Identity

11 FROM IDENTITY TO IDENTITIES

The 1960s witnessed the emergence of a series of powerful new social movements across the world’s developed liberal democracies. In the United States, the civil rights movement demanded that the country fulfill the promise of racial equality in the Declaration of Independence and written into the Constitution at the end of the Civil War. This was soon followed by the feminist movement, which similarly sought equal treatment for women, a cause that both stimulated and was shaped by a massive influx of women into the labor market. A parallel sexual revolution shattered traditional norms regarding sexuality and the family, and an environmental movement reshaped attitudes toward humanity’s relationship with nature. Subsequent years would see the emergence of other movements promoting the rights of the disabled, Native Americans, immigrants, gays, lesbians, and eventually transgender people.

Europe saw a similar explosion following the événements in France in May 1968. The old French left was formed around a nucleus of hard-core Communists, whose sympathizers included famous intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre. Their agenda remained focused on the industrial working class and Marxist revolution. In the 1968 uprisings, those preoccupations were displaced by many of the same social issues that were roiling the United States: the rights of minorities and immigrants, the status of women, environmentalism, and the like. Proletarian revolution no longer seemed relevant to the issues facing contemporary Europe. The student protests and widespread strikes that took place across France echoed similar developments in Germany, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, and other places. This “generation of 1968” on the left was no longer focused single-mindedly on class struggle, but rather on support for the rights of a broad range of marginalized groups.

These social movements emerged as they did out of the aspiration of liberal democracies to recognize equally the dignity of all citizens. But democracies never live up to this pretension: people are often judged not on their individual character and abilities, whatever the law says, but on assumptions about them as members of groups.

In the United States, these prejudices were, shamefully, reflected for many years in formal laws that did not allow black children to be educated together with white ones, or that denied women the vote on the grounds that they were insufficiently rational. But even when those laws were changed to desegregate schools and enfranchise women, the broader society did not suddenly cease thinking of itself in group terms. The psychological burdens of discrimination, prejudice, disrespect, or simple invisibility remained ingrained in social consciousness. They also remained because groups continued to differ from one another in their behavior, performance, wealth, traditions, and customs.

The new social movements that appeared in the 1960s arose in societies already primed to think in identity terms, and whose institutions had taken on the therapeutic mission of raising people’s self-esteem. Up until the 1960s, concern with identity had largely been the province of those who wanted to actualize their individual potentialities. But with the rise of these social movements, many people naturally came to think of their own aims and objectives in terms of the dignity of the groups of which they were members. Research on ethnic movements around the world has shown that individual self-esteem is related to the esteem conferred on the larger group with which one is associated; thus the political would affect the personal.^{1} Each movement represented people who had up to then been invisible and suppressed; each resented that invisibility and wanted public recognition of their inner worth. So was born what we today label as modern identity politics. Only the term was new; these groups were replicating the struggles and perspectives of earlier nationalist and religious identity movements.

Each marginalized group had a choice of seeing itself in broader or narrower identity terms. It could demand that society treat its members identically to the way that the dominant groups in society were treated, or it could assert a separate identity for its members and demand respect for them as different from the mainstream society. Over time, the latter strategy tended to win out. The early civil rights movement of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., simply demanded that American society treat black people the way it treated white people. It didn’t attack the norms and values that governed the way white people dealt with one another or demand that the country’s basic democratic institutions change. By the end of the 1960s, however, groups such as the Black Panthers or the Nation of Islam emerged that argued that black people had their own traditions and consciousness; black people needed to take pride in themselves for what they were and not for what the broader society wanted them to be. In the words of the poem written by William Holmes Borders, Sr., and recited by the Reverend Jesse Jackson, “I may be poor, but I am—Somebody!” The authentic inner selves of black Americans were not those of white people, but were shaped by the unique experiences of growing up black in a hostile white society. This experience was defined by violence, racism, and denigration and could not be appreciated by people who grew up differently.

