Does Liberalism Need Identity Politics?
This is a contribution to Symposium No. 1, our invitation to explore and explain the basic principles of a liberal outlook.
Does liberalism need identity politics? The question may shock: A wide range of liberal, libertarian, centrist, and conservative commentators (myself included) have asserted that “social justice” progressivism with its fixation on identity is a threat to liberalism and liberty. But are we missing something? There are those who counter that “identity politics” are not only benign but actually essential to liberalism’s success: After all, they say, the true promise of liberty cannot be fulfilled without addressing specific injustices and oppressions toward disadvantaged groups.
Shortly after the 2016 election, McGill University professor Jacob T. Levy made this argument in his essay “The Defense of Liberty Can’t Do Without Identity Politics,” on the website of the Niskanen Center (where he is a fellow), a left-libertarian think tank that combines market principles and advocacy of an open society with progressive cultural values. After dismissing the argument that a backlash against excessive “political correctness” contributed to Donald Trump’s victory, Levy cites Black Lives Matter as an example of an identity-based movement with a clearly pro-freedom agenda:
Black Lives Matter has provided the first truly large-scale political mobilization against police violence and mass incarceration since the War on Drugs began. It’s perfectly true that many liberal (very much including libertarian) scholars and analysts have been calling for reform of police practices, an end to police militarization and civil forfeiture abuse, respect for civil liberties, and drug decriminalization or legalization for a long time. It’s true that it’s possible to offer those analyses in a race-neutral way. But given that the policies aren’t race-neutral, it shouldn’t surprise us that opposition to them isn’t either, and that the real political energy for mobilizing against them would be race-conscious energy.
If Black Lives Matter is “identity politics,” then identity politics has provided one of the most significant political mobilizations in defense of freedom in the United States in my lifetime.
Levy also cites the role of gay rights groups in the repeal of state sodomy laws which criminalized a variety of sexual practices between consenting adults and selectively targeted gays even when they were ostensibly identity-neutral. While recognizing some excesses of “political correctness,” or what we would now call “wokeness,” he concludes:
Members of disadvantaged minorities standing up for themselves aren’t to blame for the turn to populist authoritarianism; and their energy and commitment is a resource that free societies can’t do without in resisting it.
About three years later, in February 2020, Vox columnist Zack Beauchamp laid out a similar case: the best way to revive weakened and embattled liberalism, he wrote, was to embrace identity politics, i.e., a focus on the particular concerns of oppressed groups—both because “it’s the logical extension of liberalism’s core commitment to social equality and democracy” and because it’s the best way to mobilize people to defend the liberal cause.
Before addressing Levy’s and Beauchamp’s argument, it’s important to clarify what “identity politics” means. When people speak out against discrimination or bias targeting their demographic on the basis of identity, or even about injustices that don’t overtly target their group but affect it most, this can be called “identity politics” only in the broadest sense. Very few would argue that Martin Luther King, Jr., was engaging in “identity politics” when he opposed race-based segregation and oppression, even if some progressives have recently tried to bring King under that umbrella. You could argue, in fact, that King was a fighter against identity politics—the white supremacist kind. Likewise, 1970s feminism, which focused on equal treatment for women including the repeal of laws and government policies that discriminated on the basis of sex, was not primarily an identity movement (despite having a radical “womanist” liberation wing). And the movement for the legalization of same-sex marriage tended to downplay gay identity and frame its cause as one of giving gay people equal legal access to the benefits enjoyed by heterosexual couples: Hence the rhetorical shift from “gay marriage” to “same-sex marriage” and “marriage equality.”
By contrast, the new wave of identity politics that began circa 2013 has often focused almost entirely on transforming attitudes and protecting “marginalized people” from real or perceived slights and affronts based on identity (an agenda that itself poses major problems for liberalism, an issue to which I will return shortly). In that sense, Black Lives Matter is an exception. It is a progressive, identity-based movement that has specific political goals—ones that do, in many cases, have the effect of expanding liberty: curbing police powers, reducing incarceration, and promoting police accountability. But is it a movement friendly to liberal goals?
