Two tribes going to war: When identity politics begets identity politics

March 2019 essay just prior to a year of riots

Recently, Sean Lundergan, a staff writer for the Student Life paper at Washington University, St Louis, opined that it was ok to discriminate against conservative students and to make them feel unwelcome. ‘Conservative ideas’ he said ‘do not deserve equal consideration to that afforded liberal and left ideas, because conservative ideas are not equal to liberal and left ideas… There is no legitimate argument for supporting Donald Trump and his allies, at least not one that holds up in any academic community worth its salt.’ And since ¾ of the student body were self-identified liberals, there was no ethical or pragmatic reason to ‘prop up fringe and right-wing ideas’ that ‘no one really believes’. Sean’s dismissal of bipartisan political culture is now very common on the left of the spectrum, not just in the United States but also the UK and Canada.

This is very dangerous. Casual ad hominem attacks on conservatives, the cavalier undermining of civil discourse, dismissing the possibility of citizen-based social compact, embracing sectarian 'intersectional' and 'critical race theory', legitimating any kind of identity politics -- these are likely surely to have one result. In his ‘manifesto’ the Christchurch terrorist Brenton Tarrant was very clear about his intention – which was to accelerate the culture war and to force neutrals on either side (so to speak) to choose a side. Referencing right wing YouTubers such as CutiePie and Candace Owens, the intention was to trigger a clamp down on the American conservatives and right wing identitarians on the part of social media corporations and on university campuses; and to solicit revenge attacks from Jihadists (cementing their perhaps accidental alliance with the identitarian left). The mainstream press has predictably played into his hands by rolling with exactly the moral panic over freedom of speech that Tarrant was hoping to provoke. And quite possibly, the attack on a Utrecht tram was the first terrorist response from the Islamicists.

The cycle has gone up a notch. Round one to Tarrant. But why is the mainstream left so vulnerable to this kind of provocation? There is some very basic political sociology at play here. Citizenship requires:

I. the suspension of violence as a way of solving problems

II. a shared [national] 'we identity' that overrides all sectarian allegiances, and

III. that all sides resist the temptation to point out whole classes of people as being 'beyond communion', unspeak-to-able and beyond redemption.

A stable and well-functioning democracy also requires some form of nationalism because only nation states can create and sustain a ‘society of individuals’ insulated from the claims of clannish clientelism and tribalism. Where the pull of the nation proves weak, the result is usually a failed state and the kind of violent instability that is endemic in countries such as Iraq, Syria, Somalia or Afghanistan.

This is unfortunate because large swathes of liberal opinion now equate any kind of national sentiment as suspect and potentially fascistic. Increasingly, progressives think they can afford the luxury of being selective in the application of these first principles of democracy. They pull their punches with certain kinds of ideological sectarianism and stifle any discussion with claims of 'Islamophobia' (as in 'Sam Harris is an alt-right Islamophobe'

). They broaden (and empty the meaning of) the category of 'fascist' to include any and all categories of conservative, including ant-feminist refusniks such as Camilia Paglia, Christina Hoff-Summers and Janice Fiamengo, classic liberal anti-fascists such as Jordan Peterson, cultural conservative commentators such as Ben Shapiro (a notable Jewish Nazi, no less) or YouTubers Tim Pool and Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad) and conservative academics such as Roger Scruton or Rachel Fulton Brown (the medievalist ‘white nationalist’). Orchestrated liberal/left and intersectional feminist campaigns have seen takedowns of conservative social media pundits on platforms such as Patreon and Twitter – to such an extent that there is likely to be a move to create alternative conservative platforms. And yet the same activists and pundits go easy on Antifa activists who make rhetorical mileage by endorsing street violence ('punch a fascist') and physical intimidation of opponents ; and refer persistently to ascriptive crimes of identity ('white privilege', 'kill all men' [e.g. Bahar Mustafa in London in 2015; Emily McCombs in America 2018 ] making whole classes of citizens guilty and reprehensible by birth. White, heterosexual men should put their hands down, take a step back, give up opportunities in favour of people of colour or sexual minorities – or just castrated according to one Georgetown feminist professor. White Americans should give up family inheritances in favour of random blacks and make personal white reparations [Chanelle Helm]. Heterosexual men should be shamed into dating trans-women. Perhaps most strange is the ways in which mutable and progressive class politics has been transmuted by the inflexible logic of race and ‘white privilege’ – despite the fact that Asians and Nigerians earn more than Caucasians and there is very good sociological evidence that family dynamics more than any other factor account for differential income and experiences of poverty.

You might fairly respond to the litany of stupidity referred to above by arguing that it is unrepresentative of mainstream opinion – which it is. But the fact that the mainstream turns a blind eye, that any discussion of the trans phenomenon, or the concept of decolonization or the pay gap or the patriarchy is shut down very quickly in the media and on campus – the fact that to make conservatives unwelcome in publicly-funded institutions as a matter of policy – this does have consequences. And as it turns out, what is good for the goose is even better for the gander. This is playground stuff and guess what, if you call people names they throw them right back at you. identity politics begets identity politics. Nativism and essentialism on the right takes exactly the same binaries that have become the common sense of the intersectional left, and simply reverses the valance. Thus for instance right wing identitarian and white nationalist Jared Taylor argued that the single biggest factor in the recent rise of the far right was Black Lives Matter, who after all, he argued, were seeking pretty much the same thing.

The only defence against all of that is an unqualified commitment to the principles of individual citizenship – and a commitment to put the interests of all fellow citizens above other non-citizens. Citizenship only works as a quasi-familial relation of symbolic consanguinity. It is, by definition, an exclusive form of solidarity. This means that conservative or liberal antagonists with whom you might argue must be owed allegiance and solidarity above any non-citizens – period! It doesn't mean that human rights and a commitment to treat people well qua humanity shouldn't be an important principle of public and private life. But if you value any kind of stable democracy, a common identity qua citizenship must come first. And because liberals and social democrats are forgetting this, they are in danger of reaping a dreadful harvest. A post-civic state is almost certainly a failed-state. There are plenty of Bosnian Serbs and Muslims in Canada who don't want to revisit that place. Just FYI, if you do get caught up in genocidal sectarian and communal violence, you don't get to choose what side, or whether or not to be a 'good guy.' There are no good guys. Statistically the chance that you would have been that heroic good German in the late 1930s is almost negligible. You would have done the maths and looked after your family first.

Sean Lundergan is an under-educated nitwit and doesn't understand the meaning of the word 'logistical'. He is also representative of a great swathe of opinion across the liberal/left intelligentsia. They have forgotten just how fragile and amazingly unique a process was the liberal parliamentarization of conflict. The English set out down that path precisely because the civil war was branded into the nation’s consciousness (casualties amounted to nearly 4% of the population, and over 40% in Ireland – more than twice the impact of the later famine). Unless they remember very soon, we may all get a taste of Srebenica.

In short, if you choose to normalise sectarian identity politics, then eventually some lunatic with a gun will act it out. If you choose not to, the hard bit is taking issue with those who are nominally 'on your own side' and breaking bread with those who are most certainly not.