Identity Politics and Tribalism

With progressives, it is identity politics uber alles. This is reflected in Biden’s cabinet, which includes the first African-American defense secretary, the first gay cabinet officer, the first woman of color to head OMB, the first woman DNI, the first Hispanic secretaries at Homeland Security and HHS and the first woman treasury secretary. Checking off all the PC racial, ethnic, gender and LGBTQ boxes is all that counts.

This monomaniacal focus on identity comes at a steep price. To begin, there are nagging doubts about merit, competence and true equality. Progressives wield diversity mainly as a weapon to silence criticism and opposition. They have created a tyranny of diversity which undermines other values. Moreover, identity politics harms those who putatively benefit from being placed in exalted positions; they are subject to lingering but sub-rosa questions whether they owe their positions to identity or to merit.

Identity politics leads to tribalism, misunderstanding, anger and hostility.

Identity politics inevitably intensifies tribalism, which is anathema to the body politic. Tribalism has been the default condition for most of human history, but life in a tribe is easy in all the wrong ways and for all the wrong reasons. Tribal members don’t ever have to think; they just believe whatever the tribe says is right. Now, due to identity politics, we are seeing more and more Americans becoming tribal about where and how they live, work, socialize, vacation, marry and educate their children. This leads to anger, misunderstanding and hostility. It is a cancer we must not let metastasize.

Identity Politics is a Marxist Construct

Identity politics has a Marxist provenance. At the heart of Marxism lies class struggle, the belief workers, abused by capitalism, would arise, seize the means of production and create a workers paradise. However, as Ludwig von Mises pointed out (see our 10/3/21 post at www.mllg.us), Marx did not see workers also as consumers; he believed they were slaves under capitalism and would remain slaves under socialism.

In actual practice, Soviet-style Marxism brutally murdered over 100 million of its own people. It was a economic disaster; see our 10/24/21 post about the Trabant compared to the Mercedes. The human carnage and economic destruction were so monumental, that even die-hard Marxists understood that workers in Western Europe, North America, Japan and elsewhere would never accept the idea of class struggle.

Marxists desperately needed an alternative, so they substituted race and ethnic struggle for class struggle, which led directly to identity politics and Critical Race Theory. They mean to end private property and redistribute everything according to race. They aim to abolish individual rights in favor of group rights based on race and ethnicity.

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Fortunately, many things unite Americans: culture, history, language, traditions, flag, manners, landmarks, national symbols and sacrifices of past generations. In closing, we recall the salving words of Abraham Lincoln in his first inaugural address.

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break, our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely as they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”