[Oe List ...] The End of Identity Liberalism - NYTimes.com

[Judy Lindblad via OE]

Helpful...thanks, Judy

On Sun, Nov 20, 2016 at 6:38 AM, Randy Williams via OE <
oe at lists.wedgeblade.net> wrote:

> Colleagues,
> Another thoughtful theory about the plight of liberalism, prompted by the
> recent U.S. election.
> Randy
>
> http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/sunday/the-
> end-of-identity-liberalism.html
>
> The End of Identity Liberalism
> November 18, 2016
>
> Opinion
>
> It is a truism that America has become a more diverse country. It is also
> a beautiful thing to watch. Visitors from other countries, particularly
> those having trouble incorporating different ethnic groups and faiths, are
> amazed that we manage to pull it off. Not perfectly, of course, but
> certainly better than any European or Asian nation today. It’s an
> extraordinary success story.
>
> But how should this diversity shape our politics? The standard liberal
> answer for nearly a generation now has been that we should become aware of
> and “celebrate” our differences. Which is a splendid principle of moral
> pedagogy — but disastrous as a foundation for democratic politics in our
> ideological age. In recent years American liberalism has slipped into a
> kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity that has
> distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying
> force capable of governing.
>
> One of the many lessons of the recent presidential election campaign and
> its repugnant outcome is that the age of identity liberalism must be
> brought to an end. Hillary Clinton was at her best and most uplifting when
> she spoke about American interests in world affairs and how they relate to
> our understanding of democracy. But when it came to life at home, she
> tended on the campaign trail to lose that large vision and slip into the
> rhetoric of diversity, calling out explicitly to African-American, Latino,
> L.G.B.T. and women voters at every stop. This was a strategic mistake. If
> you are going to mention groups in America, you had better mention all of
> them. If you don’t, those left out will notice and feel excluded. Which, as
> the data show, was exactly what happened with the white working class and
> those with strong religious convictions. Fully two-thirds of white voters
> without college degrees voted for Donald Trump, as did over 80 percent of
> white evangelicals.
>
> The moral energy surrounding identity has, of course, had many good
> effects. Affirmative action has reshaped and improved corporate life. Black
> Lives Matter has delivered a wake-up call to every American with a
> conscience. Hollywood’s efforts to normalize homosexuality in our popular
> culture helped to normalize it in American families and public life.
>
> But the fixation on diversity in our schools and in the press has produced
> a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of
> conditions outside their self-defined groups, and indifferent to the task
> of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life. At a very young age our
> children are being encouraged to talk about their individual identities,
> even before they have them. By the time they reach college many assume that
> diversity discourse exhausts political discourse, and have shockingly
> little to say about such perennial questions as class, war, the economy and
> the common good. In large part this is because of high school history
> curriculums, which anachronistically project the identity politics of today
> back onto the past, creating a distorted picture of the major forces and
> individuals that shaped our country. (The achievements of women’s rights
> movements, for instance, were real and important, but you cannot understand
> them if you do not first understand the founding fathers’ achievement in
> establishing a system of government based on the guarantee of rights.)
>
> When young people arrive at college they are encouraged to keep this focus
> on themselves by student groups, faculty members and also administrators
> whose full-time job is to deal with — and heighten the significance of —
> “diversity issues.” Fox News and other conservative media outlets make
> great sport of mocking the “campus craziness” that surrounds such issues,
> and more often than not they are right to. Which only plays into the hands
> of populist demagogues who want to delegitimize learning in the eyes of
> those who have never set foot on a campus. How to explain to the average
> voter the supposed moral urgency of giving college students the right to
> choose the designated gender pronouns to be used when addressing them? How
> not to laugh along with those voters at the story of a University of
> Michigan prankster who wrote in “His Majesty”?
>
> This campus-diversity consciousness has over the years filtered into the
> liberal media, and not subtly. Affirmative action for women and minorities
> at America’s newspapers and broadcasters has been an extraordinary social
> achievement — and has even changed, quite literally, the face of right-wing
> media, as journalists like Megyn Kelly and Laura Ingraham have gained
> prominence. But it also appears to have encouraged the assumption,
> especially among younger journalists and editors, that simply by focusing
> on identity they have done their jobs.
>
> Recently I performed a little experiment during a sabbatical in France:
> For a full year I read only European publications, not American ones. My
> thought was to try seeing the world as European readers did. But it was far
> more instructive to return home and realize how the lens of identity has
