“Feeding Off Each Other”
A Treatise on How the Identity Politics of the Left Gave Rise to the Alt-Right (Part I)
Introduction
In his 2018 article, “The White-Supremacy Surge,” attorney, journalist, and author David French took a closer look at the rise of the “alt-right” (or the “alternative right”). The alt-right is defined by the Associated Press as an ideology “which emphasizes preserving and protecting the white race in the United States.” French claims that the rise of this white supremacist movement is caused by the decline of faith and family. While these are elements that have played a role in the recent emergence of the alt-right, this reason alone is not capable of answering more comprehensive questions about the movement’s origins.
A deeper understanding of the alt-right helps to illuminate the central dynamics of exclusive identity politics and its effects on people’s ideologies. I predict to see the alt-right movement remain significant as long as exclusive identity politics remains a dominant attribute of the political Left.
First, let us explore why Mr. French’s explanation of the alt-right is incomplete. French references “[a] Voter Study Group survey of Trump voters [which] showed that the less churchgoing they were, the more likely they were to say that being white was ‘very important’ to their identity . . . . And, it so happens, the non-churchgoing cohort — as Ross Douthat observed in the New York Times — is ‘less likely to have college degrees, less likely to be married and more likely to be divorced.’ ” From this evidence, French concludes that the rise of white supremacy is caused by the decline of faith and family. “[A] secularizing Right is not a better Right,” he declares. People “need purpose, and the aimless or despairing man is ripe for radicalization.”
This explanation, while it may be accurate, fails to fully explain why people are turning to the alt-right in particular. They may be “ripe for radicalization,” but why, ultimately, do they become radicalized? And why is the political Right more susceptible to this radicalization than a much more secular political Left?
Chapter One: Two Kinds of Identity Politics
The answer to these questions has to do with identity politics. In his 2017 article explaining identity politics, Vox journalist German Lopez asserted that “[e]very single step in the push to end systemic racism — from the abolition of slavery to the civil rights movement to Black Lives Matter — was and is part of what’s now known as identity politics today.” On the face of it, this is a true statement; however, it hides some very important distinctions because there are actually two kinds of identity politics.
The first kind is what I call inclusive identity politics and it is synonymous with the term “common-humanity identity politics” used by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt in their book, The Coddling of the American Mind. This kind of identity politics, they explain, mobilizes identity “in ways that emphasize an overarching common humanity while making the case that some fellow human beings are denied dignity and rights because they belong to a particular group.”*
This is the identity politics of the civil rights movement and a shining example of its use is Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. “When the architects of our Republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir,” King proclaimed before some 250,000 people gathered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. “This note was a promise that all men — yes, black men as well as white men — would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Rev. King called upon the country to value marginalized black Americans as equals based on the fact that they shared a common identity as Americans and as humans. On the other hand, the second kind of identity politics, exclusive identity politics, calls for the value of marginalized groups based on the very identity that makes them different. Sonia Kruks, an Oberlin College politics professor, defines this second kind of identity politics by contrasting it with the civil rights movements that preceded it:
[W]hat makes [exclusive] identity politics a significant departure from earlier [inclusive identity politics] . . . is its demand for recognition on the basis of the very grounds on which recognition has previously been denied . . . . The demand is not for inclusion within the fold of “universal humankind,” on the basis of shared human attributes . . . . Rather, what is demanded is respect for oneself as different. An earlier advocate of black equality, such as W. E. B. DuBois, argued for the advancement of black dignity, self-respect, and recognition, for a “social regeneration of the negro” . . . through full political participation, education, and entry into Western culture. By contrast, with the slogan “Black is beautiful” and its stress on the value of black culture, the black power movement of the 1960s demanded recognition and respect on the basis of difference rather than admission to a universal humanity.
The Left did not immediately adopt exclusive identity politics. In fact, prominent figures on the left have outrightly rejected exclusive identity politics, such as in 2004 when then-Senate candidate Barack Obama declared that “[t]here’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.” However, author and law professor Amy Chua observes that “the contemporary Left is pointedly exclusionary.”
It was the adoption of exclusive identity politics by the mainstream Left, which led reactionaries on the Right to adopt exclusive identity politics themselves. The alt-right movement demands recognition and respect for white Americans on the basis of their difference: whiteness. But why are white Americans, a group that has historically been recognized and respected before other groups, now demanding recognition and respect? It is because they have been ostracized by the concepts that the Left’s exclusive identity politics has produced: cultural appropriation and intersectionality.
* Greg Lukianoff & Jonathan Haidt. The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure. Penguin Press, 2018, print, p. 60.
Photo by Anthony Crider, (CC BY 2.0) https://www.flickr.com/photos/acrider/35780277204/in/photostream/
