American Awakening

Identity Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Time

Joshua Mitchell

• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781641771313
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

America has always been committed to the idea that citizens can work together to build a common world. Today, three afflictions keep us from pursuing that noble ideal. The first and most obvious affliction is identity politics, which seeks to transform America by turning politics into a religious venue of sacrificial offering. For now, the sacrificial scapegoat is the white, heterosexual, man. After he is humiliated and purged, who will be the object of cathartic rage? White women? Black men? Identity politics is the anti-egalitarian spiritual eugenics of our age. It demands that pure and innocent groups ascend, and the stained transgressor groups be purged. The second affliction is that citizens oscillate back and forth, in bipolar fashion, at one moment feeling invincible on their social media platforms and, the next, feeling impotent to face the everyday problems of life without the guidance of experts and global managers. Third, Americans are afflicted by a disease that cannot quite be named, characterized by an addictive hope that they can find cheap shortcuts that bypass the difficult labors of everyday life. Instead of real friendship, we seek social media "friends."Instead of meals at home, we order "fast food." Instead of real shopping, we "shop" online. Instead of counting on our families and neighbors to address our problems, we look to the state to take care of us. In its many forms, this disease promises release from our labors, yet impoverishes us all. American Awakening chronicles all of these problems, yet gives us hope for the future.

PART ONE

Identity Politics: Transgression and Innocence

A. THE STAIN OF OUR INHERITANCE

§1. Americans are a rough-knit community of individuals, forever reinventing ourselves and losing sight of our past. Taking the long view, this is a rather exceptional state of affairs. For the most part, the human race has divided into nations, with long and binding histories. In the Hebrew Bible, there is mention of seventy nations.¹ Ancient history is the tale of heroic actions, undertaken with a view to defending the nation.

§2. In America, we often confuse the terms “nation” and “state,” and lose sight of the meaning of nation altogether. The state we understand; we call our state our own because we are citizens within it, who have never-ending arguments about representation, law, policy, consent, voting, legitimate authority, and so on. To bring the state to life and to sustain it, we must constantly think and talk about these issues. Because of the ongoing need among citizens to think and talk with one another, the state is a fragile affair, held together moment to moment, as the long and turbulent history of the United States attests. The state can be undone. That is why we have laws against sedition.²

§3. The nation is different. The Latin word natio, from which we derive “nation,” literally means “birth,” which is to say, that from which we receive our inheritance. We consent to being a citizen of our state, but we consent neither to being born nor to the time and place of our birth.³ Some of us were born here in the United States, for example; others were not. Some of us can trace our lineage back many generations in this country. Those of us who cannot—I count myself partly among them⁴—often carry the weight of our more ancient inheritances from another nation or nations for several generations, which, with the passing years, is lifted as we come to feel ourselves more and more “American.” In three generations or so, the work is generally done.⁵

§4. Exactly when the weight of an inheritance lifts from our shoulders is not easy to establish. Reasonable people will disagree on this point. One of the main characteristics of modern life, in fact, is that our inheritance is in perpetual danger of being overshadowed by the anxious light we shine on the present and the future. Alexis de Tocqueville, the great French philosopher who visited America in the early nineteenth century, saw the problem long ago. Americans flee their inheritance and rush headlong into the future:

Americans cleave to the things of this world as if assured that they will never die, and yet are in such a rush to snatch any that come within their reach, as if expecting to stop living before they have relished them. They clutch everything but hold nothing fast, and so lose grip as they hurry after some new delight.⁶

§5. It is worth remembering, especially in America, that in other parts of the world, nations—inheritances—are still very much alive and binding. Because equality is so important to us in America, we tend to think of other people around the globe as persons, without predicates, who have no inheritance, and who are “just like us.” The most important work of political theory in the second half of the twentieth century—A Theory of Justice, written by John Rawls—is premised on our American intuition that we can build a just political community with citizens who have no history.⁷ Only in America. In the rest of the world, on the contrary, most citizens acknowledge that the inheritance of their nation still binds them. Reasonable people will disagree about how intact that inheritance is, and even about what that inheritance is—but in America we often unreasonably conclude that inheritance is not binding at all.

