Identity politics fractures whole solutions
A lot of political discourse gives us an excuse to avoid our own responsibility for progress
My storage area is not quite this bad, but it’s close enough. And if yours looks like this, you have to understand a thing or two about responsibilities. (Image by levelord from Pixabay)
Any day now, I’m going to tackle the attic. Mindful of the success of 12-step programs, I have taken a first step by admitting that I have become powerless over the retention of stuff, so that my attic has become unmanageable. The clarifying moment arrived with our first frost, which suggested a nearing need to store the big cushions that make lounging on the back porch a summertime joy. There is no joy on snow-covered cushions, but there is also no longer any winter storage space for them inside.
Even so, I concede that I have weighed whether nature might let me shirk the task of clearing by sending me to camp, if you get my drift, before room to maneuver in the house runs out. That would leave the job to our daughter, who so far has expressed no interest in my childhood postcard collection or my high school yearbooks, nor in taking custody of her kindergarten drawings and middle school science projects, nor in reading the boxloads of files from the four books her mom wrote.
She doesn’t want the stuff and her parents don’t need the stuff, so my responsibility is clear: clean out the attic, man. It shouldn’t be a hard call, since taking responsibility for our stuff and our actions is the sort of thing that kindergarten teachers stress, beginning with stowing crayons.
But when it comes to matters more consequential than what we own, grown-ups often figure out clever ways to shift responsibility — that is, to assign blame elsewhere for what stymies or troubles us, and to insist that somebody else, then, needs to present us with a solution. I’d say that’s a key reason why so many Americans have lost faith in politics and democracy: A lot of us have come to believe that we’re in a group that is disadvantaged in one way or another, and we’re tired of waiting for somebody to fix things. To speak to that sort of group disaffection, campaigns s practice what’s known as identity politics.
The disillusionment of a group is often cited by way of explaining the appeal of Donald Trump to what he calls “the forgotten men and women of America” — people who feel that a changing world has left them behind, who believe he will fix their problems. But the malpractice of identity politics is a bipartisan dilemma. Both in its focus on segmentation of the electorate and in the tendency of politicians to raise unrealistic expectations that a rescue for some identified groups awaits, the practice of identity politics is exacerbating divisions among Americans.
Focusing on segments of voters, after all, draws both the energy and the impetus to make all of society better. And the whole of America is so much more than the sum of its parts. With so much of politics nowadays narrowcasted to salve the wounds of those parts, it’s hard to get buy-in for broader considerations that can add up to a stronger country.
Most of us can cite factors that surely limit us from achieving what we might hope. For some of us, it could be the circumstances of our birth, for others its our family pathologies, and for many it is the reality of our society’s ethnic and racial divides. But as real as these barriers are, overcoming them is neither entirely anybody else’s responsibility nor entirely beyond our own ability. The experts and politicians who seem to suggest otherwise — by assigning blame to some external “they” for whatever aggrieves a group — are setting us up for disappointment: The limitations they eagerly spotlight each election season are never overcome afterwards by the solutions that they so regularly promise.
Identity politics is really about people looking at issues through the lens of their own group, and then expecting benefits to accrue to their group. It is how politics has come to be played in 21st century America. When Joe Biden was running for president in 2020, his campaign website listed 19 different identity groups for which he had specific plans. These included tribal nations, women, people with disabilities, Black Americans, military families, union members, rural Americans, older Americans, the LBGTQ+ community, veterans, the Catholic community, students/young Americans, immigrants, the Asian American Pacific Islander community, the Indian American community, the Jewish community, the Muslim American community, the Latino community and the Arab American community. 1
White conservatives were not on Biden’s list, but that’s the group that Donald Trump’s three presidential campaigns have targeted for particular attention, despite policies during his term in office that did little to help them. Meanwhile, there’s an identity group that won’t self-identify, but which benefited most from the Trump term, as it would from another one: the wealthiest fraction of a percent of the nation’s population. Let’s not lose much sleep worrying about how things are going for them.
So what’s wrong with this focus on identity politics? For starters, it can yield hostility to those who aren’t in your group — or, as Gallup pollster Frank Newport rather gently put it in a 2021 essay, “the assumptions that people not in particular identity groups are responsible for the negative situation of those who are.” That blame game makes anybody who isn’t part of your group an “other” who hasn’t done enough to help you, building resentment across ethnic, racial, occupational and geographic divides. No wonder we seem clearly less inclined to come together as Americans for the good of all: nobody else gets the goods, we say, until we do.
To be clear, it is undeniably true that some Americans are uniquely disadvantaged by their racial and ethnic identity, and that benefits do not accrue equally to all. As a white male born in America in the second half of the 20th century, I’m in a cohort that likely came into the world with surer footing than almost anyone in history. We can’t gloss over the reality of lives that start with fewer opportunities than I’ve had because of the heritage of slavery that robbed Black Americans of the chance for generational wealth, or the cultural erasure that destroyed indigenous societies, or the ethnic and religious background that makes life more difficult for anybody who doesn’t look and worship like my clan.
