Tag: Jordan B. Peterson

The Civil Rights struggles of the 1950s and 60s count as identity politics, Lila explained in an interview with Steve Paikin, because they integrated “African-Americans, women, gays, into the great American democratic we.” The goal was to enlarge the notion of Americanness so that it included previously marginalized groups. So rather than it being about bringing us together into a great “democratic we,” instead doubts were raised about the existence of it, and politics came to be conceived of on our liberal side as a politics of groups, of movements, and not party politics with a message that would offer a vision of American destiny that would attract Americans from all walks of life. Francis Fukuyama agrees, arguing that the great threat of identity politics is not merely its de-emphasis on the individual, but its breaking of our larger identification with the nation: I think that national identity as a practical political project is really the level at which you need to think about building these communal values, because frankly political power is still organized around these things we call nations, and those political institutions aren’t going to work unless you have those kind of integrative identities. But despite these similarities, the Intellectual Dark Web operates under a stricter definition of identity politics than the definition Lilla and Fukuyama use. .you can’t say that people’s proclivity to identify with their group is identity politics. We have here two very different origin stories, and thus two different definitions. For Lilla and Fukuyama, the civil rights movement was a kind of identity politics, one that strove to link the identity of the sub-group with the broader identity of the nation. And while it is unclear to what degree other individual members of the IDW subscribe to Peterson’s definition, in general the IDW treats identity politics as categorically cancerous. To be sure, nations can have shared experiences, values, and stories too. The degree to which this shared national identification can be restored in America is the degree to which pernicious manifestations of identity politics can be rolled back or rerouted toward a shared commitment to the common good.