The Identity Politics Two-Step

White supremacy is for losers. 

Let’s say you have a lot going for you. I mean this in the broadest sense possible. You could have a great job and stellar education. Or you have a wonderful family and some truly great friends. Or maybe you’re just a valued member of your community, however you define community. You’re funny. Or a great athlete. Or the best poker player, skateboarder, dancer, golfer, painter, writer, cook, mom, dad, or dog breeder, in your slice of the world. In other words, you have things—accomplishments, abilities, hobbies, whatever—in your column to be rightly proud of or that simply give you real satisfaction or joy. 

If any of these things or a combination of them applies to you to any meaningful extent, you don’t need to brag about being white. After all, you didn’t do anything to be white. White isn’t an accomplishment, it’s an adjective and a problematic adjective at that. 

It’s problematic in part because to be frank, “white culture” really isn’t a thing—or much of one. German American culture? Sure. Irish American or Italian American culture? Absolutely. But even here, there’s a lot of diversity (Italian Americans in New Orleans are going to be a bit different than Italian Americans in Philadelphia or Los Angeles).  But what most people mean by “white” culture—both its defenders and its detractors—is either a kind of Hollywood or Madison Avenue composite or just some kind of subculture. The “white culture” of, say, Mississippi is just very different from the “white culture” of Vermont. It’s a bit like talking about Bulgarians and Spaniards as “Europeans.” The description captures something, but not very much. And “European” is a lot more meaningful as a concept than “white.”

Black culture, on the other hand, definitely is a thing, even though there’s a lot of diversity there, too. Oppression is terrible, but it’s great at building up cultural sinew among the oppressed. The story of Jewish culture is impossible to separate from the story of antisemitism. Irish culture is a pearl formed in no small part by English irritation. Ukraine is leaning heavily into its distinctiveness as a response to Russian aggression, both military and cultural. 

I think this is an important point that often gets lost in discussion of identity politics. Ethnic politics is not the same thing as identity politics. Sure, there’s an overlap, particularly at the rhetorical level. But ethnic politics is as old as America—much older, actually—and it expresses itself organically from the needs of specific communities. Identity politics is an abstraction, a heuristic, designed to reduce diverse groups to a single variable. Identity politics denies agency. Ethnic politics unites specific communities to act on perceived interests. It’s a bit of a paradox: Champions of “diversity” tout identity politics even though identity politics erases the diversity within groups. If a conservative says “all women think alike,” it’s sexist. But feminists often insist that all women see their interests the same way. If you claim that repealing Roe v. Wade is a “war on women” you have to ignore or deny the fact that women have a diverse range of opinions on abortion. 

Leon Wieseltier once wrote that identity can be thought of as “the solution to the problem of individuality.” But I think that’s actually backward. Individuality is more like the negation of identity. Or, put another way, identity is what you grab off the shelf when you lack individuality. It allows you to claim meaning, importance, and authority simply by being part of some group.

I’ve been making this point about “youth politics” for decades now. Even when I was young, I thought the habit of young people to take immense pride in being young to be kind of pathetic. You didn’t do anything to be young. Moreover, the idea that all young people share the same worldview is an insult to young people. It’s the cheapest form of identity politics. If your only case for a policy is that you’re young and therefore have special access to wisdom that cannot be articulated beyond “this is how I feel” or “you just don’t get it” then you’re not actually making an argument. Logically, it’s no different than saying, “We’re right because we have noble blood.” 

Indeed, the idea of noble blood is one of the oldest forms of identity politics; simply by virtue of an accident of birth, we have more authority than you.

 Identity is what you fall back on when you don’t have anything else to say.

The poverty of white supremacy.

But let’s get back to “white supremacy.”

We don’t know much about this evil cretin who set out to murder people in a Buffalo, N.Y., grocery store just because they were black, but I’m confident he was a loser before he became a villain. And he became a villain because he was a loser. For the most part, the actual adherents of white supremacy—as opposed to demagogues, opportunists, and cynics who pander to the losers as well as the merely confused and fearful—are among the weakest people out there. Their weakness—psychological, economic, political—is why they grab hold of “white supremacy” as a way to purchase pride or meaning on the cheap. 