Black Lives Matter, Liberty, and Illiberalism
While Black Lives Matter has radical beginnings—two of the movement’s three founders are self-described “trained Marxists”—it has sometimes aligned itself with goals that can be described as broadly liberal. In 2015, for instance, BLM activist DeRay Mckesson and two other racial justice activists started a group called Campaign Zero, whose platform was occasionally described as a BLM policy platform (though, in fact, Campaign Zero has no formal affiliation with BLM). Its agenda includes more community oversight, limiting the use of force, independent investigations and prosecutions of police shootings, ending “for-profit policing” such as civil asset forfeiture and reliance on fines to fund local government budgets, and police demilitarization. All these are laudable—and liberal—goals.
But the movement has also been linked to far more extreme views. Take the six “policy demands” released in August 2016 by another group under the BLM umbrella, the Movement for Black Lives. That list included what sounds like black political separatism (“independent Black political power and Black self-determination in all areas of society”), broadly defined reparations, and racialized communism (“economic justice for all and a reconstruction of the economy to ensure Black communities have collective ownership”). In 2020, BLM undercut the effectiveness of its police reform message by embracing radical causes such as dismantling the police and abolishing prisons and by linking itself to violence-plagued police-free zones such as “CHOP” (Capitol Hill Occupied Protest zone) in Seattle.
What’s more, BLM’s explicit and emphatic placement of identity—i.e., race—at the center of its mission may ultimately undermine more than aid the liberal aspects of its goals.
For one, this perspective leads to simplistic narratives that are often at odds with reality. These narratives ignore, for example, the fact that far more black lives are lost to intra-racial crime than either to police killings or to racist white vigilantism. (As one black woman in Chicago told a news crew last summer after losing two nephews to gun violence amidst a spike in crime: “We talk about Black Lives Matter, but I’m sick and tired of what’s going on in these streets.”) Of course, police violence has the uniquely pernicious element of state coercion, intertwined in this case with the specifically racial aspect of America’s history of denying full citizenship to black people and using law enforcement to enforce white supremacy. But police brutality in 21st Century America is also a far more complex problem than the racial narrative suggests. While racial bias and profiling play a role—apparently more in low-level police harassment and abuse than in lethal violence—there are many other factors as well, and plenty of white people die needlessly at the hands of police officers who are not held accountable. In July of last year, right on the heels of the protests against the killing of George Floyd, a federal judge in Dallas tossed out an excessive force lawsuit against five police officers involved in the eerily similar demise of a mentally ill white man, Tony Timpa, who died while being restrained and pleading for his life in 2016.
Some BLM supporters such as Jarvis DeBerry, formerly a columnist for The Times-Picayune/New Orleans Advocate, have argued that BLM speaks up for white victims of police violence far more than any of the people who criticize BLM for its racial focus. DeBerry offers some examples of BLM activists drawing attention to cases of unarmed white people being killed by law enforcement. But there is no question that such cases have received very little publicity overall, and there is an inherent tension between acknowledging non-racial police abuse and promoting BLM’s core message that black people are being abused and killed because they are black, as part of “systemic” racial oppression. Indeed, on a number of occasions—most recently after the March 22 grocery store shooting in Boulder, Colorado—BLM supporters have rushed to declare that restraint shown by the police in apprehending a white suspect was a demonstration of white supremacy or white privilege. (The shooter in Boulder turned out to be Middle Eastern.)
Levy may be correct when he says that the race-conscious message makes it easier to mobilize outrage into protest, not only from blacks but from liberal and moderate whites who react with anger and shame to the oppression of blacks. But does this translate into more long-term support for essentially liberal laws and policy changes curbing police powers, or does the race-conscious messaging ultimately tell many whites (and members of other groups) that this is not their problem? Does it, in the end, polarize more than it mobilizes? That remains to be seen. While BLM registered support from as many as two-thirds of all Americans in the wake of Floyd’s death in late May of 2020, its approval appeared to slip to around or below 50 percent by the end of summer. Sarah Longwell, NeverTrump Republican consultant and publisher of The Bulwark, reported a backlash among centrist white women in her focus groups after the shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on August 23 of that year; they felt that, as one woman put it, “If he was white no one would have cared.”
