Why Do Conservatives Hate Identity Politics So Much?
Conservatives have always viewed the quest for equality as a zero-sum game.
While John Adams was away at the Second Continental Congress, his wife Abigail was concerned he would forget about her. Not literally, of course, but in the nation’s new code of laws. So she wrote him a letter and advised him to “remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors.” She warned, “Do not put such unlimited power in the hands of the husbands.”
John Adams laughed off her suggestion. He and his fellow “revolutionaries” knew “better than to repeal our Masculine systems.” America would not succumb to the “despotism of the petticoat.”
Consequently, the founding fathers consigned women and non-whites to decades — in fact centuries — of subjugation, while they gave themselves more agency than ever before.
That conclusion is not up for debate, but somehow Andrew Sullivan thinks it is. He recently moaned that liberals are wrong to understand America’s “bedrock principles” like free speech “as mere masks for ‘white male’ power, code words for the oppression of women and nonwhites.”
But is that such an unfair interpretation of American history? From the United States’ infancy, white men have shaped, codified, and manipulated our laws to favor them. Men, as Abigail observed in that same letter, are “Naturally Tyrannical.” Such words, I’m sure, were not arbitrarily chosen.
To Sullivan’s credit, he does acknowledge that history can “affect and structure our discourse.” However, he doesn’t want those with privilege to constantly have to “check it.” It should be good enough, he contends, for the privileged to recognize existing power differentials, but only “to a degree.” And it is him, not those clamoring for greater recognition and power, who knows how great that degree should be.
David Brooks is another conservative who distrusts the judgement of those highlighting his privilege. In a recent column, he complained about “identity politics warriors” and their misplaced desire of fostering a more open public forum. Ever vigilant, Brooks sees right through Black Lives Matter protestors and the #MeToo movement. They’re not seeking a more perfect union. No! Their demands to be heard are really just “a mass mobilization to gain power for the tribe.”
Yes, you just read that right: disadvantaged “tribes” protesting the clear inequities of the status quo are the ones who are power-hungry.
For conservatives like Brooks and Sullivan, the quest for equality is a zero-sum game. Incorporating “those who previously had no standing” into the “parameters of public speech” necessitates a removal of freedom from those who were already being heard. A more inclusive society will inevitably water down the influence of their white, male worldview.
I understand their unease with this development—up to a point. It’s hard to hear honest critiques of a world that has disproportionately benefitted people like you. It calls into question the legitimacy of your success. This is what Brooks is trying to articulate when he writes:
Identity politics takes individual merit out of the moral center of our system and asserts that group is, Goldberg says, “an immutable category, a permanent tribe.”
To his mind, the liberal pursuit of equality artificially tampers with the human marketplace— like Kurt Vonnegut’s satirical short story “Harrison Bergeron,” where the government makes everyone “equal every which way.”
Halting progress by playing upon the fears of a manipulated meritocracy is not a new conservative tactic. Edmund Burke used it during the French Revolution, when he cautioned that the goal of the masses wasn’t liberté, égalité, fraternité. On the contrary, it was “to break all those connexions, natural and civil, that regulate and hold together the community by a chain of subordination.”
Rip down the monarchy, Burke warned, and church-goers will become hostile towards their priests, employees will challenge their employers — even children may start to question the authority of their parents!
Defenders of an unjust status quo know they can’t just say, “Hey, look, society currently suits me super-well, so let’s not change it.” So they portray the enfranchisement of subordinated groups as attacks on individual relationships, too.
From this vantage point, those who question the legitimacy of the “natural” order are the true danger to prosperity, not the relationships which repress agency. This explains why Sullivan and Brooks accuse equality-seeking groups of “tearing the civic fabric” apart. The animating force of conservatism has always been a righteous resistance to forces subverting the social and political hierarchies of the day.
As John Adams himself wrote, “to teach that all men are born with…equal influence in society” is an ideology “taught in the school of folly.” Brooks and Sullivan are merely carrying on this conservative conviction, which made an otherwise brilliant founding father fear the “despotism” of free women more than a political system which excluded the majority of its citizens.
As the saying goes, “When you are accustomed to privilege, equality can feel like oppression.”