These themes have been taken up in today’s Black Lives Matter movement, which arose in response to police violence in Ferguson (Missouri), Baltimore, New York, and other American cities. This movement broadened over time from a demand for justice for individual victims such as Michael Brown or Eric Garner, to an effort to make people aware of the nature of day-to-day existence for black Americans. Writers such as Ta-Nehisi Coates have connected contemporary police violence against African-Americans to the long historical memory of slavery and lynching. This memory constitutes part of a gulf of understanding between blacks and whites based on their different lived experiences.^{2}

The same evolution occurred within the feminist movement, only more quickly and powerfully. The demands of the mainstream movement were focused, like the early civil rights movement, on equal treatment for women in employment, education, the courts, and so on. But from the beginning an important strand of feminist thought argued that the consciousness and life experiences of women were fundamentally different from those of men, and that the movement’s aim should not simply be to facilitate women’s behaving and thinking like men. Simone de Beauvoir’s highly influential 1949 book, The Second Sex, asserted that women’s experience of life and their bodies was heavily shaped by the patriarchal nature of the society around them, and that this experience could be scarcely perceived by men.^{3} This view was expressed in a more extreme form by feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon, who argued that rape and intercourse were “difficult to distinguish,” and that existing laws on rape reflected the rapist’s point of view. While not all of the writers of such laws were rapists, she said, “they are a member of the group who do [rape] and who do for reasons that they share in common even with those who don’t, namely masculinity and their identification with masculine norms.”^{4}

The idea that each group has its own identity that was not accessible to outsiders was reflected in the use of the term lived experience, which has seen explosive growth in the popular culture since the 1970s.^{5} The distinction between experience and lived experience has its roots in the difference between the German words Erfahrung and Erlebnis, which preoccupied a number of thinkers in the nineteenth century. Erfahrung referred to experiences that could be shared, as when people witnessed chemistry experiments in different laboratories. Erlebnis (which incorporates the word Leben, or “life”), by contrast, meant the subjective perception of experiences, which might not necessarily be shareable. The writer Walter Benjamin argued in a 1939 essay that modern life constituted a series of “shock experiences” that prevented individuals from seeing their lives as a whole and made it hard to convert Erlebnis into Erfahrung. He saw this negatively as a “new kind of barbarism” in which communal memory breaks down into a series of individual experiences.^{6} This line of thought ultimately traces back, we should recall, to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose emphasis on the “sentiment of existence” valorized subjective inner feeling over the shared norms and understandings of the surrounding society.

The distinction between Erfahrung and Erlebnis is the same as the distinction between experience and lived experience. The latter term entered the English language via Simone de Beauvoir: the second volume of The Second Sex was entitled L’expérience vécue, or “lived experience.” The lived experience of women was not the lived experience of men, she argued. Women’s subjective experiences raised the profile of subjectivity as such, which was applied to other groups and categories: those based on race, ethnicity, gender orientation, disability, and the like. Within each of these categories, lived experiences were different: those of gays and lesbians differ from those of transgender people; a black man in Baltimore has a different experience from a black woman in Birmingham, Alabama.

The new prominence of lived experience reflects the broader nature of long-term modernization, one we noted earlier that gave rise to the problem of identity in the first place. Modernization entails the emergence of a complex society with an elaborate division of labor, the personal mobility that necessarily underlies modern market economies, and the movement from village to city that creates a diverse pluralism of individuals living next to one another. In contemporary societies, these social changes were deepened by modern communications technology and social media, which allow like-minded individuals in geographically separate places to communicate with one another. In such a world, lived experiences, and therefore identities, begin to proliferate exponentially, just like YouTube stars and Facebook circles on the internet. What erodes just as rapidly is the possibility of old-fashioned “experience,” that is, perspectives and feelings that can be shared across group boundaries.

The therapeutic turn that institutions such as schools, universities, health centers, and other social services had taken meant that they were ready to minister to people’s psyches—the isothymia driving each social movement—as well as to their material conditions. As the growing consciousness of racial minorities and women became stronger in the seventies and eighties, a vocabulary and framework were ready-made for understanding their experiences of marginalization. Identity, which had formerly been a matter for individuals, now became the property of groups that were seen as having their own cultures shaped by their own lived experiences.