But even if BLM’s focus on identity can be used to further liberal goals, its other aspects—namely, its intolerance of criticism and dissent—makes it profoundly illiberal. This has been especially evident since last summer’s “racial reckoning,” with case after case of people hounded out of their jobs for voicing some variation on “All Lives Matter.”
In June, NBA announcer and Sacramento radio talk show host Grant Napear lost both spots after he responded to a tweet asking about his “take on BLM” with, “ALL LIVES MATTER…EVERY SINGLE ONE!!!” Around the same time, University of Massachusetts-Lowell nursing school dean Leslie Neal-Boylan was fired for an email about the racial justice protests which said, in part, “BLACK LIVES MATTER, but also, EVERYONE’S LIFE MATTERS”; the university took quick action after an offended (white) student tweeted a screenshot of the dean’s “upsetting statement” and complained about “narrow minded people in lead positions.” Vermont school principal Tiffany Riley was placed on leave pending “an exit strategy” after a Facebook post which, ironically, criticized the “coercive measures” used to advance the BLM message. (Riley stressed that she sympathized with the message itself but believed that “others who advocate for and demand equity for all” should be heard as well.) Philadelphia Inquirer editor Stan Wischnowski was forced out because pro-BLM staffers were angered by an article on the human costs of property destruction, headlined “Buildings Matter Too.”
Still more alarming, perhaps, is the trend of penalizing individuals and organizations judged to be insufficiently vocal, enthusiastic, or sincere in their support for BLM. Kindness Yoga, a 19-year-old company with nine yoga studios in Denver, shut down in June after “callouts” from a few employees who felt that its statement of solidarity with BLM on Instagram was “too little, too late” grew into a massive social media backlash and a wave of membership cancellations. In Chicago, the Poetry Foundation found itself in trouble when its pledge to work on eradicating “institutional racism” was denounced as inadequate; numerous writers and readers declared their intent to boycott the foundation’s Poetry magazine, and its president and board chair ended up resigning.
Identities, Intersectionality, and “Oppression Olympics”
“Intersectionality,” or a focus on the “intersection” of different identities, is the cornerstone of modern progressive politics. It is frequently criticized for reducing individuals to a collection of labels and creating a new hierarchy in which more “oppression points” equal higher status; yet its defenders dismiss this critique as a misunderstanding or misrepresentation. Kimberlé Crenshaw, the feminist legal scholar who coined the concept of intersectionality in 1989, argues that it is essentially anti-hierarchy and that it offers a complex and nuanced approach to identity and power in which most people are both “oppressors” and “oppressed” in different contexts. (Even the straight, cisgender white male can be disadvantaged by class, religion, immigrant status, or disability.) In Liberal Currents, an online magazine that often aims to synthesize classical liberalism with identitarian “social justice,” Paul Crider argues that “only intersectional liberalism can achieve the liberal purpose of equality of dignity among all persons, and genuine freedom for each individual” and that liberalism without intersectionality will inevitably perpetuate injustices based on race, gender, and other identities.
Few would deny, for instance, that a multidimensional framework can be necessary to understand the plight of “multiply burdened” individuals such as black female plaintiffs seeking redress in a situation where neither white women nor black men are discriminated against (the example invoked in Crenshaw’s groundbreaking law review essay). Conversely, defenders of intersectionality sometimes acknowledge that in practice, it can devolve into point-scoring or into a meaningless buzzword. However, they also insist that such misuses of intersectionality are a minor problem.
But in fact, both the theory and especially the “normal” practice of intersectionality have flaws that make them singularly ill-suited to liberalism.
