Earlier this year, liberal journalist and Vox co-founder Ezra Klein went on conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro’s show, where they talked about politics for over an hour, primarily about the concept of identity politics.
The two have, to put it mildly, very different views of the world. Ezra, being a strong proponent of what is typically called identity politics, sees some groups as clearly privileged and others as clearly marginalized. To him, this means not only that there is a significant and urgent imperative for redress, but that the rules cannot and should not be the same for different groups. He has, for instance, published a full-fledged defense of Sarah Jeong, the journalist who’d made many derogatory tweets about white people, arguing that much of the furor in response to the tweets was simply from racist alt-right trolls.
Ben has a different take. He is perhaps best known for the BEN SHAPIRO DESTROYS videos on YouTube, in which he takes on and challenges liberal views, oftentimes against college students arguing in favor of identity politics. While he’s in agreement with Ezra about the existence of significant historical discrimination, and the evils of it, he doesn’t see this as a prevailing force today. He has argued, for instance, that today’s racial disparities in income have “nothing to do with race and everything to do with culture”.
Despite these heavy disagreements, the two had a civil conversation. Ben praised much of Ezra’s book Why We’re Polarized but took issue with his support of identity politics, calling it a dangerous form of politics that needs to be kept out to minimize polarization. Ezra pushed back, arguing that politics is inherently linked to people’s identities and that critics of identity politics only take issue when the identity in question is that of a marginalized group.
My view synthesis is below. In the first part, I tried to answer how what we call identity politics is and isn’t distinct from just regular politics. In the second, I tried to answer how much value there is in racial identity politics today.
Bringing your identity into politics
In politics, people’s identities are being constantly appealed to by politicians. President Trump, for instance, has tried to appeal to farmers, to suburban housewives, and to the “poorly educated”. All of these are identities – yet none of these appeals are considered identity politics.
The term identity politics is typically used to discuss politics based on race, gender, sexual orientation, or gender identity. When Black Lives Matter protests that black people shouldn’t be shot and killed by the police at disproportionately high rates, this is called identity politics. When the NRA fights for the rights of gun owners, no one calls it identity politics. Why is this?
One potential answer is that race is an immutable characteristic, whereas gun ownership is not. A person can’t change the color of their skin or how they’re viewed in the world because of it. But a person who’s never held a gun before can pick one up and a person who is a gun owner can put theirs down for good. This makes these two very different types of identities.
But what really hinges on this immutability? From a psychological perspective, humans don’t process these identities differently. The literature suggests that a racial minority perceives a threat to their racial identity in the same way a gun owner perceives a threat to their identity as a gun owner. Our rational minds may distinguish between different types of identities (racial, geographical, professional, etc), but psychologically it is a distinction without a difference.
Take the case of religion: religion is not an immutable characteristic. People can lose, embrace, or switch faiths. Yet religious identity is an identity the founders saw as something unique that needed to be kept out of politics.
The principle of separation of church and state was created to minimize the danger of the state being made the weapon of any religious sect. People’s worldview, experiences, and morality are strongly based on their religion, yet religion is broadly agreed to have no place in politics. Religious fundamentalists may constantly try to push their agenda into politics but they are limited by this principle. This separation has kept America, a largely religious country of many different faiths, from having any serious internal religious strife.
The real distinction, then, is the danger that bringing a certain identity into politics poses. This danger has some correlation with the mutability of the identity. A socialist or a libertarian may feel threatened when they hear arguments disparaging them or their political identity, but they always have the option of abandoning that identity, whether it’s because their minds were changed or because they no longer wish to lean into it. This is untrue for race, where any hostility to someone’s racial identity is a threat to them and their kin. Religious identity falls somewhere in between: it is technically malleable, but people’s religious convictions tend to be very tightly held, largely inherited from their parents, and an important part of their social lives.
But if racial identity is dangerous to bring into politics, what does it mean to keep it out of it? White identitarianism has played a huge role in America’s history. For centuries, the entire cabinet was made up of white men who made policies that wholly or primarily benefited white men, and no one called this identity politics. Arguably, racial identity politics is at its most dangerous when it isn’t seen at all and can’t be called out. It’s important, then, to note that keeping racial identity out of politics isn’t the same thing as not talking about race in politics.
Politics exists for people to come together and solve problems. To do this, every citizen must be able to speak about their experience. These experiences are at least partially based on their identities. Black people get pulled over by the police at high rates and are subsequently subject to higher rates of police violence. White people, typically speaking, don’t have this experience. This is a problem that black people must be able to talk about and demand be addressed, without critics dismissing it as identity politics.