Multiculturalism was a description of societies that were de facto diverse. But it also became the label for a political program that sought to value each separate culture and each lived experience equally, and in particular those that had been invisible or undervalued in the past. While classical liberalism sought to protect the autonomy of equal individuals, the new ideology of multiculturalism promoted equal respect for cultures, even if those cultures abridged the autonomy of the individuals who participated in them.

Multiculturalism was originally used in reference to large cultural groups such as Canadian francophones or Muslim immigrants or African-Americans. But these groups fragmented further into smaller and more specific groups with distinct experiences, as well as groups defined by the intersection of different forms of discrimination, such as women of color, whose lives could not be understood through the lens of either race or gender alone.^{7}

Another factor driving the shift of focus to identity was the increasing difficulty of crafting policies that would bring about large-scale socioeconomic change. By the 1970s and ’80s, progressive groups were facing an existential crisis throughout the developed world. The hard left had been defined for the first half of the century by Marxism and the Marxist emphasis on the working class and the proletarian revolution. The social democratic left, which unlike the Marxists accepted liberal democracy as a framework, had a different agenda: it sought to expand the welfare state to cover more people with more social protections. In both its Marxist and its social democratic variants, the left hoped to increase socioeconomic equality through the use of state power, both to open access to social services to all citizens and to redistribute wealth and income.

The limits of this strategy were evident as the century drew to a close. The Marxist left had to confront the fact that actual Communist societies in the Soviet Union and China had turned into grotesque and oppressive dictatorships, denounced by leaders such as Nikita Khrushchev and Mikhail Gorbachev, who were themselves Communists. Meanwhile the working class in most industrialized democracies grew richer and began to merge happily with the middle class. Communist revolution and the abolition of private property fell off the agenda.

The social democratic left also reached a dead end of sorts: its goals of an ever-expanding welfare state bumped into the reality of fiscal constraints during the turbulent 1970s. Governments responded by printing money, leading to inflation and financial crisis; redistributive programs were creating perverse incentives that discouraged work, savings, and entrepreneurship, which in turn limited the size of the pie available for redistribution. Inequality remained deeply entrenched, despite ambitious efforts such as Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society to eradicate it. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and China’s shift toward a market economy after 1978, the Marxist left largely collapsed, and social democrats were left to make their peace with capitalism. The left also came to share with the right an increasing disillusionment with government itself after failures such as the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal.

The diminished ambitions for large-scale socioeconomic reform converged with the left’s embrace of identity politics and multiculturalism in the final decades of the twentieth century. The left continued to be defined by its passion for equality, but that agenda shifted from its earlier emphasis on the conditions of the working class to the often psychological demands of an ever-widening circle of marginalized groups. Many activists came to see the old working class and their trade unions as a privileged stratum with little sympathy for the plight of groups such as immigrants or racial minorities worse off than they were. Recognition struggles targeted newer groups and their rights as groups, rather than the economic inequality of individuals. In the process, the old working class was left behind.

Something similar happened in European countries such as France, where the hard left had always been more prominent than in the United States. After the événements of May 1968, the revolutionary goals of the old Marxist left no longer seemed relevant to the new Europe that was emerging. The left’s agenda shifted to culture: what needed to be smashed was not the current political order that exploited the working class, but the hegemony of Western culture and values that suppressed minorities at home and developing countries abroad.^{8} Classical Marxism had accepted many of the underpinnings of the Western Enlightenment: a belief in science and rationality, in historical progress, and in the superiority of modern societies over traditional ones. By contrast, the new cultural left was more Nietzschean and relativistic, attacking the Christian and democratic values on which the Western Enlightenment had been based. Western culture was seen as the incubator of colonialism, patriarchy, and environmental destruction. This critique then filtered back into the United States as postmodernism and deconstructionism in American universities.

