By Dan Williams
Since President Trump’s election, there has been much finger pointing in what amounts to a cultural “whodunnit.” One of the targets of the commentators has been that nebulous phrase “identity politics.” The precise causes of the 2016 election result will remain obscure for some time, but we need a narrative now to make some sense of it all. Unfortunately, many have taken this as an opportunity to vindicate some grudge they have with the way things have been done. To avoid caricature, let us interrogate for ourselves the concept of identity politics.
First, what many supporters of Trump don’t seem to see is that he is the very embodiment of the sort of victimhood-obsessed, “identitarian” outlook they so deride. Trump is, in many ways, the ultimate identity politician. His contempt for all things “other,” especially “the elite order,” his direct appeal to a specific demographic, the way he shifts blame for his own shortcomings onto others: These are all things we normally recognize as unsavory pandering to groupthink. But in the political arena, we suddenly find it appealing.
This election will hopefully make it clear that most voters don’t care about coherent and feasible policy platforms. Indeed, they rarely have. This is a fact that political scientists have known for decades, as is outlined in the 2016 book Democracy for Realists. Voters are far more likely to be swayed by other factors, such as their social identity, where they have grown up, and how they were raised, than by a reasonable assessment of a candidate’s ability to govern.
This shouldn’t be surprising. Most people have busy lives to attend to. The opportunity costs associated with learning about the intricacies of health care, immigration, the national debt, foreign policy, and a host of other national issues, far outweigh the influence any single vote will have. Most people don’t have a clue about what should be done from a policy perspective; rather, they have some vague “feeling” about “what’s going on,” based on specious “observations” and self-selected news sources. But these feelings and intuitions are highly unreliable, and a rational voter they do not make.
Again, these are facts uncovered by political scientists. The individual rational voter is, to a large extent, a myth. We see the influence of social identity in something such as climate change. If you, a believer in climate change, find yourself in a social group that views climate change with total contempt, where public support for the thesis will entail ridicule, it is actually rational, if cowardly, to modify or subdue your beliefs in order to remain in good standing with the group. Psychologically, the truth matters less than our desire to conform to social identities. The debate over “identity politics” must acknowledge this fact.
Few of us like identity politics because it makes victims of us all. Generally speaking, we like to think that hard work and perseverance pay out in the end. We like to feel responsible for our success. But, the identity politician proclaims, you never can be. The individual must be subservient to the group’s political and social goals. Strength comes in numbers. Only a member of a highly privileged group, which had few well-defined political and social goals not yet achieved, would fail to recognize the necessity of forming voting blocs. In the context of politics, this shouldn’t be surprising.
We are less likely to be forgiving of the groupthink mentality, which identity politics encourages, outside the political context. Now, I see some English student striding up, waving their fist, yelling “There is no outside the political context,” which is the whole attitudinal problem. Of course there is.