For one, intersectional analysis of identities and “lived experiences” tends to be mired in broad stereotypical assumptions that often reflect progressive dogma more than fact. Thus, left-libertarian Cathy Reisenwitz asserts, as an example of identity-specific disadvantage, that “only women know what it’s like to have to choose between being successful and being liked,” citing Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In. But is this really universal or exclusive to women? Recent research questions Sandberg’s claim that women, but not men, are seen as less likable when they are successful. In a 2015 Harvard Business School study, women (both working adults and business students) were less likely than men to regard high-level, high-power jobs as desirable—but the gender gap was small, and women who did not want such positions cited time constraints and conflicts with other priorities, not concerns about “being liked.”
Or take Crider’s reference to a “queer black Muslim woman” as a model multiply-burdened individual. It’s safe to say that in this example, the “Muslim” dimension of the woman’s oppression refers to anti-Muslim bigotry from white Western “systems of oppression,” not the problems she might encounter from within the Muslim community as a woman of non-traditional sexuality. An actual “queer [brown] Muslim woman,” Canadian writer and educator Irshad Manji—a Uganda-born immigrant of Egyptian and Indian heritage, a lesbian, and an advocate for liberal reform of Islam—has been attacked in progressive publications as a promoter of “Islamophobic ideology” who uses her identity to give cover to racist white men. (Manji’s offenses include being a fan of “Western enlightenment” and criticizing “political correctness” about radical Islamism.) A few years ago in England, another woman of Muslim background, Iranian-born feminist and secularist Maryam Namazie, was targeted for deplatforming at Goldsmiths College, University of London, by an intersectional alliance between the campus Islamic Society, which tried to block her talk as a violation of “safe space” for Muslim students, and feminist and LGBT groups which joined in solidarity.
In other words, the intersectional inclusion of “marginalized identities” generally extends only to those people who are performing their identity correctly, according to progressive doctrine—or, in sarcastic online slang, who are “womaning,” “blacking,” or “Musliming” right. This is also evident in many progressive activists’ attitudes toward Asian-Americans who are seen as taking “conservative” positions—for instance, opposing racial preferences in education.
Recently, San Francisco school board member Alison Collins came under fire after people drew attention to her November 2016 Twitter tirade against such deviant Asian-Americans. Many Asian-American teachers, students, and parents, Collins had written, “believe they benefit from the ‘model minority’ BS,” “actively promote these myths,” and “use white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead’”; in a particularly inflammatory tweet, she comparing this stance to “being a house n****r.” Collins’s rant elicited outrage amidst the heightened awareness of anti-Asian racism in the wake of the Atlanta shootings, in which six of the eight victims were Asian-American women; she lost her school board committee assignments and vice-presidency. Yet before that, similar rhetoric, accusing non-leftist Asian-Americans of “white adjacency and proximity,” had been fairly standard in the social justice community.
Another problem is that intersectional discourse on the “multiply burdened” never thinks outside the box of stereotypical hierarchies of oppression; it thus remains astoundingly blind to situations in which the burden may fall on a traditionally “privileged” identity, such as being male. This is especially true of the intersection of race and gender, since black men and boys fare worse than black women and girls on many metrics from education to violence at the hands of law enforcement. According to a 2019 study, a black man’s lifetime risk of being killed by a police officer is 2.4 times higher than for a white man and as much as 40 times higher than for a black woman; for a black woman, that risk is 1.4 times higher than for a white woman. Yet proponents of intersectionality are more concerned about the fact that sexual assault by cops, the victims of which are primarily women, gets too little attention in discussions of police violence.
And that’s the theory. In practice, intersectionality usually ends up doing precisely what its defenders fervently deny: constructing new hierarchies in which presumed oppressed status confers higher rank.