Europeans became more multicultural, both in fact and as a matter of principle. Immigrant communities, often heavily Muslim, grew in many European countries in response to early post–World War II labor shortages. In the early days, activists in these communities pushed for equal rights for immigrants and their children, but found themselves frustrated by continuing barriers to upward mobility and social integration. Inspired both by the 1979 Iranian Revolution and by Saudi support for Salafist mosques and madrassas, Islamist groups began to appear in Europe that argued that Muslims should not seek to integrate, but should maintain separate cultural institutions. Many people on the European left embraced this trend, regarding Islamists as more authentic spokesmen for the marginalized than westernized Muslims who had chosen to integrate into the social system.^{9} In France, Muslims became the new proletariat, with part of the left abandoning its traditional secularism in the name of cultural pluralism. Criticisms that Islamists were themselves intolerant and illiberal were often downplayed under the banner of antiracism and countering Islamophobia.

The shifting agenda by the progressive left in the United States and Europe had both advantages and drawbacks. The embrace of identity politics was both understandable and necessary. The lived experiences of identity groups are different from one another and often need to be addressed in ways specific to those groups. Outsiders to those groups often fail to perceive the harm they are doing by their actions, as many men realized in the wake of the #MeToo movement’s highlighting of sexual harassment and sexual assault. Identity politics aims at changing culture and behavior in ways that will have real benefits for the people involved.

By turning a spotlight on narrower experiences of injustice, identity politics has brought about welcome changes in concrete public policies that have benefited the groups in question, as well as in cultural norms. The Black Lives Matter movement has made police departments across the United States much more conscious of the way they treat minority citizens, even if cases of police abuse still continue. The #MeToo movement has broadened popular understanding of sexual assault, and has opened an important discussion of the inadequacies of existing criminal law in dealing with it. Its most important consequence is probably the broad normative shift that it has already brought about in the way that women and men interact in workplaces around the United States and beyond.

So there is nothing wrong with identity politics as such; it is a natural and inevitable response to injustice. It becomes problematic only when identity is interpreted or asserted in certain specific ways. Identity politics for some progressives has become a cheap substitute for serious thinking about how to reverse the thirty-year trend in most liberal democracies toward greater socioeconomic inequality. It is easier to argue over cultural issues within the confines of elite institutions than it is to appropriate money or convince skeptical legislators to change policies. The most visible manifestations of identity politics have appeared on university campuses from the 1980s onward. University curricula can be more readily altered to include readings of women and minority authors than can the incomes or social situations of the groups in question. Many of the constituencies that have been the focus of recent identity claims, such as female executives in Silicon Valley or aspiring women actresses and filmmakers in Hollywood, are near the top of the income distribution. Helping them to achieve greater equality is a good thing, but will do nothing to address the glaring disparities between the top 1 percent and the remaining 99.

This points to a second problem that arises with a focus on newer and more narrowly defined marginalized groups: it diverts attention from older and larger groups whose serious problems have been ignored. A significant part of the white American working class has been dragged into an underclass, comparable to the experience of African-Americans during the 1970s and ’80s. Yet one has heard little concern from activists on the left, at least until recently, about the burgeoning opioid crisis, or the fate of children growing up in impoverished single-parent families in the rural United States. Progressives today have no ambitious strategies for dealing with the potentially immense job losses that will accompany advancing automation, or the income disparities that technology may bring to all Americans, white or black, male or female. The same problem afflicts parties of the left in Europe: the French Communist and Socialist parties have lost significant numbers of voters to the National Front in recent decades, while the German Social Democrats’ embrace of Angela Merkel’s welcome of Syrian refugees led to similar defections in the 2017 elections.^{10}

A third problem with current understandings of identity is that they can threaten free speech and, more broadly, the kind of rational discourse needed to sustain a democracy. Liberal democracies are committed to protecting the right to say anything you want in a marketplace of ideas, particularly in the political sphere. But the preoccupation with identity has clashed with the need for deliberative discourse. The focus on lived experience by identity groups valorizes inner selves experienced emotionally rather than examined rationally. Notes one observer, “Our political culture is marked, at the micro level, by the fusion of a given person’s opinion and what they perceive to be their singular, permanent, and authentic self.” This privileges opinions sincerely held over reasoned deliberation that may force one to abandon those opinions.^{11} That an argument is offensive to someone’s sense of self-worth is often seen as sufficient to delegitimize it, a trend encouraged by the kind of short-form discourse propagated by social media.^{12}

