I swear, David Brooks must be contractually obligated to write this once a month. Or woke independents just just derive pure joy from psychological projection. Either way I just wish this trope would die.
As long as there is more than one person in the world, there will be identity politics, even if they're twins.
So much of this conservative inveighing against the Democratic Party's practice of "identity politics" is mere concern-trolling- "We think that it would be in your own best interest to abandon large swaths of your voting base, because we really want what's best for you, yeah, that's the ticket." BAsically the Otter gambit from Animal House. That Democrats would focus on economic concerns that Democrats already do focus on, that they don't know about, because Fox won't tell them, and come to think of it, neither will the MSM. Their advice is worthless, their concerns are moot. Ignore them all.
Brooks brags that the GOP is again the Party of Ideas, with many ideas to combat "hyper individualism" as he calls it, seems like a euphenism for uppity minorities.
The centerpiece of his article highlights National Review’s Jonah Goldberg’s forthcoming mangnus derpus: “Suicide of the West.” Well James Burnham already used that title for a book, and jeez it just oozes with idenity politics.
Other conservatives are rising to defend that order, including National Review’s Jonah Goldberg, who later this month comes out with his epic and debate-shifting book, “Suicide of the West.”
Goldberg points out that for eons human beings were semi-hairless upright apes clumped in tribes and fighting for food. But about 300 years ago something that he calls “the Miracle” happened. It was a shift in attitude. For thousands of years, societies divided people into permanent categories of race or caste. But, Goldberg writes, “the Miracle ushered in a philosophy that says each person is to be judged and respected on account of their own merits, not the class or caste of their ancestors.”
That belief, championed by John Locke, or a story we tell about Locke, paved the way for human equality, pluralism, democracy, capitalism and the idea that a person can have a plurality of identities and a society can contain a plurality of moral creeds.
It also proved to be the goose that laid the golden egg. Economic growth exploded. The American founding asserted that Lockean ideas are universal. And nothing had ever succeeded like America. Between 1860 and 1900 alone, America’s population doubled and its wealth grew fivefold.
But we have stopped teaching about the Miracle, Goldberg says, and stopped feeling grateful for it.
Tribalism was always there, lurking under the surface. It returns now as identity politics, which is reactionary reversion to the pre-modern world. Identity politics takes individual merit out of the moral center of our system and asserts that group is, Goldberg says, “an immutable category, a permanent tribe.” Identity politics warriors claim they are fighting for social justice, but really it’s just the same old thing, Goldberg argues, a mass mobilization to gain power for the tribe.
A miracle 300 years ago! The phrasing sounds more like evangelicalism than serious political science.
If anything in this life is certain, if history has taught us anything, it’s that John Locke permanently ended caste systems, and that Lockean liberalism cannot coexist with any kind of caste system. The United States is a perfect example, given by the complete absence of caste, let alone genocidal violence against groups based in part on fallacious arguments that they were not using the land they possessed productively, or chattel slavery, or white supremacist authoritarian enclaves persisting well into the 20th century.
Anyway, this history of colorblind liberal individualism is now being threatened by IDENTITY POLITICS.