By Russell A. Berman · Wednesday, April 28, 2021 Criticism of identity politics is hardly new. The insistence on—or “celebration” of—fractional community identities rather than a common good was presented as an explanation for Hillary Clinton’s defeat in the 2016 presidential election. No coalition of separate groups will ever be able to muster the political magnetism of an inclusive rhetoric of national solidarity. That is the first problem: how identity politics divides, rather than unites.
However in addition to the problems of fragmentation and exclusion, the very focus on “identity,” a cultural and psychological concept, has always distracted from material issues of political economy, redirecting debate toward symbols and selfhood. Christopher Lasch labeled this a Culture of Narcissism as early as 1979. At stake is both a tendency toward subjectification within contemporary society and a transformation of the—often primarily academic—discussion about this society, as critical attention shifted toward subjective elements rather than discriminatory conditions and economic processes. If you want to hide class difference, identity politics is just what you need.
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By Peter Brandt · Wednesday, April 28, 2021 This is a more extensive version of an essay by Peter Brandt that appeared in Neue Gesellschaft/Frankfurter Hefte in March 2021. Brandt comments on identity politics here. Translated by Russell A. Berman, with comments here.
In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States and the United Kingdom, growing numbers of statues of historical figures have been toppled, beheaded, or turned upside down. It has been a matter primarily of figures charged with participation in the extermination, oppression, and enslavement of non-white ethnic groups, such as the famous generals of the Confederacy during the American Civil War of 1861–65. The matter gets complicated because not a few of these targets of symbolic attacks or executions embody quite different qualities. Several of the American founding fathers, the first constitutional state, were slaveowners, for example, the primary author of the Declaration of Independence of 1776 and later third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, a figure of the Enlightenment and a wide-ranging intellectual. Although never a rigorous defender of slavery, he viewed blacks—in contrast to Native Americans—as inferior.
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