The Left's Reliance on Identity Politics.

AuthorContinetti, Matthew
PositionNATIONAL AFFAIRS

THE BEGINNINGS of identity politics can be traced to 1973, the year the first volume of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago--a book that demolished any pretense of communism's moral authority--was published in the West. The ideological challenge of socialism was fading, its fighting spirit dwindling. This presented a challenge for the Left: how to carry on the fight against capitalism when its major ideological alternative no longer was viable?

The Left found its answer in an identity politics that grew out of anti-colonialism. Karl Marx's class struggle was reformulated into an ethno-racial struggle--a ceaseless competition between colonizer and colonized, victimizer and victim, oppressor and oppressed. Instead of presenting collectivism and central planning as the gateway to the realization of genuine freedom, the new multiculturalist Left turned to unmasking the supposed power relations that subordinated minorities and exploited Third World nations.

The original battleground was the American university, where, as Bruce Bawer writes in The Victims' Revolution: The Rise of Identity Politics and the Closing of the Liberal Mind, "The point [became] simply to 'prove'--repetitively, endlessly--certain facile, reductive, and invariably left-wing points about the nature of power and oppression. In this new version of the humanities, all of Western civilization is not analyzed through the use of reason or judged according to aesthetic standards that have been developed over centuries; rather, it is viewed through prisms of race, class, and gender, and is hailed or condemned in accordance with certain political checklists."

Under the new leftist dispensation, the study of English became the application of critical and literary theory to disparate texts so as to uncover the hidden power relations they concealed. The study of history became the study of social history or "people's history," the record of Western Civilization's oppression of various groups, and popping up everywhere were new departments of "studies": African-American Studies, Women's Studies, Queer Studies, Chicano Studies, Gender Studies, and so on. "What these radicals blandly call multiculturalism," wrote journalist Irving Kristol, is as much a "war against the West" as Nazism and Stalinism ever were. Under the guise of multiculturalism, their ideas--whose radical substance often goes beyond the bounds of the political into sheer fantasy--are infiltrating our educational system at all levels.

This revolution in U.S. universities was accomplished swiftly and largely outside the public eye. What little resistance the radicals met was vanquished with accusations of racism. It was not until the late 1980s, with Jesse Jackson's presidential campaigns, the battle over the Stanford core curriculum, and the publication of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind that the rise of identity politics on campus and the idea of "political correctness" became a page one story. By that time, however, it was too late. Alumni, trustees, and parents had no recourse. The American university was irrevocably changed.

There have been liberal critics of identity politics through the years. In 1991, historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. published The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society. Schlesinger noted that the Soviet Union had collapsed in a heap of warring nationalities and that the state of Yugoslavia was in the process of doing the same, and asked whether the U.S. would be next. Presenting America as a...

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