A Warning To The Left: Identity Politics Only Helps Trump

The left's obsession with identity is destroying our ability to speak to each other, and helps fuel right wing extremism.

by Ben Cohen

In the midsts of an election year it is easy to fall into tribal patterns. We determine our political affiliation, then go all in our candidate and party. This inevitably means ignoring things you don’t like about your own side — a sometimes necessary but ultimately incongruent way of being. I have found that the longer you do this, the bigger the price you pay. When you are silent on issues that bother you because you fear condemnation from your side, resentment and despair can build.

It is better then to speak on these issues and face the backlash, not just for your own wellbeing, but for those on your side to. Without internal criticism, your tribe can never self correct or grow. Religious groups become cults because of this, and few can ever come back from the seductive delusions of a despotic narcissist.

There are elements on the left that are falling into cult-like patterns, and I am concerned that without a course correction, it will fuel the MAGA right’s electoral chances in the coming years.

This article seeks to address the roots of these issues on the left, from the cult of identity to the rewriting of history and the toxic effect it is having on our personal relationships.

The cult of identity

Identity politics is having a moment. The philosophy built on intersecting identity affiliations and ever changing hierarchies of oppression has swept through the university system, corporate institutions, and media systems.

What pronouns do you use? Is gender real or a social construct? What is your ethnicity? How do you define yourself racially? Is your country a colonizing power or the victim of colonization? Are you an oppressed person or an oppressor? Are you an antiracist, or complicit in white supremacy?

I have had many of these debates with friends and acquaintances over the past few years, and have a decidedly mixed view on how helpful it has been. While there are many positives to recognizing systems of power, the role of identity, and the insidious influence of white supremacy and racism, the movement has gone too far. So far in fact that it is destroying our ability to interact normally and bridge superficial difference that we should be trying to overcome.

This cult of identity is also alienating liberals, many to the point of leaving the Democratic Party. The number of personal friends who no long pay attention to politics because of the left’s obsession with identity has alarmed me in recent years. They won’t vote for Donald Trump, but they won’t vote for Joe Biden either. While the media is certainly complicit in the “both sidesing” of politics in America, the left must bear some responsibility too.

If you insist on dividing people into arbitrary categories of racial/ethnic/gender identities with an accompanying oppression status, a breakdown in interpersonal relationships is almost guaranteed.

The way we speak to each other

A neighbor of mine is of Nigerian ancestry and while chatting in our local park I mentioned that I grew up with many West Africans because of where I lived in London. “Ah, yes, colonialism,” she said in an accusatory tone. “You colonized us, so that would make sense.”

I was a little taken aback by her statement, particularly given I was trying to be friendly. We don’t know each other well, but I see her on a frequent enough basis to chat for a few minutes. From a technical point of view, my neighbor was of course correct. Britain did colonize Nigeria from 1884 to 1960 and committed a number of atrocities there. Given I was born in the UK, there is some collective responsibility I could hypothetically bear.

There are caveats to this however, the most notable being that none of my ancestors had anything to do with it (they were farmers, small shop keepers, and lower middle class professionals in England and Scotland, or fleeing violent pogroms in Ukraine and Poland at the time). But in the era of militant identity politics, none of this is relevant. I am white, most British people are white, therefore I am culpable for colonialism.

Given my neighbor was born in America, I momentarily thought about mentioning her culpability in the American colonization of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. In the interests of civility I didn’t, but I’m fairly certain it would not have gone down well. I have learned that non-white minorities can only be victims of white colonialism and oppression and never part of it — even if there are many black and brown people who work in the US government, serve on corporate boards, and fight in the US military.

We are all ‘colonizers’

The real history of colonialism and slavery is of course far, far more complex. West African empires for example, practiced their own versions of colonialism and slavery long before Europeans arrived. Many fought with and collaborated with Western colonialists, and they were deeply involved in the trading of slaves. Many West Africans who emigrated to Europe and the US in recent decades are descended from wealthy African slave trading families.

I thought about mentioning this to my neighbor too, but again thought better of it. I have no idea whether her family was engaged in the slave trade, or collaborated with the British Empire, so I didn’t want to make any assumptions. It did get me thinking though, and I left the conversation wondering why it was OK for her to make those assumptions about me, and not the other way around.

