To read more in depth from Telos, subscribe to the journal here.
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.
These problems have been with us for a while, but the importance of identity politics has burgeoned recently, in part due to tensions within globalization processes, as international competition continues to generate national consequences and the hollowing out of real communities. Accelerated population mobility—immigration—also prompts questions about national identity, in Europe particularly after the surge of 2015. In some countries, currently especially France, the identity question continues to interlock with the experience of Islamist radicalism and terrorism, while the appearance of populist movements on the left, such as Syriza in Greece, and on the right in Italy have gone hand in hand with appeals to national identity and a simultaneous suspicion of multinational processes.[1]
On these matters, the American discussion, as always, tends to be generally parochial, inattentive to developments elsewhere, even as political discourse abroad is profoundly influenced by American phenomena. Identity politics is a successful American export product, with no dearth of U.S. experts eager to tell others around the world how to live. Yet there is also an opportunity for Americans to learn from discussions elsewhere, and Germany offers a case in point.
No doubt Germany is an exceptional case insofar as “identity” has been prominent in discussions in Germany—or perhaps more in American discussions “about” Germany than in Germany itself—given the particularities of its history: the vicissitudes of a German identity long before the establishment of a unified German state in 1871, the burden of historical guilt in German self-understanding after 1945, the status of any shared national identity during the Cold War and the division of Germany into two separate states, and currently the complex tensions between German national interest and its integration into the European Union. Of course other countries have their own identity complexities and complexes, but the problems of German national identity are at least as multifaceted as others.
With the question of German national identity in the background, the current concern with identity politics takes on a distinctive significance. The prominence of group identities, with their multiple claims on recognition, resources, and symbolic status, has consequences for the cohesion of any nation, at best limiting the credibility of an inclusive solidarity, at worst effectively calling for its cancellation, when the nation is described exclusively as a source of violence and guilt (see: rejection of the national anthem in the United States). One way or another, identity politics puts pressure on the viability of a shared political community. In Germany, Wolfgang Thierse, former president of the Bundestag, offered a critical response to the dissemination of identity politics and cancel culture, available here, which has sparked a robust discussion. We now provide translations of three related texts: a “position paper” indicating critical perspectives from the “left, green, and liberal spectrum” with regard to “diversity” politics and associated identity-political tendencies; a blog post by the historian Peter Brandt endorsing Thierse’s cautionary remarks on identity politics and pointing to their deleterious significance for Social Democratic politics; and an article by Brandt on symbolic controversies in Germany, especially regarding street names, viewed as an analogy to the wave of attacks on statues of historical figures in the United States and the United Kingdom especially during the summer of 2020.
Taken together, the three texts stake out a specifically progressive (center-left) criticism of those cultural tendencies of the moment that are apparently proliferating in German contexts but are certainly familiar from American public life as well. The position paper stipulates that “identity politics is currently turning into self-righteousness, arrogance, and prohibitions on thought in the name of ‘diversity’ and postcolonialism. In our view, this is an attack on freedom.” As an alternative to identity politics, it emphasizes that “overcoming social fragmentation requires the pursuit of the common good.” One achieves that common good, according to Brandt, with “more economics and less identity politics,” but also through a recognition of the validity of shared legacies. That legacy involves traditions, which are always undergoing transformation and renegotiations, but are nonetheless traditions from the past. One needs to think through these inheritances complexly with an honest recognition of failings, as when he invokes “our Germany, with a history that is partially but not completely terrible.” Such would be a mature appreciation of one’s national past, reflecting on profound flaws but nonetheless endorsing positive accomplishments. That could be a model for an American discussion, as an alternative to the blanket condemnation of the past in the exclusive terms of “systemic racism,” as if there had never been any democratization. Brandt’s brief comments on Andrew Jackson are apt on this point.
These documents stand on their own and require no elaborate summarizing. They are evidence of the current German discussion, but they are also presented here as prompts for reflection in the American context. In particular they shed light on the phenomenon of identity politics in a way that reveals three key aspects of its functioning.