But those realities don’t mean political actors are behaving responsibly when they play to specific galleries, or that we don’t each carry the burden of doing whatever we can for ourselves, notwithstanding the impediments of our birth and upbringing. To her credit, Kamala Harris hasn’t stressed her identities on the campaign trail; she rarely mentions that she could become our first woman president, and it’s left to others to note that she is Black and Indian American. In fact, Harris goes out of her way to note that her campaign is aimed at benefiting everybody. You may attribute that to smart politicking in light of racial prejudice and the record of the first woman presidential nominee, but it also could be true that Harris doesn’t wish to further balkanize our political identities.
We each carry a load of varying weight from our childhoods and our ancestors’ experience. Social scientists have so far tracked the impact of pathologies through three generations — meaning that the mental health limitations and the flawed behavior of a grandfather, say, can affect a grandson he may never know. Yet our grandpas’ share of the blame for whatever troubles we carry doesn’t lift off our own shoulders the responsibility for our passage in this world.2
Organized religion also shares some of the blame for our aversion to responsibility. Every time a preacher suggests that we turn over every care to God, or that it is the will of the Almighty that some candidate succeeds or some deed be done, it diminishes our personal responsibility for the outcome of our lives and our society. As a non-theologian, I’ll take a risk of calling that approach a misreading of the teachings of most faiths, and certainly of Christianity, which demands action of believers, not just talk. The writer of the epistle 1 John put it succinctly: “Let us not love in word or in talk, but in deed and in truth.”3
And certainly that’s the sensibility of the philosophers who have tried to establish a non-religious framework to guide us. The existentialists whose teachings emerged in the 1950s argued that humans alone mold who we are, which give us both freedom and responsibility. That freedom can be seen as a privilege, Jean Paul Sartre and others argued, but many people consider it a burden, one they do not wish to embrace.4
Besides, when there are politicians eagerly assigning blame, why should we take on that weight ourselves? Donald Trump tells us, for example, that China is to blame for Covid, that it’s Ukraine’s fault that it was invaded by Russia, that Joe Biden is to blame for last year’s Hamas attack on Israel and that Kamala Harris is responsible for the assassination attempt that injured him. He was tossed from the White House in 2020 not by voters’ rejection, Trump claims, but by Democrats’ cheating — a flat-out lie that he has convinced two-thirds of Republicans must be true. His felony conviction, the legal finding that his enterprises have engaged in fraud and the jury verdict that he sexually harassed a woman in New York decades ago are all the fault of his political opponents, not of his own behavior.
That’s quite a role model for us all, isn’t it? No wonder so many of us are not only reluctant to pitch in to help all our fellow citizens, but unwilling to weigh where responsibility for events really might lie, nor to consider taking on the duty of working toward better days. Maybe we missed the lessons on crayon stowing all those years ago. I’ve got to give that some more thought, which I’ll have time for, you know, as I’m cleaning out the attic.
https://news.gallup.com/opinion/polling-matters/357812/identity-politics-context.aspx?version=print
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9009746/
1 John 3:18
https://philarchive.org/archive/AKIJSE
BONUS VIDEO
My great friend Niki Haynes, an artist who is best known for her brilliant collages, has created a short video with a message appropriate for this election season. You won’t want to miss it. Check it out here.
DOWNLOAD OR LISTEN NOW: MORE FROM THE UPSTATE AMERICAN
IF YOU’RE A READER who wants to hear more of Rex Smith’s views, check www.wamc.org for his weekly on-air commentary aired by Northeast Public Radio. Here’s a link to the latest essay.
AND IF YOUR INTEREST IS SPECIFIC TO AMERICAN MEDIA, you can download the podcast of The Media Project, the 30-minute nationally-syndicated discussion that Rex leads each week on current issues in journalism. In the seven states where Northeast Public Radio is heard, the program airs at 3 p.m. each Friday and is rebroadcast at 6 p.m. Sunday. You can tune in live, too, at www.wamc.org, or get the podcast there. It has been called “a half-hour of talk about finding and telling the truth.” And it’s worth your time.
NOW, LEARN TO WRITE OP-EDS
If you’d like to learn how to write opinion essays — for newspapers, audio or digital platforms — check out the live 90-minute class that Rex co-teaches that is offered by Marion Roach Smith’s global platform for writing instruction, The Memoir Project. Click below for information on our upcoming schedule of classes.
Our next class is Wednesday, Nov. 20, at 11:30 a.m. Eastern.
Lots of our students have been well published — and you can be, too.
THANK YOU for reading The Upstate American, and for joining us in the conversation about *our common ground, this great country. I hope you’ll join us again next week — or send a message with ideas you’d like to see us address.
-REX SMITH