The political strategy of building a left out of a coalition of disparate identity groups is problematic as well, as Mark Lilla has explained.^{13} The current dysfunction and decay of the American political system is related to the extreme and ever-growing polarization of American politics, which has made routine governing an exercise in brinkmanship and threatens to politicize all of the country’s institutions. The blame for this polarization is not equally shared between left and right. As Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein have argued, the Republican Party has moved much more rapidly toward the extremist views represented by its Tea Party wing than has the Democratic Party to its left.^{14} But the left has moved further to the left as well. In doing so, both parties are responding to the incentives that a two-party electoral system and popular primaries give to politically conscious activists. The activists most concerned with identity issues are seldom broadly representative of the electorate as a whole; indeed, their concerns have often alienated mainstream voters. Moreover, the very nature of modern identity with its emphasis on lived experiences creates conflicts within the liberal coalition. For example, controversies over “cultural appropriation” have set progressive blacks and whites against one another.^{15}

The final, and perhaps most significant, problem with identity politics as currently practiced on the left is that it has stimulated the rise of identity politics on the right. Identity politics gives rise to political correctness, opposition to which has become a major source of mobilization on the right. Since the latter term became a central issue in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, it is necessary to step back a bit and think about the origins of the phrase.

Political correctness refers to things you can’t say in public without fearing withering moral opprobrium. Every society has certain ideas that run counter to its foundational ideas of legitimacy and therefore are off-limits in public discourse. In a liberal democracy, one is free to believe and say in private that Hitler was right to kill the Jews, or that slavery was a benevolent institution. Under the U.S. First Amendment, one’s right to say these sorts of things is also constitutionally protected. But considerable moral opprobrium would rightly be brought to bear against any political figure espousing such views, since they run counter to the principle of equality enunciated in the American Declaration of Independence. In many European democracies that do not have the same absolutist view of free speech as the United States, similar statements have been criminalized for many years.

But the social phenomenon of political correctness is more complex than this. The constant discovery of new identities and the shifting grounds for acceptable speech are hard to follow: manholes are now referred to as maintenance holes; the name of the Washington Redskins football team is denigrating to Native Americans; the use of he or she in the wrong context denotes insensitivity to intersex or transgender people. The eminent biologist E. O. Wilson once had a bucket of water dumped on his head for suggesting that some gender differences had biological grounds. None of these words have any significance for fundamental democratic principles; what they do is challenge the dignity of a particular group and denote lack of awareness of or sympathy for that group’s particular challenges and struggles.

The more extreme forms of political correctness are in the end the province of relatively small numbers of writers, artists, students, and intellectuals on the left. But they are picked up by the conservative media and amplified as representative of the left as a whole. This may then explain one of the extraordinary aspects of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, which is Donald Trump’s continuing popularity among a core group of supporters despite behavior that would have ended the career of any other politician. In his campaign he mocked a disabled journalist; he was revealed to have bragged that he had groped women; and he characterized Mexicans as rapists and criminals. While many of his supporters may not have approved of each individual statement, they liked the fact that he was not intimidated by the pressure to be politically correct. Trump was the perfect practitioner of the ethics of authenticity that defines our age: he may be mendacious, malicious, bigoted, and unpresidential, but at least he says what he thinks.

By taking on political correctness so frontally, Trump has played a critical role in moving the focus of identity politics from the left, where it was born, to the right, where it is now taking root. Identity politics on the left tended to legitimate only certain identities while ignoring or denigrating others, such as European (i.e., white) ethnicity, Christian religiosity, rural residence, belief in traditional family values, and related categories. Many of Donald Trump’s working-class supporters feel they have been disregarded by the national elites. Hollywood makes movies with strong female, black, or gay characters, but few centering around people like themselves, except occasionally to make fun of them (think of Will Ferrell’s Talladega Nights). Rural people, who are the backbone of populist movements not just in the United States but in Britain, Hungary, Poland, and other countries, often believe that their traditional values are under severe threat by cosmopolitan, city-based elites. They feel victimized by a secular culture that is careful not to criticize Islam or Judaism, yet regards their own Christianity as a mark of bigotry. They feel that the elite media have put them in danger by their political correctness, as when the mainstream German press failed to report for several days an incident of mass groping and sexual assault by a crowd of mostly Muslim men at a 2016 New Year’s celebration in Cologne, all for fear of stoking Islamophobia.

