Identity-Based Grievance Politics: We Gotta Get Past This
At the dawn of the last decade, the financial crisis recovery was this country's biggest, darkest, and most foreboding problem. With effective stewardship by President Obama and his administration, and quite a bit of luck, the country recovered more quickly and more comprehensively than I expected. We don't have a crisis quite so pressing and overarching at the dawn of the new decade, although there's serious cause for concern that a new recession is around the corner and that Trump-era fiscal and monetary policy leaves us few tools in the toolbox to counter it. Still, the biggest challenge our country needs to overcome in the decade ahead is a cultural one, most specifically being an increasingly diverse society in which every demographic group is being culturally conditioned to not get along with others.
I've always considered myself pretty progressive on race for a white guy who grew up surrounded by cornfields on a Minnesota back road. This was true even before I went to college, but social science classes on college campuses even a generation ago when I went to school really hit hard on the notion of "white privilege". The term was provocative, and still is, but it's also important for identifying structural inequities in society that date back to the country's origins. Nonetheless, even in the late 90s as I became aware of the term, I was always nervous about it eventually being weaponized for partisan political reasons. It took a while to get there, but we're definitely there now.
When "white privilege" first left the college campus and found its way into the mainstream cultural conversation, my hope was that there would be enough nuance in its presentation that lower-income whites wouldn't feel villainized. But the combination of campus rabble rousers using the term as a bazooka in nearly every sociological conversation and Fox News provocateurs exploiting the term's overuse to ignite a backlash from its audience has killed any possibility of a "nuanced conversation about race" in America. Instead, more than a decade removed from America electing our first black President, race relations are the worst they've been in my lifetime and seemingly poised to get much worse before they get better. With each passing week, it becomes easier to come to the inescapable conclusion: this isn't working. This REALLY isn't working!
And it's not just a "black versus white" matter. Identity groups based on race, gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity all seem to be fragmenting into hostile tribes, each with a chip on their shoulder and self-identifying as victims of the "patriarchy". The narrative of endemic victimhood runs through their every public utterance, and the media and culture feeds the beast with news reporting and entertainment that elevates our gender, sexual orientation, and especially our race as the single most important identifying qualities about us. Watch any episode of "Saturday Night Live" from the past few years to confirm how drawing attention to our racial differences has become the punchline to....just about everything.
Obviously, whites and males are part of this identitarian grievance culture as well, with escalating incidence of backlash and even hate crimes against women, minorities, and Jews. Trump's base insists the backlash is a consequence of being demonized by minority groups hostile to them. Trump's critics insist the real hostility is a result of Trump stoking this bigotry. But it's ultimately a useless chicken versus egg argument. In both cases, the relentless escalation of identity-based grievance is driving both sides to radicalism....and further away from where we need to be if we're going to be a functional society that accepts its rising level of diversity.
So I ask this question to my fellow travelers on the political left who are more than willing to co-opt identitarian grievance politics to consolidate support among the aggrieved groups....what's the endgame here? Where do we get to the point where the original sin is absolved? The core premise of this brand of politics is that the structural bias can never be absolved. That may well be true from a sociological perspective, but it's an absolute cancer on our body politic if this narrative remains front and center in our national conversation as it does today. And with college campuses and pop culture radicalizing a new generation of young people to assure the grievance politics footprint grows still larger, we're headed for the kinds of bitter divisions that have for generations defined countries like the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Rwanda, with ethnic groups that have forever hated each other and have proven themselves incapable of living peaceably.
We have to get past this! A nation diversifying at the speed America is cannot function with its people dwelling bitterly on all the things that make us different. And those who point this out cannot be silenced with accusations of bigotry. It's hard to see what can break this national fever, but hopefully something in the decade ahead is able to.
Later this month, I'll return with thoughts on another of the country's biggest challenges in the decade ahead.
I've always considered myself pretty progressive on race for a white guy who grew up surrounded by cornfields on a Minnesota back road. This was true even before I went to college, but social science classes on college campuses even a generation ago when I went to school really hit hard on the notion of "white privilege". The term was provocative, and still is, but it's also important for identifying structural inequities in society that date back to the country's origins. Nonetheless, even in the late 90s as I became aware of the term, I was always nervous about it eventually being weaponized for partisan political reasons. It took a while to get there, but we're definitely there now.
When "white privilege" first left the college campus and found its way into the mainstream cultural conversation, my hope was that there would be enough nuance in its presentation that lower-income whites wouldn't feel villainized. But the combination of campus rabble rousers using the term as a bazooka in nearly every sociological conversation and Fox News provocateurs exploiting the term's overuse to ignite a backlash from its audience has killed any possibility of a "nuanced conversation about race" in America. Instead, more than a decade removed from America electing our first black President, race relations are the worst they've been in my lifetime and seemingly poised to get much worse before they get better. With each passing week, it becomes easier to come to the inescapable conclusion: this isn't working. This REALLY isn't working!
And it's not just a "black versus white" matter. Identity groups based on race, gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity all seem to be fragmenting into hostile tribes, each with a chip on their shoulder and self-identifying as victims of the "patriarchy". The narrative of endemic victimhood runs through their every public utterance, and the media and culture feeds the beast with news reporting and entertainment that elevates our gender, sexual orientation, and especially our race as the single most important identifying qualities about us. Watch any episode of "Saturday Night Live" from the past few years to confirm how drawing attention to our racial differences has become the punchline to....just about everything.
Obviously, whites and males are part of this identitarian grievance culture as well, with escalating incidence of backlash and even hate crimes against women, minorities, and Jews. Trump's base insists the backlash is a consequence of being demonized by minority groups hostile to them. Trump's critics insist the real hostility is a result of Trump stoking this bigotry. But it's ultimately a useless chicken versus egg argument. In both cases, the relentless escalation of identity-based grievance is driving both sides to radicalism....and further away from where we need to be if we're going to be a functional society that accepts its rising level of diversity.
So I ask this question to my fellow travelers on the political left who are more than willing to co-opt identitarian grievance politics to consolidate support among the aggrieved groups....what's the endgame here? Where do we get to the point where the original sin is absolved? The core premise of this brand of politics is that the structural bias can never be absolved. That may well be true from a sociological perspective, but it's an absolute cancer on our body politic if this narrative remains front and center in our national conversation as it does today. And with college campuses and pop culture radicalizing a new generation of young people to assure the grievance politics footprint grows still larger, we're headed for the kinds of bitter divisions that have for generations defined countries like the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Rwanda, with ethnic groups that have forever hated each other and have proven themselves incapable of living peaceably.
We have to get past this! A nation diversifying at the speed America is cannot function with its people dwelling bitterly on all the things that make us different. And those who point this out cannot be silenced with accusations of bigotry. It's hard to see what can break this national fever, but hopefully something in the decade ahead is able to.
Later this month, I'll return with thoughts on another of the country's biggest challenges in the decade ahead.
posted by Mark at 12:26 PM
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