Even when there is
suffering, it does not always produce wisdom or virtue. Moreover, even when the
response to suffering is virtuous, it does not produce ideological uniformity.
Thus, it’s vitally important that we evaluate politicians as individuals. We
don’t need more of any given demographic in American politics, we need better people in American politics — regardless
of their group identity.
Identity politics rejects all these realities. It’s built
on a series of fundamental untruths — that membership in particular demographic
groups equates with victimization, victimization produces wisdom, and this
wisdom is progressive and uniform across each and every marginalized victim
group. The result is toxic. Because it flies in the face of reality, identity
politics can only be maintained through tribalism and bullying. Dissenters are
punished. Diversity of thought is suppressed. The virtue of accountability is
transformed in short order into the vice of group blame.
As with every social movement in our hyper-politicized
time, #MeToo is at a crossroads. It can retain its focus on justice and
maintain its extraordinary potency. Or it can devolve into just another
partisan movement that attempts to carve America into ideologically uniform
interest groups. The problem in our culture isn’t “men.” It’s individual males.
The political answer isn’t “women” (or, more precisely, “progressive women”).
It’s individuals who seek justice. Any other approach risks sacrificing real
cultural progress for the sake of short-term political gain.
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