First, because identity politics involves itself primarily with symbolic representations, its net effect is to camouflage material social issues. As noted above, this narcissistic turn is not new, but recognizing it as such helps understand why so much emphasis is currently placed on affective responses to events, i.e., on “triggering” and on “hurt,” generating in turn the caricature of the “snowflake.” The point is not that symbols are unimportant, but that there has been a disproportionate shift into an immaterial dimension of symbols, identities, and narratives and away from structure, society, and fact.
Second, identity politics operates, apparently necessarily, via social fragmentation: at stake is always the identity of a small group, by definition a minority. A process of disaggregation ensues, as contemporary alienation takes the shape of multiple “communities” that can continue to fragment further. This splintering of society echoes what Paul Piccone used to call “artificial negativity,” a divide-and-conquer strategy by the administrative state, but also a proliferation of platforms for “community leaders,” career opportunities for self-promotion for anyone claiming to represent the invented group—hence an incentive for further segmentation. One corollary result of this identity-political process is the insistence on specifically minority interests, which is therefore explicitly and by definition anti-majoritarian, a direct challenge to the legacy program of an earlier revolutionary age that established the democratic majority as sovereign. The prioritization of the margins means the diminishment of the center. Here the “position paper” is emphatic: “We advocate an open society of solidarity that, in accordance with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is based on the idea that all have the same opportunity to develop and cultivate their individual personalities. We decisively reject any attempts to divide people up into groups based on genealogy or sexual identity and to treat them on the basis of group membership.”
Third, the erosion of national majoritarian solidarity should not be viewed only in relation to the identity-political claims of heretofore marginalized minorities but also in the face of the larger contextual force of globalization. Globalization puts pressure on national institutions and on political programs of national interest from the outside, so to speak, while identity politics dismantles the nation from within. Hence the simultaneity of identity-political movements and a broader suspicion of nationhood, perhaps especially in Germany and the United States, the former burdened by its Nazi and militarist past, the latter by slavery and the narrative of “systemic racism.” In some ways, these two countries resemble each other in this dynamic, just as they differ from some other nation-states where the relationship to the national past and national identity is less fraught. Compare and contrast: Angela Merkel’s gesture of anti-nationalism, snatching away a German flag during an electoral victory celebration, and Donald Trump’s critique of cancel culture hostile to the American national past in the Mount Rushmore speech, but also Emanuel Macron’s insistence on the validity of the full French national tradition and his rejection of statue toppling in his speech at the Panthéon.
And beyond those examples? We are in need of an extensive examination of identity politics and cancel culture in other contexts, with a goal of a wider comparative international mapping. It appears however that the hypothesis is credible that the identity-political agenda operates at odds with economic categories of inequality and class difference, just as it undermines the project of majoritarian democratic nationhood. That implies: The critique of identity politics is the critique of globalization. The German discussion is evidence of an emerging critique of identity politics specifically from the left. One can find analogous arguments in the United States, as for example with the Socialist critique of the 1619 Project, which calls into question the identity-political claim that racism is the exclusive content of national history and which then turns the table on critical race theory, accusing it of suppressing democratic and anti-racist legacies.
Yet despite such apprehension from the left, criticism of identity politics is increasingly treated as solely the province of an unacceptable extremism of the right, allegedly deserving of cancellation. That stigmatization deserves to be called out: the hegemonic left in power in cultural institutions denounces any critics as renegades and reactionaries. This repressive response repeats the treatment that dissidents have faced before in other contexts. It is important to see this habit of denunciation for what it is, the cancel culture of a left that increasingly limits the terms of debate in the academy, i.e., debate where competing positions are excluded a priori. The appeal articulated in the position paper is therefore all the more urgent because it seems so distant today: “freedom of scholarship, teaching, art, and a culture of open dialogue, in which different opinions can be expressed and shared in a fair way and on the basis of differing knowledge and experiences, without repression, in a context of polite and respectful behavior by all.” Such is a public sphere one wishes to attain.
1. Andreas Pantazopoulos, “Populism or National Populism? A Critical Approach to Cas Mudde’s Perspective on SYRIZA’s Populism,” Telos 175 (Summer 2016): 201–8.