But it’s also important not to invoke racial identity outside of such shared experiences. It should go without saying that there isn’t a single black experience. Within each race are people with wildly different income levels, psychological profiles, interests, and experiences. To deny this, or even to not appropriately consider this, is to be a race reductionist. Outside of any shared experiences people in a group or sub-group may have, bringing in race is unnecessarily dangerous.
Apart from minimizing invocations of tightly held identities, there is another way to reduce identity-based conflict in politics: always seek to de-escalate. A conversation where both parties feel safe will play out very differently from a conversation where one person is trying to destroy the other. This safety is based not only on the actions of the participants during the conversation but outside of it as well. Mockery or demonization of people on the basis of any of their identities is arguably the biggest contributor to political polarization.
The value of racial identity politics today
One of the worst aspects of United States history is that it is rife with white identity politics. Today, such white identitarianism is rightly criticized. But then if white identitarianism is unwelcome, shouldn’t black and Hispanic identitarianism be too?
The problem is that there are many inequalities that exist today because of historical injustices. The average white family has a net worth nearly ten times that of a black family. Even if all racism disappeared today, that disparity cannot be fixed without some sort of government intervention. The accumulated wealth, power and social positions puts the average white person at a much better footing than the average black person. If this gap is to be addressed, simply providing equality of opportunity is insufficient.
But in a society, everyone is born to their own unique set of advantages and disadvantages. Some of these are the results of historical oppression or injustice, but many have nothing to do with that. A person born to poor circumstances because their ancestors made poor choices isn’t any less deserving of help than a person born to poor circumstances because their ancestors faced discrimination. To go even broader, a person born to poor socioeconomic circumstances isn’t any less deserving than a person born to poor biological circumstances like blindness or mental illness.
Given these complexities, is it reasonable to have the government decide who deserves to have something taken from them and who deserves to have something given to them? Is it set up, let alone trustworthy enough, to handle such a complex question? What majoritarian governments have done, typically, is take from the powerless to give to the powerful. Arguably, if the government decides to prioritize the well-being of well-off black people over poor white people, this is exactly what will be happening. And if the goal is to reach true equity, that is equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity, this would require all sorts of totalitarian controls. At the very least, it’s important to set up some limiting principles: equal rights before the law, for instance, cannot be trampled on in a quest for equity.
Provided it doesn’t trample on any individual’s fundamental rights, however, it is reasonable for a government to pass policies to help address inequalities. Even critics of affirmative action and reparations don’t believe these are totalitarian policies. These are policies the country could pursue to help pay off an insurmountable debt. If this would be largely, even if not entirely, a policy that would help the worse off over the better off, there is an argument for it. If the racial inequalities and divisions in the country aren’t addressed through politics, where else can they be addressed?
Inequalities due to historic injustice also exist in representation, prompting a pursuit of policies that are not race-neutral. There is a big push, for instance, on the side of the Democrats to take a candidate’s race and gender into account so that the country is run by people who look more like its citizens. This stands in contrast to the meritocratic notion that each position should go to the most qualified person, regardless of their race or gender. Outside of politics, the New York Times recently published a piece arguing that blind auditions should be ended in order to make orchestras more diverse, a policy that’s been instrumental (no pun intended) in getting more women into orchestras.
Such proposals run contrary to the principles of meritocracy, a system that’s not only procedurally fair, but allows everyone to reap the highest quality goods and services. But calls for diversity could also be a forcing function for meritocracy down the line. If women see only men becoming presidents and black people see orchestras as something that isn’t for them, this could stifle their ambitions, and the talent pool for the future might be smaller than it could be.
Whatever their merits, one of the side effects of the increased focus on race-based identity politics has been the re-emergence of white identity politics. More and more white people are leaning into their racial identities, though thankfully the outgroup hostility that’s historically accompanied it remains unpopular. This re-emergence is not surprising: when a victim hierarchy is set up and the white majoritarian population is excluded from it, the result is that they will stand against it.
Is this white identity politics a reaction to a politics and culture that’s overly racialized? Or is it a racialized reaction on the part of white people who are disoriented by sweeping cultural, political, social and technological changes? This is difficult to answer, but what is clear is that the more one group plays identity politics, the more other groups will too.
If people of every ethnicity are increasingly bringing their racial identity into politics, one of the most dangerous forms of identity to bring into politics, that’s scary. This scariness is one of few things Ezra and Ben were able to agree upon.