Political Tribes

by Amy Chua

  Muslim Americans too feel threatened in today’s United States. The day after the 2016 presidential election, Omer Aziz described in a New Republic essay how he and his Muslim American friends reacted to Trump’s win: “We felt in the deepest chambers of our being that America had betrayed us, had repudiated who we were. In a matter of minutes, the shining city on the hill became an armed citadel determined to oppose our existence. . . . [A]s people who come from the edges of society, we know what the face of white terror looks like and what Trump’s victory means for our future. There is no silver lining.”

  Mexican Americans feel threatened; the president of their country swept to power with anti-Mexican rhetoric. Reports abound of indiscriminate raids and detentions by ICE agents, and many live in fear that they or someone they love will be rounded up and deported.

  Women in America—not all, but many—feel threatened. They fear that overt sexism will not only be normalized but made fashionable again in the name of anti–political correctness. They fear that America may be entering a new era of sexual predation, sexual harassment, and sexual assault. Gay and transgender Americans feel threatened. They fear that a new conservative Supreme Court will undo hard-fought gains and that they will be subject to renewed hostility, stigma, and discrimination. Progressives in general feel threatened, under siege by what they see as a white-male-dominated, reactionary administration intent on destroying their vision of a tolerant, open, multicultural America.

  Finally—even though they won—Trump supporters feel threatened, under constant, vitriolic attack from liberal America. In a survey of Eastern Washington State residents, one small-business owner who voted for Trump said, “Citizens can be afraid to speak out on real issues for fear of being called Racist, Homophobic, Xenophobic, etc. when they are none of those things.” Another said, “I saw a YouTube video from the University of Chicago where students and some educators had made a piñata of President Trump and were telling the children to hit it and knock it down and when they did, the adults told them to rip it apart. What kind of message is that sending to young children?” And in the words of a former Democrat who voted twice for Bill Clinton but for Trump in 2016: “I feel like we are in some kind of civil war right now. . . . The Democratic Party has changed so much that I don’t recognize it anymore. . . . They are scarier to me than these Islamic terrorists.”

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  Thus we find ourselves in an unprecedented moment of pervasive tribal anxiety. For two hundred years, whites in America represented an undisputed politically, economically, and culturally dominant majority. When a political tribe is so overwhelmingly dominant, it can persecute with impunity, but it can also be more generous. It can afford to be more universalist, more enlightened, more inclusive, like the WASP elites of the 1960s who opened up the Ivy League colleges to more Jews, blacks, and other minorities—in part because it seemed like the right thing to do.

  Today, no group in America feels comfortably dominant. Every group feels attacked, pitted against other groups not just for jobs and spoils but for the right to define the nation’s identity. In these conditions, democracy devolves into zero-sum group competition—pure political tribalism.

  IDENTITY POLITICS, LEFT AND RIGHT

  In a sense, American politics has always been identity politics. If we define “identity politics” broadly, to include cultural and social movements based on group identities, then slavery and Jim Crow were forms of identity politics for white Americans, just as the suffragette movement at the turn of the twentieth century was for women.

  Nevertheless, at different times in the past, both the American Left and the American Right have stood for group-transcending values. Neither does today.

  Fifty years ago, the rhetoric of pro–civil rights, Great Society liberals was, in its dominant voices, expressly group transcending, framed in the language of national unity and equal opportunity. Introducing the bill that eventually became the Civil Rights Act of 1964, John F. Kennedy famously said: “This is one country. It has become one country because all of us and all the people who came here had an equal chance to develop their talents. We cannot say to ten percent of the population that you can’t have that right; that your children cannot have the chance to develop whatever talents they have.” In his most famous speech, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed: “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men—yes, black men as well as white men—would be guaranteed the unalienable Rights of Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” While more radical black power movements, led by activists like Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and the Nation of Islam’s Elijah Muhammad, espoused a more overtly racial, pro-black, or even antiwhite agenda, King’s ideals—the ideals that captured the imagination and hearts of the public and led to real change—transcended group divides and called for an America in which skin color didn’t matter.

  Leading liberal philosophical movements of that era were similarly group blind and universalist in character. John Rawls’s enormously influential A Theory of Justice, published in 1971, called on people to imagine themselves in an “original position,” behind a “veil of ignorance,” in which they could decide on their society’s basic principles without regard to “race, gender, religious affiliation, [or] wealth.” At roughly the same time, the idea of universal human rights proliferated, advancing the dignity of every individual as the foundation of a just international order. As Will Kymlicka would later point out, the international human rights movement deliberately elevated individual rights as opposed to group rights: “Rather than protecting vulnerable groups directly, through special rights for the members of designated groups, cultural minorities would be protected indirectly, by guaranteeing basic civil and political rights to all individuals regardless of group membership.”