I would never dream of lecturing Native American person about the appalling brutality of the Comanches, or an Asian person about the extraordinarily violent imperialism of Japan. Many on the new left might wonder what I was talking about given their version of history automatically designates black and brown people ‘oppressed’ status. This unfortunately has become commonplace in liberal circles (it wasn’t the first time someone has lectured me about Britain’s colonial history), and I can’t see how it is helpful.

Becoming what it hates

Identity politics history is now the mirror image of the pro-colonial history it aims to debunk. The parallels, at least from my experience, are uncanny.

I once had a conversation with my grandmother about the crimes of the British Empire, specifically their disgusting behavior in China during the 1800’s opium wars. She could not believe what I was saying. “They didn’t teach me that in school,” she said, genuinely taken aback. “I want my money back!”

Born in the 1930’s, my grandmother was brought up to believe in the benevolence of colonialism and the inherent goodness of the British Empire. Thankfully there has been seismic shift in the British education system, but radical left wing ideology is now creating an equally distorted view of history. The British Empire is now viewed as the epitome of evil — a white supremacist state single handedly responsible for colonialism and the exportation of racism. America, according to this new branch of history, is merely an “extension of British white supremacy.”

There is some truth to the role racism played in British colonialism, and white supremacy was certainly popular in some sectors of British society during the height of empire. But a broader understanding of history makes it very clear that colonialism is not uniquely European (or white), and that white supremacy was used as a pretext for colonizing and enslaving other nations, and not the cause of it.

Similar ideological frameworks have driven colonial expansion across the globe. A Japanese soldier who served in World War II spoke about the impact of his imperial schooling in an interview for the book Evil Men:

“You know, public education, they drove loyalty and patriotism, that sort of ideology home,” he said. “In other words, what does that mean? It means that the country of Japan is, well, the country of God. It is the absolute best country in the world—that idea was thoroughly planted into us.”

“If you turn it over, it means to despise other races. That is the sort of ideology it is. And from the time we were small, we called Chinese people dirty chinks—made fun of them. We called Russians Russkie pigs. We called Westerners hairy barbarians, you know? And so this meant that when the people of Japan joined the army and went to the front, no matter how many Chinese they killed, they didn’t think of it as being much different than killing a dog or a cat.”

The intellectual justification for the Japanese brutalization of China was also based on a deeply misguided sense of paternalism. Much like the British, the Japanese viewed themselves as saviors, lifting lesser nations out of poverty to become more like them.

The Comanche Empire was similarly brutal in its treatment of neighboring Native American tribes. They nearly succeeded in exterminating the Apaches, practiced kidnap slavery, and were every bit as expansionist as their European enemies. Recent scholarship has even found that Comanche Empire actually “eclipsed its various European rivals in military prowess, political prestige, economic power, commercial reach, and cultural influence,” at one point in time, contradicting the victim narrative many on the left subscribe to.

Racism is universal

I used to think that left wing revisionist history was well intentioned but wrong. I am now starting to believe that the underlying assumptions are, well, racist.

Up until Whoopi Goldberg argued that Jews could not be victims of racism because they were white, the Anti Defamation League (ADL) defined racism as: “The marginalization and/or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges White people.”

If you follow this logic, it means it is not possible for people of color to be racist. If people of color behave in a racist way, they are not actually racist, according to identity politics adherents. They are engaging in ‘white supremacy,’ and behaving like white people. History is defined as one Manichean struggle between the forces of racism (white supremacists) and antiracism (people of color and some ‘white allies’).

This philosophy is becoming deeply entrenched in liberal circles, and it is based on the racist assumption that black and brown people have no agency over themselves.

Thankfully, the ADL updated their definition after the Goldberg fiasco, but the tenets of identity politics ideology still remain. I have lost count of the times I have been harangued for British colonialism and have noticed a very disturbing trend in casual anti-white racism in my liberal circles (much of it from white people). While acknowledging the effects of white supremacy and systemic racism is a good thing, pretending black and brown people can’t be racist is intellectually dishonest, and again, racist.

Priorities, priorities

I don’t believe that identity politics on the left and right are moral equivalents. There is a clear trend of virulent ethno-nationalism, xenophobia and racism on the right that is far more dangerous than its counterpart on the left. But this can change, and the left’s stunning antisemitism in recent years has made that very obvious.

I am writing about this because I am a liberal and I want to see Democrats win and the MAGA movement destroyed. If moderate liberal voices are drowned out, the left faces an existential crisis it may not recover from. We have seen this happen on the right with moderates beaten into submission by MAGA extremists. It is not a model we should seek to emulate, and the best way to stop it is to start speaking out.

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