This point has particular relevance for how we talk about “white supremacy.” On Tuesday, Joe Biden sounded off on the topic: 

“White supremacy is a poison. It’s a poison … running through our body politic,” Biden said, adding that silence is “complicity.”

“And it’s been allowed to grow and fester right before our eyes,” he continued. “No more, no more. We need to say as clearly and as forcefully as we can that the ideology of White supremacy has no place in America. None.”

Now, on the plain meaning of these words, I’m with Biden. But we need some specificity. Who are the white supremacists, exactly?

 Identity politics peddlers talk a lot about the need to dismantle “institutional white supremacy” but the paradoxical truth is that none of the institutions they have in mind are run or inhabited by actual white supremacists like the Buffalo shooter. Sure, there might the occasional 4chan lurker at, say, Goldman Sachs or the admissions department at Brown. But if their secret sympathies were made public, they’d be fired in a heartbeat. 

 Simply put, the New York Times, Google, Starbucks, et al., aren’t run or staffed by devotees of “replacement theory.” And yet, anti-racists suggest this is where the real fight against white supremacy must take place. These alleged bastions of white supremacy actually hold conferences and hire consultants to purge any hint of racism from their ranks. People like Robin D’Angelo are like Tangina the lady exorcist from Poltergeist, lavishly compensated to declare “this house—or business—is clean.”

The vast majority of institutions of power and influence in the U.S. are overwhelmingly against anything that can objectively be called “white supremacy.” The Klan doesn’t hire diversity, equity, and inclusion administrators or fund countless programs to exorcise white supremacy. Places like Yale do, because they’re wracked with guilt.

In other words, while white supremacy is a real problem, most of the activists and politicians who invoke the threat focus on rich, un-racist, institutions. It’s a bit like Willie Sutton’s line about why he robbed banks, “Because that’s where the money is.” 

Anti-racism has become a scheme to win political fights largely unrelated to the actual problem. 

For instance, yesterday, a Washington Post contributor wrote the following:

The same sort of thinking about race and birthrates now dominates the conservative Supreme Court. The leaked draft opinion isn’t about protecting babies. It is about protecting Whiteness. Specifically, White babies. Many others have pointed out that if Republicans really cared about babies and children, they’d help provide help for poor infants, child care, health care, better funding for schools, and the like. But their concern is not about babies and children in general — only certain babies. The Supreme Court draft decision is about protecting what conservatives believe is a diminishing demographic and their most valuable resource: White people.

Really? Whites have the lowest abortion rates of any group, while blacks have the highest. Black women account for a full one-third of all abortion procedures, even though blacks make up only 13 percent of the U.S. population. Clarence Thomas, a black man, reportedly believes that America’s abortion regime has racist and eugenic roots. Many historians dispute that, but it’s hard for me to see how that view is reconcilable with the charge that he’s a champion of white supremacy. But even if you can make that case—I’m all ears—it seems absurd to claim that the Supreme Court’s “white supremacy” is the same thing we saw on display in Buffalo. 

The identity politics two-step.

Don’t worry, I’m going to get to the right. But I think it’s important to understand how we got here. I’ve been fighting racists and antisemites on the right for a long time. But you know who made that effort more difficult? The left. 

For the last 20 years, Democrats and identity politics activists have been celebrating the coming demise of America’s white majority. Some argue, somewhat unfairly, that it started with Ruy Texiera and John Judis’ 2002 book The Emerging Democratic Majority. Personally, I think it started with the Hudson Institute’s report Workforce 2000, which helped birth the diversity industry. Others point to the belief that the Obama coalition was the key to a permanent progressive partisan hegemony. The idea was that “demographics are destiny.” Non-whites vote Democratic. Non-whites are going to outnumber whites and when that happens—ta da!—it’s liberal politics forevermore. 

It was all wrong, as Judis acknowledged a few years ago. The idea that demography is destiny is not always wrong, but the way it’s been used—by many on the left and the right—is basically as the plural form of identity politics. 