> transformed American reporting in recent years. How often, for example, the
> laziest story in American journalism — about the “first X to do Y” — is
> told and retold. Fascination with the identity drama has even affected
> foreign reporting, which is in distressingly short supply. However
> interesting it may be to read, say, about the fate of transgender people in
> Egypt, it contributes nothing to educating Americans about the powerful
> political and religious currents that will determine Egypt’s future, and
> indirectly, our own. No major news outlet in Europe would think of adopting
> such a focus.
>
> But it is at the level of electoral politics that identity liberalism has
> failed most spectacularly, as we have just seen. National politics in
> healthy periods is not about “difference,” it is about commonality. And it
> will be dominated by whoever best captures Americans’ imaginations about
> our shared destiny. Ronald Reagan did that very skillfully, whatever one
> may think of his vision. So did Bill Clinton, who took a page from Reagan’s
> playbook. He seized the Democratic Party away from its identity-conscious
> wing, concentrated his energies on domestic programs that would benefit
> everyone (like national health insurance) and defined America’s role in the
> post-1989 world. By remaining in office for two terms, he was then able to
> accomplish much for different groups in the Democratic coalition. Identity
> politics, by contrast, is largely expressive, not persuasive. Which is why
> it never wins elections — but can lose them.
>
> The media’s newfound, almost anthropological, interest in the angry white
> male reveals as much about the state of our liberalism as it does about
> this much maligned, and previously ignored, figure. A convenient liberal
> interpretation of the recent presidential election would have it that Mr.
> Trump won in large part because he managed to transform economic
> disadvantage into racial rage — the “whitelash” thesis. This is convenient
> because it sanctions a conviction of moral superiority and allows liberals
> to ignore what those voters said were their overriding concerns. It also
> encourages the fantasy that the Republican right is doomed to demographic
> extinction in the long run — which means liberals have only to wait for the
> country to fall into their laps. The surprisingly high percentage of the
> Latino vote that went to Mr. Trump should remind us that the longer ethnic
> groups are here in this country, the more politically diverse they become.
>
> Finally, the whitelash thesis is convenient because it absolves liberals
> of not recognizing how their own obsession with diversity has encouraged
> white, rural, religious Americans to think of themselves as a disadvantaged
> group whose identity is being threatened or ignored. Such people are not
> actually reacting against the reality of our diverse America (they tend,
> after all, to live in homogeneous areas of the country). But they are
> reacting against the omnipresent rhetoric of identity, which is what they
> mean by “political correctness.” Liberals should bear in mind that the
> first identity movement in American politics was the Ku Klux Klan, which
> still exists. Those who play the identity game should be prepared to lose
> it.
>
> We need a post-identity liberalism, and it should draw from the past
> successes of pre-identity liberalism. Such a liberalism would concentrate
> on widening its base by appealing to Americans as Americans and emphasizing
> the issues that affect a vast majority of them. It would speak to the
> nation as a nation of citizens who are in this together and must help one
> another. As for narrower issues that are highly charged symbolically and
> can drive potential allies away, especially those touching on sexuality and
> religion, such a liberalism would work quietly, sensitively and with a
> proper sense of scale. (To paraphrase Bernie Sanders, America is sick and
> tired of hearing about liberals’ damn bathrooms.)
>
> Teachers committed to such a liberalism would refocus attention on their
> main political responsibility in a democracy: to form committed citizens
> aware of their system of government and the major forces and events in our
> history. A post-identity liberalism would also emphasize that democracy is
> not only about rights; it also confers duties on its citizens, such as the
> duties to keep informed and vote. A post-identity liberal press would begin
> educating itself about parts of the country that have been ignored, and
> about what matters there, especially religion. And it would take seriously
> its responsibility to educate Americans about the major forces shaping
> world politics, especially their historical dimension.
>
> Some years ago I was invited to a union convention in Florida to speak on
> a panel about Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous Four Freedoms speech of 1941.
> The hall was full of representatives from local chapters — men, women,
> blacks, whites, Latinos. We began by singing the national anthem, and then
> sat down to listen to a recording of Roosevelt’s speech. As I looked out
> into the crowd, and saw the array of different faces, I was struck by how
> focused they were on what they shared. And listening to Roosevelt’s
> stirring voice as he invoked the freedom of speech, the freedom of worship,
> the freedom from want and the freedom from fear — freedoms that Roosevelt
> demanded for “everyone in the world” — I was reminded of what the real
> foundations of modern American liberalism are.
>
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
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