Between two identitarian politics? 'Uncle Sam' poses with cardboard cut-outs of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, November 2016.Jane Barlow/Press Association. All rights reserved.
In a recent essay for AlterNet,
Bill Fletcher defends the general concept of identity politics in the following
terms: "What passes for identity politics should actually be understood as
social justice struggles that aim for consistent democracy and become, as a
result, component parts of the larger class struggle. … This is not
self-indulgent activity by people who, for whatever reason, do not recognize
the importance of economics."
Many forms of identity politics amount to struggles for
different types of social justice, and are not simply concerned with personal
identity. Despite the intensely self-oriented conception of politics
promulgated by these cultures, all politics is ultimately a form of identity
politics. It's peculiar that only Hillary Clinton's campaign has been accused
of indulging too much in identitarianism by stressing Clinton's gender, whilst
Donald Trump's campaign is oddly not considered an example of identity
politics, even though he ran explicitly as a tough, white alpha male.
This may be true enough, but it seems that we are
nevertheless increasingly moving towards a political culture in which transgender
bathroom and locker room access is viewed as a more urgent task than tackling
growing inequality and the deterioration of workers' rights through the
promotion of gig economies.
The growth of contemporary identity politics, with its
expanding range of genders – take the concept of 'aero-gender', in which an
individual changes their gender based on their current environment – may reflect
less of a nuanced advance and more of an increasingly fragile sexual and racial
identity, stretched to the point of collapse.
Telling the inhabitants of the American Rust Belt or inner
city Glasgow that they benefit from 'white privilege' is not simply inaccurate,
but deeply insulting, and seems almost designed to alienate certain voters
sharply from those fellow members of the working-class who engage in virtue
signalling (an Alt-Right term, but potentially appropriate nonetheless) and
one-upmanship rather than compassion.
Of course, the extent to which any political action embodies
virtue signalling is ultimately impossible to gauge due to the inherently
performative nature of moral actions, but the fact that the concept is invoked
so often surely indicates the prevalence of whatever cluster of psychological
mechanisms lies behind it.
The intersections of gender and race also produce needless
hypocrisies: such as promoting multiculturalism whilst railing against 'cultural
appropriation'; promoting freedom of sexual relations and casual hook-ups as a
form of political liberation whilst demonising those who engage in such
behaviour.
A peculiar implication of cultural elitism surrounds many of
these issues. Consider Black Lives Matter. The priorities of most American and
British workers do not centre on the rates of black arrests and police
shootings, but rather centre on employment along with mistreatment and exploitation
by managers. BLM is a very important movement, but placing it at the centre of left
progressivism in the US (and to some extent in the UK) surely serves to
alienate many potential allies.
It is not simply the ideologies of identity politics which
are corrosive, but also the language. In Britain, the phrase 'coloured people'
is considered deeply racist, but the semantically identical term 'people of
colour' is thought to be progressively tolerant, respectful to non-whites, and
uttered only by those with the utmost respect for all living creatures.
Meanwhile, the archaic division of the world into 'men' and
'women' is thought by many to be extremely 'transphobic' and reactionary. The demand
(in Canada, now a legal demand) for people to refer to trans people using
particular personalised pronouns (beyond 'he' or 'she') not only violates free
speech (although it may confer personal respect), it additionally forces a
sharp reorientation in linguistic behaviour in a way that is not conducive to realistic
lexical change.
Many of the causes of contemporary identity politics grew
out of movements that were initially highly urgent and legitimate. But, having
achieved most of their major demands (i.e. the major demands of the LGBT groups
of the 1990s), a small sector of these groups were compelled to hang on to their
movements and so needed to find new enemies, new injustices, new forms of
previously invisible oppression. Hence the rise of acutely sensitive
microaggressions targeting sexist air conditioning and similar obstacles to
world peace. It should be possible to present and discuss genuine criticisms of
trigger warning culture without the resort to personal insults. These forms of
microaggressions against microaggressions
only serve to bolster this culture.
It also doesn't help that many trans and race issues on the
left are couched in academic 'theory', political science jargon which views
politics as an intellectual puzzle to be solved, rather than an actual state of
affairs to be tackled concretely. Suspicion of academic theory is known as 'anti-intellectualism',
with the prominent British political theorist and 'broadcaster' Richard Seymour
mocking it for being 'prolier-than-thou', as if using an ironic label removes
any obligation to engage with the arguments presented.
It may indeed be prolier-than-thou, but it is also sensible to
doubt the wisdom of the recent claim by the British Medical Association that
using the phrase 'expectant mother' is transphobic, since it could offend some
transgender and intersex people. Oddly, even though they are in an overwhelming
minority, offence taken by trans people is somehow deemed more legitimate than
offence taken by cisgender people. Many cisgender women are offended by not
being able to call themselves, or be referred to as, expectant mothers.
It is not difficult to find further examples of
self-defeating identitarianism. The recent trailer for the new Netflix show Dear White People has been met,
predictably, with the claim that the show is racist and divisive. The trailer
on YouTube currently has 50,000 likes and 460,000 dislikes. The show involves a
young black woman calling out white people for, amongst other things, wearing
offensive Halloween costumes. The show includes a scene in which a group of
white frat boys don black face, but instead of educating them about its
offensive history a group of black men physically attack the white students and
trash their party. It's unclear exactly how this is a positive message to
viewers – in fact, if anything the show reinforces the stereotype of young
black men as unusually violent. Consider the response a non-black and non-white
viewer would have to this show. A young Indian man, for instance, could hardly
be blamed if he opted against moving in next to well-groomed white students or
young edgy black activists. The show merely serves to cause further harmful
divisions.
To conclude, these social justice struggles need to be
accommodated by the left, but after a proper assessment. Race and trans issues
should have their prominence modulated exclusively by the social context they
find themselves in, rather than arbitrarily being assigned highest or lowest
prominence.
Perhaps the greatest current problem with identity politics
is that it encourages people to think that their personal identity is somehow
relevant when discussing facts and statistics. Many conversations about crime
and poverty begin with statements like "As a white man I believe that…"
or "As a woman of colour it is clear to me that…" as if personal
experience – however relevant this may be to other conversations – somehow
influences these facts.
The philosopher Richard
Rorty wrote that, "The heirs of the New Left of the Sixties have
created, within the academy, a cultural Left. Many members of this Left specialize
in what they call the 'politics of difference' or 'of identity' or 'of
recognition.' This cultural Left thinks more about stigma than about money,
more about deep and hidden psychosexual motivations than about shallow and
evident greed." As Rorty's comments suggest, preaching the gospel of
identity and gender fluidity will only serve to increase the mood of
anti-politics spreading through the minds of many Trump and UKIP supporters.
Laurie Penny said
last year that the reason she didn't want to publicly debate Milo Yiannopoulos
is because she knew she'd lose. Instead of debating their enemies like Milo,
many leftists engage in no-platforming, refusing to 'normalise' reactionary
views yet simultaneously failing to counter them directly. The socialist playwright
Edward Bond said that "If you can't face Hiroshima in the theatre, you'll eventually end up in Hiroshima itself." Likewise, if
the left is not prepared to face, debate and hold the alt-right to account, we
shouldn't be surprised when conservatism – as already predicted – becomes the
new radicalism.