Consider, for instance, responses to the 2014 controversy in the science fiction/fantasy community when Benjanun Sriduangkaew, a promising young writer of Thai background, was revealed to have alternate Internet identities as a social justice “rageblogger” specializing in virulent hate campaigns against writers whose work she found offensive and a prolific troll who had terrorized multiple online forums with even worse cyberbullying. The key question, according to most commentary on the affair, was how Sriduangkaew’s identity bona fides as an Asian lesbian should stack up against the fact that her abuse had mostly targeted “women, people of color, and other marginalized or vulnerable people.” The definitive LiveJournal exposé of Sriduangkaew’s exploits even featured pie charts showing that nearly three quarters of her known victims were women, some 40 percent were “POCs,” and a substantial proportion were “Queer/LGBTQI.”
Or consider the brouhaha at the Halifax Pop Explosion music festival in Canada in 2017 when singer Lido Pimienta asked “brown girls” to move to the front rows and white people to move to the back of the room, and a white volunteer photographer refused to move back and was ultimately removed from the premises. Eventually, the festival organizers apologized for the “overt racism.” The photographer’s, that is.
As for claims that intersectionality provides complexity and nuance to the analysis of issues or situations, its real-world version, at least, usually does the opposite: In almost every case, one dimension of identity is singled out at the expense of the rest.
Racial or ethnic minority status, for instance, invariably trumps class, so that an elite journalist from a thriving nonwhite demographic—Indian-American—can feel free to mock “whiny” rural white workers at a chicken processing plant. (Indeed, there is evidence that priming progressives with text about “white privilege” tends to reduce their sympathy for economically and socially disadvantaged white people.) On the other hand, the racial elements of the crusade against campus sexual assault, which has often resulted in the railroading of nonwhite men, generally get brought up only by dissenters from progressive ideology such as journalist Emily Yoffe, while intersectional feminists remain silent.
Most of the time, however, race trumps gender. Once a white woman has been condemned as a racist—like Amy Cooper, the New Yorker who called the police on a black bird-watcher in Central Park when he accosted her about walking with an unleashed dog—her possible fear of male violence is dismissed as a non-issue. Rhetoric assailing white women as upholders of white supremacy can even traffic in misogynistic stereotypes (e.g., women using tears for strategic advantage—in this case, to avoid accountability for their presumed racism) without raising an eyebrow. Likewise, transgender status decisively trumps not only womanhood but lesbian identity. And white gays, especially gay white men, are easily relegated to oppressor status.
Nor does intersectionality mitigate the social justice movement’s reluctance to condemn bigotry when the targets are ostensibly more “privileged” than the haters—e.g., anti-Semitism or anti-Asian prejudice in some black or Latino communities. (Notably, the term “POC,” or “People of Color,” in social justice discourse has increasingly given way to “BIPOC,” or “Black, Indigenous, and POC,” which is specifically intended to pull out African-Americans for special status while relegating other minorities such as Asian-Americans to the catchall of “POC”—another example of the hierarchy of identities.) During an anti-racism forum at California’s Claremont McKenna College in 2015, an Asian-American woman who tried to talk about anti-Asian racism on campus and noted that some of it came from black students was promptly shouted down. Today, awareness of racism against Asian-Americans is much higher—but it still remains an uncomfortable subject when it cannot be pinned on “white supremacy.”
The day after the Atlanta shootings, The Atlantic ran an interview with Asian-American author and progressive activist Cathy Park Hong, a US-born daughter of Korean immigrants, on the rise in anti-Asian racist incidents. The interview was conducted before the tragedy in Atlanta, when some of the most visible incidents of this kind involved nonwhite perpetrators. Hong fretted that it was “very charged and tricky to talk about...the optics of a Black or brown person assaulting or attacking the Asian elderly,” since “white people will not hold themselves accountable” for these crimes while “older Asian immigrants” who are not sensitive about racial issues or policing may react by moving “toward the right.” She also argued that “[p]art of the reason there’s a spike in anti-Asian violence is that people are angry and desperate”—the kind of language that would be quickly condemned as apology for hate if the perpetrators were white.