  Thus, although the Left was always concerned with the oppression of minorities and the rights of disadvantaged groups, the dominant ideals in this period tended to be group blind, often cosmopolitan, with many calling for transcending not just ethnic, racial, and gender barriers but national boundaries as well.

  Meanwhile, leading conservatives also began championing group blindness, although in a much more nationalist, patriotic register. Ronald Reagan, who would become the demigod of this movement, emphasized both American exceptionalism as a “city upon a hill” and the values of rugged individualism, embracing equality of opportunity through free markets. While explicitly rejecting racism, and even claiming the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., Reagan also rejected affirmative action and mandatory minority hiring: “We are committed to a society in which all men and women have equal opportunities to succeed, and so we oppose the use of quotas,” Reagan explained. “We want a color-blind society. A society, that in the words of Dr. King, judges people not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

  To be sure, many on the left claim that the Right’s rhetoric of color blindness was always disingenuous. They cite, for example, Reagan’s famous denunciation of “welfare queens” as a term loaded with disparaging racial overtones. Nevertheless, Reagan raised a flag of color blindness around which the American Right would rally for decades to come. Thus in 2013, when President Obama said that “Trayvon [Martin] could have been me thirty-five years ago,” Fox News radio host Todd Starnes was quick to label the president “Race-Baiter in Chief,” and Newt Gingrich called the speech “disgraceful.”

  Perhaps in reaction to Reaganism, in the 1980s and 1990s, a new movement began to unfold on the left—a movement emphasizing group consciousness, group identity, and group claims. Many on the left had become acutely aware that color blindness was being used by conservatives to oppose policies intended to redress historical wrongs and persisting racial inequities. Many also began to notice that the leading liberal figures in Ame
rica, whether in law, government, or academia, were predominantly white men and that the neutral “group-blind” invisible hand of the market wasn’t doing much to correct longstanding imbalances. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the anticapitalist economic preoccupations of the old Left began to take a backseat to a new way of understanding oppression: the politics of redistribution was replaced by a “politics of recognition.” Modern identity politics was born.

  As Oberlin professor Sonia Kruks writes, “[W]hat makes identity politics a significant departure from earlier, pre-identarian [movements] is its demand for recognition on the basis of the very grounds on which recognition has previously been denied: it is qua women, qua blacks, qua lesbians that groups demand recognition. . . . The demand is not for inclusion within the fold of ‘universal humankind’ . . . nor is it for respect ‘in spite of’ one’s differences. Rather, what is demanded is respect for oneself as different.”

  But identity politics, with its group-based rhetoric, did not initially become the mainstream position of the Democratic Party. In the 1992 campaign, Bill Clinton famously repudiated Sister Souljah, a singer and activist who had said in justification of violence in Los Angeles, “If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?” Said Clinton: “If you took the words white and black, and you reversed them, you might think David Duke was giving that speech.” At the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama famously declared, “There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.”

  THE NEW TRIBAL LEFT

  A decade and a half later, we are very far from Obama’s America. Indeed, for today’s Left, group blindness is the ultimate sin, because it masks the reality of group hierarchies and oppression in America. As writer Catherine Crooke puts it:

  America has always channeled its politics and its power through hierarchies of identity. . . . European America acquired its land through the genocide of American Indians. It grew rich thanks to the importation and forced labor of enslaved blacks, who on the one hand became undeniably part of the American family through widespread sexual coercion, and on the other hand were legally and socially excluded from the American political community for generations. . . . In light of these realities, to insist upon a singular America is to deny the impact of violent marginalizations past and present. Progressives reject the whitewashing of the lived experiences of non-white or non-male Americans . . .

  It’s indisputable that whites, and specifically white male Protestants, dominated America for most of its history, often violently, and that this legacy persists. Thus, for the Left, identity politics is a means to “confront rather than obscure the uglier aspects of American history and society.”

  But in recent years, whether because of growing strength or growing frustration with the lack of progress, the Left has upped the ante. A shift in tone, rhetoric, and logic has moved identity politics away from inclusion—which had always been the Left’s watchword—toward exclusion and division. For much of the Left today, anyone who speaks in favor of group blindness is on the other side, indifferent to or even guilty of oppression. For some, especially on college campuses, anyone who doesn’t swallow the antioppression orthodoxy hook, line, and sinker—anyone who doesn’t acknowledge “white supremacy” in America—is a racist. When liberal icon Bernie Sanders told supporters, “It’s not good enough for somebody to say, ‘Hey, I’m a Latina, vote for me,’” Quentin James, the National Black Americans Director for the Ready for Hillary PAC, retorted that Sanders’s “comments regarding identity politics suggest he may be a white supremacist, too.”