Indeed, there’s a certain amount of racism embedded in the idea that if you know what a population will look like you will necessarily know what it will think. As Yascha Mounk noted on the latest episode of The Remnant, Irish Americans were once among the most reliable Democratic voters. Not anymore. Indeed, Judis points to another fatal flaw to all of this. “The U.S. census makes a critical assumption that undermines its predictions of a majority-nonwhite country. It projects that the same percentage of people who currently identify themselves as “Latino” or “Asian” will continue to claim those identities in future generations.” That isn’t happening. 

And as Charles Cooke notes, it’s simply weird that celebrating the demise of the white majority is considered high-minded and normal, but lamenting it is the lowest form of racism. I’m not saying that some concerns about the demise of the white majority aren’t racist. Some definitely are. I’m saying there’s a bait-and-switch at work. When progressives cheer demography as destiny as a stand-in for eternal progressive political dominance, they insist they’re just making an analytical point about political trends. But when conservatives accept their analysis and worry about Republicans becoming a rump party, progressives assume Republicans object to this scenario not because they’re old-fashioned partisan Republicans but because they’re racists.

And that’s a big part of the problem because one of the best ways to create racists is to call non racists racist. As Sheri Berman—no right-winger she—explains:

Relatedly, research suggests that calling people racist when they do not see themselves that way is counterproductive. As noted above, while there surely are true bigots, studies show that not all those who exhibit intolerant behavior harbor extreme racial animus. Moreover, as Stanford psychologist Alana Conner notes, if the goal is to diminish intolerance “telling people they’re racist, sexist and xenophobic is going to get you exactly nowhere. It’s such a threatening message. One of the things we know from social psychology is when people feel threatened, they can’t change, they can’t listen.”

Taking the Bait

I know I’m running long, but I can’t leave it there. I don’t think the GOP or the conservative movement—such as it is these days—is institutionally racist. This is not to say there aren’t any racists on the right. There are too many of them, and their ranks are growing. 

The right’s real problem boils down to two things: conspiracy and cowardice. Broadly speaking, the right hasn’t become institutionally racist, it’s become institutionally paranoid. All bad things are intended and brilliantly executed by our enemies. If we lose an election, it’s because it was rigged. If immigrants vote for Democrats, it’s because that’s why they were brought here in the first place. If our team riots, the real explanation must be that it was an Antifa false-flag operation, or part of a Deep State entrapment scheme, or some other paranoid idiocy. I am constantly amazed by how many conservatives can simultaneously insist that Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, AOC, Bernie Sanders, liberal pundits, et al, are at once idiots and fools, and also part of some of the most elaborate and brilliant schemes to tear down this country. 

It’s important to remember that antisemitism, at its core, is simply a conspiracy theory. The Joooooz did this! George Soros, a 91-year-old, is pulling strings and orchestrating events all around the world. Such conspiracy theories encourage violence. Because if you think that powerful and sinister forces, bagel-snarfing puppeteers behind the curtain, are the authors of your misfortune and your loserdom, then the “system” cannot work for you and so must work outside the system or tear the system down or just plain murder people. 

I don’t think Tucker Carlson subscribes to the hard version of replacement theory, and I certainly don’t think he intended for anything like the Buffalo massacre to happen. But I do think he peddles conspiracy theories. I think he has helped to move the Overton window of right-wing paranoia and victimology. He hasn’t done it alone, of course. Donald Trump flooded the right with paranoia, victimology, and uncontrolled anger at “them” for their war on “us.”

And that brings us to cowardice. The right increasingly thinks that bullying and crudeness is courageous and caring about niceties and norms is cowardly. Standing up to bigots in our midst is cast as caving in to the leftist mob. On one issue after another, Republican and conservative “leaders” are terrified of telling anyone on their own side that they’re wrong. But real leadership isn’t about simply fighting the enemy, it’s about guiding your own followers to fight for the right things and in the right way. Elise Stefanik and her ilk aren’t champions of replacement theory, they’re cowards who think taking direction from the mob and telling the mob what it wants to hear is a form of courage. 

I don’t blame them for the Buffalo shooter any more than I blame the progressives who pushed their own version of replacement theory. But I don’t see how they’re helping, and that’s bad enough.