In the end, identity politics can undermine activism as much as mobilize it. Ironically, Beauchamp cites the 2017 Women’s March as “a concrete example of how identity politics can help” the liberal cause, before conceding that the movement had “largely petered out” thanks in part to “leadership infighting.” He leaves out the fact that the infighting was almost entirely the result of “intersectional” conflicts, including clashes over anti-Semitism and accusations of “privilege” against white female activists.
Liberalism absolutely must strive to ensure “equality of dignity among all persons.” But intersectionality and identity politics are not the way to get us there.
The Problem of Speech and “Harm”
Aside from the sacralization of identity (and identity hierarchies), left-identitarian ideology today poses another major problem for liberalism: It is explicitly hostile to freedom of speech and open discourse.
In March 2018, when Christina Hoff Sommers, a feminist scholar who dissents from feminist orthodoxies on a number of subjects, was invited to speak at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon, left-wing students tried to get her deplatformed (and failing at that, repeatedly disrupted her talk). The statement in which several student groups including the Black Law Student Association, the Women’s Law Caucus, and the Young Democratic Socialists of America urged the cancellation of Sommers’s event contained some strikingly revealing language. The event was condemned as “an act of aggression and violence” toward oppressed groups. After enumerating Sommers’s supposed offenses (e.g., “She has called the epidemic of sexual assault on campuses and the gender wage gap ‘myths’”), the statement declared:
We live in an age when we have come to an understanding of how power works: Those calling for “debate” of marginalized people’s humanity fail to recognize how unevenly political power is able to be wielded. We now understand how language works, and how it can be used to reproduce the systems of oppression we know we must resist at all costs. Instead of recognizing this and moving forward, some in our community choose to remain in denial of this truth and act to stifle progress in an attempt to preserve the status quo. Free speech is certainly an important tenet to a free, healthy society, but that freedom stops when it has a negative and violent impact on other individuals. There is no debate here.
This is a remarkably clear and concise statement of the movement’s view of speech and intellectual discourse. Speech that questions progressive dogma on any identity-related issues (e.g., whether the gap in earnings between men and women is due to discrimination) amounts to questioning “marginalized people’s humanity.” “Wrong” speech not only amounts to “violence” against the oppressed but perpetuates the “systems of oppression”—which must be resisted “at all costs.” People who defend the very idea of debate on such issues are “in denial” of truth and standing in the way of progress. What’s more, this view is presented not simply as the writers’ perspective, but as the cutting-edge understanding of how language and power operate.
This is not just knee-jerk hostility to speech that offends; it is a carefully rationalized argument for suppression of dissenting speech, which is seen as causing “harm” and often equated with “violence.” This mindset was also in evidence in the recent debates about so-called “cancel culture,” particularly in responses to the “Letter on Justice and Open Debate” published in Harper’s magazine last summer, which warned about the dangers of speech and debate suppression in the name of social justice. Thus, The Atlantic’s Hannah Giorgis wrote that “defenses of ‘free speech’ have often been wielded by people in positions of power in response to critics who want to hold them accountable for the real-life harm their words might cause.” But it’s unclear what “people in positions of power” means. Yes, some of the signers of the letter are influential cultural figures, such as novelists Salman Rushdie and J.K. Rowling; others are no more powerful than Giorgis, a culture critic for a prestigious magazine.
What’s more, the notion that people should be “held accountable” for words that might cause “real-life harm” is dangerously fuzzy. In recent years, speech labeled “harmful” has included Rowling’s tweet arguing that transgender people should be able to live, dress, and love as they wish but other people should not be punished for stating the reality of biological sex; Jeanine Cummins’s best-selling novel American Dirt, written to humanize the plight of Mexican migrants but condemned for containing stereotypes and inaccuracies and having an insufficiently “Latinx” author with one Puerto Rican grandparent; the name of the hip-hop band “N**gaz With Attitude” spelled out in full by a Latina professor in a discussion post for an online class; and a painting of lynching victim Emmett Till by a white female artist.
It should also be noted that in this framework, words that “might cause” real-life harm never come from the left. (It can’t be, for example, words that romanticize rioting.)
