Commentary: An American Awakening – The Ohio Star

by Joshua Mitchell

The seemingly novel developments of the last several years have not taken me by surprise. When I completed American Awakening in May 2020, the national election was still five months into the future, and the stringent measures ostensibly instituted to hold the Wuhan Flu at bay had just been implemented. I thought then that a Democratic Party victory in November 2020 would promise the American electorate a return to normal politics, but in fact would operate on the basis of what, in American Awakening, I called the politics of innocence and transgression; and that if Joe Biden became the Democratic Party nominee, in order to demonstrate that he was the-right-kind-of-white-man, he would champion this sort of politics.

The veneer of moderation, of adult politics, would not long conceal the inner logic of identity politics, according to which white heterosexual men—the current prime transgressors in the identity politics dystopian moral economy—must adopt every species of political madness offered up by identity politics or suffer social death. That has indeed come to pass in the Biden Administration, leaving the Democratic Party in a position from which it is hard to imagine it can recover in the near future. To argue against identity politics in the Democratic Party today is to invite the charge of being “racist,” “misogynist,” “homophobic,” “transphobic,” etc. Comply or be expunged.

Can Anyone Save the Democratic Party?

Who within the Democratic Party might be capable of turning it from its present, self-destructive, and nation-destroying course?

One group might be members of the 1960s Left who have, over the course of the intervening decades, retained their commitment to addressing race in America, to defending the middle class, and to warning about the unreasonable use of U.S. military power abroad. All good ideas. Alas, members of this group have fallen into two categories: those who naïvely think the Democratic Party has not defected from the path it walked in the 1960s; and those who are well aware that it has, but who are frightened to speak up for fear of being scapegoated and purged. Neither of these contingents from the 1960s Left will likely alter the current state of things.

The second group, some of whose members should be counted among the 1960s Left, are black Americans who, as I have argued elsewhere, have the necessary moral authority in America today to put an end to identity politics with a single declaration. Identity politics parishioners use the wound of black America to go further—into women’s rights, gay and lesbian rights, and more recently, transgender rights. In a world oriented by liberal pluralism, these groups can and will make their claims. A liberal society will respond soberly but generously that exceptions to the rule are not ruled out. In a word, a liberal society will, within bounds, be a tolerant society.

Identity politics does not operate according to this liberal paradigm. From its defenders, we hear of the pressing need for “diversity,” and are perhaps seduced into thinking that diversity is contiguous with earlier liberal ideals. It is not. Identity politics proceeds on the basis of the illiberal claim that the exception is the rule. To make room for the transgendered, for example, identity politics parishioners claim that those who believe that “man” and “woman” are natural categories, that sex matters, must be regarded as guilty of a thought crime, of heteronormativity, and therefore must be purged. This is anti-liberal lunacy.

How far we have come since the 1960s. Then, the Reverend Martin Luther King argued that the state could appropriately supplement the vibrant and necessary mediating institutions of family and church, but not be a substitute for them. In the world identity politics constructs, however, the world where transgenderism is not the exception but rather the rule, the family that Reverend King had in mind—the generative family of a man and a woman—would today be charged with the thought crime of heteronormativity; and the church he had in mind—the patriarchal Christian Church—would be charged with being homophobic.

Is this really where the civil rights movement takes us? Can it really be the case that the latest identity politics cause of transgenderism, whose adherents today dare claim the mantle of black America, should require that we ostracize and purge the very institutions that black America, indeed all Americans, needs to thrive? Black America endorses those institutions, in their historically inherited form, by a sizable margin. Yet black America under the tutelage of the Democratic Party that today promulgates identity politics must do as it did under the Democratic Party in the 1950s, namely, go to the back of the (figurative) bus, as more important riders take the front seats—first feminists, then gays and lesbians, and now the transgendered.

Organized segregation was once visible. Today it is invisible. If you are black in America today, and want to live without fear of cancellation, you must support the social movements that came after yours and which trade on your wound. If you do not, the Democratic Party and the Institutions of Higher Stupification that inflame it—our colleges and universities—will ostracize you. Do you doubt this? Peruse the course catalogs of Black Studies Programs around the country; look at recent hiring; seek to discover the direction these programs intend to take. You will learn that not an insignificant number of these programs have courses on feminism, gays and lesbians, and transgenderism. Black studies programs were instituted a half-century ago with a view to redressing the unbalanced account of American history, and for that, they would have been a valuable and necessary undertaking. Today, they seem to have another purpose: to demonstrate, through curriculum and pedagogy, solidarity with causes that a vast majority of black Americans think have no right to draw their moral authority from the historical wound black America endured.

Elite blacks must support these causes. Asked in her Senate confirmation testimony what the definition of a woman is, Harvard-trained black Supreme Court woman nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson said she does not know. We should not be surprised. Black Americans have the moral authority to begin to cure our country from the identity politics madness that consumes us like a plague. But if they wish not to be cast into the pit with the rest of the irredeemables, both black and white, elite blacks who should be at the forefront of the effort to heal our country are instead compelled to accept a terrible bargain with the defenders of identity politics. Instead of challenging identity politics, instead of declaring with a firm and unwavering voice, “No, your cause may not invoke our wound,” they are the very agents who permit and authorize identity politics to invoke ever-new victim groups, whose interests are increasingly anathema to those of black America.

No small part of American Awakening chronicles the respect in which identity politics betrays black America. Here is but another sickening example. Defenders of identity politics are quick to call out so-called cultural appropriation; but without compunction, they support ever more marginal causes, whose moral authority rests on wound appropriation.

Identity Politics Succeeds Where Cultural Marxism Failed

I gave some consideration in the first edition of this book published in 2020 to the inability of the conservative movement to comprehend, let alone push back against, identity politics. Identity politics I characterized as a deformation of Christianity and, more provocatively, as a deformation of the Reformation Christianity of our Puritan originaries. I suggested that free market conservatives who defend the American regime understood debt in terms of the ledger book of monetary payment, and that cultural conservatives who defended the American regime understood debt in terms of what we owe to the tradition of our forefathers. Identity politics, I suggested, attends to what I called spiritual debt, which is akin to the deep internal debt Christians call original sin.

Call it spiritual debt, call it something else, but whatever we call it, we should understand that one of the reasons why conservatives do not understand identity politics is that they understand the first two kinds of debt, but not the third. Speaking generally, the default account from both sorts of conservatives is that identity politics is a further outworking of cultural Marxism, whose long march through our institutions they have long fought. How convenient if that were the case, for no additional work would need to be undertaken to understand identity politics; and critics could continue to bemoan the ongoing losses on the various battlefronts of the culture wars….