  Once identity politics gains momentum, it inevitably subdivides, giving rise to ever-proliferating group identities demanding recognition. One of the most important concepts in left-academic circles today is “intersectionality,” which understands oppression as operating on multiple axes simultaneously. Thus Columbia law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined the term over twenty-five years ago, has explored how the claims of black women were often excluded from both feminist and antiracist movements because the experiences of black women did not reflect the typical “women’s experience” or “black experience.” Similarly, political activist Linda Sarsour has pointed out that while equal pay for women is an important issue, “look at the ratio of what white women get paid versus black women and Latina women.”

  Pathbreaking in the 1990s, intersectionality has in recent years been misinterpreted and used in ways not originally intended, becoming, as Crenshaw put it in 2017, “basically identity politics on steroids,” dividing people into ever more specific subgroups created by overlapping racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual orientation categories. Today, there is an ever-expanding vocabulary of identity on the left. Facebook now lists more than fifty gender designations from which users can choose, from genderqueer to intersex to pangender. Or take the acronym LGBTQ. Originally LGB, variants over the years have ranged from GLBT to LGBTI to LGBTQQIAAP as preferred terminology shifted and identity groups quarreled about who should be included and who should come first.

  Because the Left is always trying to outleft the last Left, the result can be a zero-sum competition over which group is the least privileged, an “Oppression Olympics” often fragmenting progressives and setting them against each other.

  All these dynamics were on display at the Women’s March of January 21, 2017, when a staggering 4.2 million people gathered in solidarity at events around the country, with an estimated crowd of almost 500,000 in DC alone. In many ways, the march was a stupendous success, an expression of progressive unity. The New Yorker reported that the “crowds on Saturday were so enormous, so radiant with love and dissent, that” the “coming together” of all marginalized groups “seemed possible.”

  Below the surface, however, political-tribe tensions plagued the march. The original name of the march, the “Million Woman March,” was also the name of an important 1997 protest for black women’s unity. Black women quickly accused the organizers of appropriation. On Facebook, one critic wrote: “I take issue with white feminists taking the name of something that Black people started to address our struggles. That’s appropriation. . . . I will not even consider supporting this until the organizers are intersectional, original and come up with a different name.” Another critic lambasted the organizers as racist: “This is the perfect example of how white supremacy disguised as white feminism can be incredibly damaging to Black bodies, Black culture and Black herstory.”

  Acknowledging these criticisms, the organizers changed the name of the march and brought on nonwhite activists as cochairs. But tensions continued. Many black women felt used, especially in light of the glaring fact that 53 percent of white women had voted for Trump. Others chose not to participate in the march, because “they didn’t want to be apart [sic] of a mass mobilization of white women.” And on the march’s Facebook page, one black activist encouraged white women to assume a more passive role in the fight, to listen and learn from those who had already been engaged in the struggle: “You don’t just get to join because now you’re scared, too. I was born scared.” ShiShi Rose, a Brooklyn blogger, wrote, “Now is the time for you to be listening more, talking less. You should be reading our books and understanding the roots of racism and white supremacy. You should be drowning yourselves in our poetry.”

  Predictably, these criticisms ignited backlash from some white women, who began “to feel not very welcome” and didn’t understand why women of color had to be “so divisive.” Some who had planned to fly to DC decided not to go. One fifty-year-old South Carolinian woman, who had been excited to bring her daughters, canceled her trip after reading online posts. “This is a women’s march,” she said. “We’re supposed to be allies in equal pay, marriage, adoption. Why is it now about, ‘White women don’t understand black women’?” Others responded angrily to the organizers’ online request that white wom
en “understand their privilege, and acknowledge the struggle that women of color face.” “Fuck You is my immediate reaction,” one white woman wrote. “You’re no better than trump voters,” wrote another.

  Although inclusivity is presumably still the ultimate goal, the contemporary Left is pointedly exclusionary. During a Black Lives Matter protest at the DNC held in Philadelphia in July 2016, a protest leader announced that “this is a black and brown resistance march,” asking white allies to “appropriately take [their] place in the back of this march.” The war on “cultural appropriation” is rooted in the belief that groups have exclusive rights to their own histories, symbols, and traditions. A prototypical example of cultural appropriation would be a white person wearing a sombrero and a fake mustache to a Halloween party, but some on the Left today would also consider it an offensive act of privilege for, say, a straight white man to write a novel featuring a gay Latina. Transgressions are called out daily on social media; no one is immune. Beyoncé was criticized for wearing what looked like a traditional Indian bridal outfit; Amy Schumer, in turn, was criticized for making a parody of Beyoncé’s “Formation,” a song about black female pride and empowerment. Students at Oberlin complained of a vendor’s “history of blurring the line between culinary diversity and cultural appropriation by modifying the recipes without respect for certain Asian countries’ cuisines.” And a student op-ed at Louisiana State University claimed that white women styling their eyebrows to look thicker—like “a lot of ethnic women”—was “a prime example of the cultural appropriation in the country.”