§6. Throughout history, then, the human race has divided itself into nations, into different kinds of peoples, having different inheritances. As recently as the 1960s, we identified ourselves as distinct kinds of people, without the need to use additional terms. “He is Lebanese.” “She is French.” This was not limited to political distinctions alone; we also treated religion this way. “He is Protestant.” She is “Roman Catholic.” Ethnic distinctions—prone to historical drift and imaginative construction—were handled in the same manner. “He is Phoenician.” “She is Viking.” Racial distinctions, too.

§7. As we entered the 1990s, however, a new term became ubiquitous in our everyday vocabulary: “identity.” As a philosophical term, identity has a long history. David Hume famously wrote about it in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739),⁸ with a view to showing just how transitive personal identity was. Sigmund Freud, whose monumental book Civilization and Its Discontents (1930)⁹ is a classic in the academic literature of psychology, would seem to be a work very much concerned with identity. He, like Hume, saw the fragility of human ego, but never once uses the term identity. In Freud’s framework, the agonistic wrestling match between the id, ego, and superego, which raised doubts about where the self begins and ends, seemed not to require the term at all. Erik Erikson’s Identity and the Life Cycle (1959)¹⁰ is among the first works in which the term identity is used systematically in the psychological literature; but there, too, his concern was the instability of the self throughout the life cycle, especially in the transition from adolescence to adulthood. Our use of the term during the 1990s and since that time has not indicated something transitory and fragile, but rather something firm and irrefutable. The term now has this more self-assured meaning whenever it is used. Instead of being “Lebanese,” I might instead proudly announce, “My identity is Lebanese”; “my gender identity is male”; “my religious identity is Protestant”; “my ethnic identity is Phoenician”; and so on. What is going on here? Why add the term identity at all, when to a generation before, it seemed so unnecessary—indeed inappropriate, since it indicated something unstable rather than firm and irrefutable?

§8. The first answer is that in its more innocent and innocuous usage today, the term “identity” is simply the verbal upgrade and fashionable equivalent of what we once recognized the term “kind” to mean. Because the meaning of identity morphed from referring to something unstable to referring to something stable, we can understand why it came to be synonymous with the notion of a stable kind. On that basis, many Americans today declare that they have an American identity. Bearing this meaning in mind, when critics suggest that the term identity is unnecessary or pernicious, the response often heard is that people have had identities for all of human history, and that it is therefore impossible to eliminate the word. This response is understandable—but only when identity is synonymous with kind, and has no further meaning.¹¹

§9. The second answer is that the term “identity” has another and more radical meaning, which is fundamentally different from “kind.” Without this more radical meaning, the term probably never would have taken hold in the 1990s in the first place. I am speculating here, but it seems plausible that the innocent usage of the term identity, which today pertains to relatively stable kinds, is downstream of its more radical meaning, because it was only through its radical meaning that the term identity came to mean something stable rather than unstable, which is in keeping with the domestication that generally happens to all radical ideas.¹² This evolved meaning of identity involves not so much a specification of a kind but a specification of a relationship. More importantly, the relationship is of a specific type, with discernible religious overtones: the unpayable and permanent debt one kind owes another. In America and in Europe, we know which groups identity politics declares to be the debtors and which groups it declares to be the creditors. To think clearly about the framework of identity politics, rather than becoming overwhelmed by the current attributions that haunt us all, I will use the more exotic examples I have thus far relied on for illustration. When identity is a mere proxy for kind, Lebanese identity might be considered one kind and French identity might be considered another kind, and nothing more need be said. A distinction is made, and that is all. When identity takes on this second meaning, something fundamentally different is involved. Lebanese and French identities now stand in a relationship to each other: one is the offending transgressor; the other is the innocent victim. Moreover, the transgressor and innocent victim confront each other with these standings not just for the moment of their current encounter, but permanently. Like the stain of original sin that marks Adam and all his progeny, the transgressor is permanently marked. He himself may have done nothing to contribute to transgressions that predated him by decades or even centuries. Little matter. He stands for the sum of the transgressions linked to his identity. Pressing Christian imagery further, though distorting it immensely, like Christ, the transgressor stands in as a scapegoat¹³ for those who purport themselves to be innocent, but who know in their hearts that they are not wholly so. The transgressor thereby covers over¹⁴ their stains, so that no judgment against them may be rendered.

