Feeling Up the Elephant of Identity Politics

Here's John Gray mourning "identitarian liberalism" in the modern West. In the good old days of the Austro-Hungarian empire, people were glad to be Austrian, he writes. But then, according to Galician Jewish writer Joseph Roth, born in 1894:

All those people who had never been other than Austrians … now began to call themselves part of the Polish, the Czech, the Ukrainian, the Slovenian, the Croatian ‘nation’ — and so on.

From Roth's point of view,

With all of its faults — including a virulently anti-Semitic mayor in fin-de-siècle Vienna — the Austro-Hungarian Empire allowed its subjects to live with one another without having to define themselves as belonging in any particular group.

Well, according to Adolf Hitler the only problem was that everyone did define themselves by National group in the Habsburg Empire whatever intellectual Jews thought and that the minority Germans came out second best. At least from the point of view of a nationalist German like Adolf.

In other words the ruling class of the time thought of itself as above national identity, but wasn't above a bit of divide and conquer on the national identity front.

Now John Gray thinks that there's a problem today, that

Both in Europe and the US, the liberal project has shifted from aiming to enable peaceful coexistence among individuals and groups with divergent identities to one that seeks hegemony for a single kind of identity—that of the autonomous, self-fashioning individual.

Well, I don't think that our liberal friends have ever been in favor of peaceful coexistence between groups, except those that were willing to peacefully protest for the Gentry liberal agenda. That's why the socialists were against the bourgeoisie and for the workers back in the day. 

And that is why liberals today are against Trump-voting commoners and for racial and gender identity groups that vote for liberals.

And as for the autonomous self-fashioning individual, I think that our liberal friends are in favor of left-leaning Gentry individuals that toe the left-liberal line and will cancel anyone that steps out of line.

And I think it is characteristic of chaps like Gray to think that maybe we've got a slight problem, but not to worry.

No, the bigger problem is that autonomous self-fashioning liberals are not people that think that politics is something that we need to keep under a tight rein; they think that politics run by them will bend the arc of history towards justice for autonomous self-fashioning indivoduals like them.

But Gray's heart may be in the right place. Says he,

A 21st-century successor to liberalism would enable devotees of individual autonomy to inhabit the same society as people who define themselves by other values — inherited codes of conduct of settled communities, revealed religionsoor noncommittal pragmatism, for example. Basic freedoms would allow people to move from one identity to another, but there would be nattempt to convert everyone to a life of self-fashioning autonomy.

But first our liberal friends have to release their rigid grip on the controls of political power.

A group intent on impeaching a duly-elected president is not a group anywhere close to admitting politics is not the universal answer to human problems, and that other people have rights too.