Trudeau, Buttigieg, Harris, Yang: Identity politics eats its own

As such stories show, insisting on one’s own victim status is insufficient protection from identity mobs. Even being an identity “two-fer” does not suffice, as demonstrated by a New York Times story in March 2019. In that case, a young black man who identified as gay was employed as a “sensitivity reader” by several publishing houses—i.e., an enforcer of “cancel culture.” Then he wrote and tried to publish a book of his own. The result, as the Times story put it, was a “karmic boomerang.” Despite the author’s conformity overall to an identity-first narrative, he made the catastrophic mistake — by identity-first standards — of situating some of his story among Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo’s civil war in the late 1990s. Following a Twitter storm, he withdrew his debut book before circulation. As the reporter summarized, “He was Robespierre with his own neck in the cradle of the guillotine.”

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All of which raises an interesting question about these and many others hoist on the identitarian petard: What, exactly, explains the primordial passion behind identity politics?

Here’s a guess: Decades into the potent experiment of the sexual revolution, a great many human beings now live as if we are not the intensely communal and familial creatures that we always have been; and systemic consequences of that profound species-wide shift are now emerging. These include our increasingly surreal politics. Identity politics is driven in large measure by a question that generations before us never had to answer: Who am I? Until very recently, that question has been answered at least implicitly by reference to one’s role in a familial social order: I am a mother, a sister, a cousin, an aunt, and so on. Today, in an age when families form and re-form and un-form at record speed, all of those “givens” have become attenuated. The result is a frantic search for self via other groups that substitute for the loss of familial gravity—namely, identity politics.

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