§10. This second understanding of identity is more often what we mean today when we speak about identity politics. Identity politics has no single proponent; it is less a single theory than a large genus within which all theories of innocent victimhood are species, because all of them invoke the relationship between transgression and innocence.¹⁵ Identity politics began penetrating our vernacular in the 1990s, and since that time, and at an ever-escalating pace, more and more groups have self-consciously claimed that they, too, have an identity—with a view to revealing the transgressions that they, the invisible innocent ones, have suffered. Had Hillary Clinton won the 2016 presidential election, it is not improbable that she would have followed through with the Obama administration’s plan to recognize MENA—people, like members of my father’s family, of Middle Eastern and North African descent—as a group identity, distinct from whites, and therefore to be counted among the innocents rather than among the transgressors. By definition, we cannot now imagine the groups who will be counted among the innocents in the distant future, because the nature of the undertaking involves making visible a currently invisible group. The exercise is instructive, however, not least because it lays down a marker by which we can measure how unawares we will be caught in the future.

In the quasi-religious world of identity politics, innocent victims alone are hallowed; they alone receive what could be called debt-point recognition, by which I mean credits in the invisible economy of transgression and innocence. The rest of us—however much our legal, economic, or social status might otherwise indicate—have no legitimate voice. Indeed, our penance as transgressors is to listen to the innocents,¹⁶ and our lay responsibility in the identity politics liturgy is to assent to the right of the innocents to tear down the civilizational temple they say we the transgressors have built over the centuries—paid for, as it has been, not simply with money but with the unearned suffering of the innocents. Whatever the innocents wish to accomplish in politics is legitimate because the real basis of political legitimacy now is innocence.¹⁷ The past belongs to the transgressors, who today are an archaic holdover and an embarrassment. The future—politically, economically, and socially—belongs to the innocents. Little wonder that the prime transgressors—white, heterosexual men—who, in the world that identity politics constructs can have nothing important to say,¹⁸ eventually wonder if they, too, have been victims, and begin cataloging their own wounds. Hence, the recent emergence of what might be called a “men’s Me Too movement,” which presumes that the right to speak to and with other innocent victims hangs on the unearned suffering men have also endured through the ages.¹⁹

§11. I will offer more nuanced accounts later (in sections 23, 26, and 27), but looking back at the period from the 1960s to the 1990s, and painting with a broad brush, a number developments contributed to the emergence of identity politics in America. First, the collapse of the mainline Protestant churches shunted the idea of transgression and innocence from religion into politics. Second, the extension of the black American template of innocence²⁰ to other groups after the civil rights era served a growing class of political brokers, who benefited from speaking on their behalf. Third, the discovery by the academic left in America of European postmodern thought provided a framework more powerful than Marxism for attacking the legitimacy of historical inheritance and for distinguishing who is stained from who is pure.²¹ Identity politics has now incorporated itself into the heart of the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party is not, however, the source of identity politics. To justify being heard in America today, you and I must demonstrate our special standing as innocent victims. Having demonstrated that, we can take our place in the political firmament and become activists, committed—in our hearts, but seldom in our recurrent daily actions—to “social justice.”

There is much to say about this, but before delving more deeply into why identity politics has taken hold, and what it does to and in the body politic, I will pause to consider what identity politics purports to repudiate—namely, the liberal idea of the competent citizen. This brief historical excursion in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Part One: Identity Politics: Transgression and Innocence
• Part Two: Bipolarity and Addiction: Further Obstacles to the Retrieval of Liberal Competence
• Conclusion: Patient and Unending Labor
• Epilogue: American Awakening: Wuhan Flu Edition
• Acknowledgments
• Index