The most dangerous of these new right-wing identities are those related to race. President Trump has been careful not to articulate overtly racist views. But he has happily accepted support from individuals and groups that hold them. As a candidate he was evasive in criticizing the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke and, after the August 2017 “Unite the Right” gathering in Charlottesville, Virginia, laid blame for the violence on “both sides.” He has spent a lot of time singling out black athletes and celebrities for criticism. The country has become further polarized over whether to remove statues honoring Confederate heroes, an issue Trump has been happy to exploit. Since his rise, white nationalism has moved from a fringe movement to something much more mainstream in American politics. Its proponents argue that it has been politically acceptable to talk about Black Lives Matter or gay rights or Latino voters as groups that can legitimately organize around a specific identity. But if one even uses the adjective white as self-identification or, worse yet, organizes politically around the theme of “white rights,” one is immediately identified, the white nationalists note, as a racist and bigot.

Similar things are happening in other liberal democracies. White nationalism has a long history in Europe, where it was called fascism. Fascism was defeated militarily in 1945 and has been carefully suppressed ever since. But recent events have loosened some of the restraints. As a result of the refugee crisis of the mid-2010s, a panic has arisen in Eastern Europe over the possibility that Muslim migrants might shift the region’s demographic balance. In November 2017, on the anniversary of Poland’s independence, an estimated sixty thousand people marched through Warsaw chanting “Pure Poland, white Poland” and “Refugees get out!” (This was despite Poland’s being home to a relatively small number of refugees.) The ruling populist Law and Justice Party distanced itself from the demonstrators, but, like Donald Trump, sent mixed signals that suggested it was not entirely unsympathetic to the aims of the marchers.^{16}

The proponents of identity politics on the left would argue that assertions of identity on the right are illegitimate and cannot be placed on the same moral plane as those of minorities, women, and other marginalized groups. Rather, they reflect the perspectives of a dominant mainstream culture that has been historically privileged and continues to be so.

These arguments have obvious truth. Perceptions on the part of conservatives of advantages being unfairly given to minorities, women, or refugees are greatly exaggerated, as is the sense that political correctness has run amok everywhere. Social media contributes heavily to this problem, since a single comment or incident can ricochet around the internet and become emblematic of an entire category of people. The reality for many marginalized groups continues as before: African-Americans continue to be objects of police violence, and women continue to be assaulted and harassed.

What is notable, however, is how the right has adopted the language and framing of identity from the left: the idea that my particular group is being victimized, that its situation and sufferings are invisible to the rest of society, and that the whole of the social and political structure responsible for this situation (read: the media and political elites) needs to be smashed. Identity politics is the lens through which most social issues are now seen across the ideological spectrum.

Liberal democracies have good reasons not to organize themselves around a series of ever-proliferating identity groups inaccessible to outsiders. The dynamic of identity politics is to stimulate more of the same, as identity groups begin to see one another as threats. Unlike fights over economic resources, identity claims are usually nonnegotiable: rights to social recognition based on race, ethnicity, or gender are based on fixed biological characteristics and cannot be traded for other goods or abridged in any way.

Despite the beliefs of certain advocates on both the left and the right, identities are not biologically determined; while they are shaped by experience and environment, they can be defined in terms that are either tightly focused or broad. That I am born a certain way does not mean I have to think in a certain way; lived experience can eventually be translated into shared experience. Societies need to protect the marginalized and excluded, but they also need to achieve common goals via deliberation and consensus. The shift in agendas of both left and right toward the protection of ever narrower group identities ultimately threatens the possibility of communication and collective action. The remedy for this is not to abandon the idea of identity, which is too much a part of the way that modern people think about themselves and their surrounding societies. The remedy is to define larger and more integrative national identities that take account of the de facto diversity of existing liberal democratic societies. This will be the subject of the two following chapters.