Shortly after the Harper’s letter, another elaborate rationalization of speech suppression was offered by Zack Beauchamp—ironically, the same Vox writer who had previously argued that identitarian social justice is liberalism’s savior. While Beauchamp conceded that social justice advocates can overreach in condemning a broad range of speech as bigoted, he also argued that overall, their work seeks to expand freedom by “making historically marginalized voices feel comfortable enough in the public square to be their authentic selves, to exist honestly and speak their own truths.” But it turns out that in this paradigm, expanded freedom and comfort for the “marginalized” requires effectively silencing many others. For instance, in Beauchamp’s view, transgender people cannot speak freely and comfortably if other people—Rowling, for example—are permitted to question their self-identification in any way, because they find such debates too demoralizing and hurtful.
While progressives tend to dismiss concerns about “cancel culture” as griping from people who want to express contentious views without “consequences” such as encountering criticism or pushback, their own statements make it clear that the “consequences” they have in mind go far beyond vigorous contestation. Beauchamp, for instance, candidly admits that in the social justice worldview, “hurtful” opinions must be driven out of the public square. (He also concedes that in the identity-politics framework, “marginalized” activists must be able to speak without being contradicted or criticized: Their arguments “deserve a special kind of deference” and must be “grant[ed] authority,” and their speech must not be “undercut” by “tone policing” even if they are disruptive and abusive.)
Likewise, the language of “accountability” used by Giorgis and others generally implies not just criticism but judgment and punishment. Perhaps the clearest expression of this was a tweet by New Yorker writer Jelani Cobb in the debate over the Harper’s letter: “Amazing how often I hear people say they are defending ‘free speech’ when what they are actually defending is impunity.” I believe this is what’s known as “saying the quiet part loud”: People need to be punished for bad speech.
Granted, none of these examples involve speech suppression by the government or by mob violence; despite occasional violent campus protests, social justice activists usually silence undesirable speech through stigma and social pressure, which many progressives point out have always been a part of negotiating cultural norms. It is true, of course, that civilized discourse is impossible unless some speech is considered beyond the pale. As Beauchamp correctly points out, Jews are not expected to politely debate Nazis. No one would cry “cancel culture” if a private organization deplatformed someone for arguing that rape or child molestation are valid sexual preferences or that genocide and slavery are just fine if the right demographic is in power.
However, liberals including John Stuart Mill have long acknowledged that limitations on speech by social censure and pressure can also create a climate inhospitable to freedom. A liberal culture requires that the boundaries of speech deemed “beyond the pale” be drawn as clearly and narrowly as possible. The humanity of transgender people should not, as social justice activists stress, be up for debate; however, in a free society, such questions as “should puberty blockers be approved for children with gender dysphoria” or “should male-bodied teenagers who identify as girls be able to join girls’ athletic programs” cannot be taken off the table simply because transgender activists regard these questions as an assault on their identity. Likewise, “are women human” should not be debatable; “are male and female social roles partly shaped by innate sex differences” should be.
What’s more, when the social climate turns inhospitable to a wide range of speech that offends dominant values and the suppression of “wrongthink” by societal pressures as well as corporate, cultural, and educational institutions becomes a norm, censorship by government may not be far behind. In a 2017 survey by the Cato Institute and the YouGov polling firm, about half of college students said that hate speech should not have First Amendment protections. One of the leading current gurus of the social justice left, author, activist, and academic Ibram X. Kendi, has proposed an “Anti-Racist Constitutional Amendment” and a federal “Department of Anti-Racism” tasked, among other things, with punishing “racist” speech by public officials and eliminating racial disparities in the private sector. (Kendi’s definition of racism is so broad that it includes Barack Obama’s acknowledgment that high crime rates and father absence in the black community are real problems or that legitimate concerns about affirmative action exist.) This would take us down the road of a coercive, state-engineered overhaul of a wide range of societal practices accompanied by extensive speech policing.
Lastly, it is also worth noting that the social justice agenda often includes not only speech restrictions but compelled speech such as confessions to various forms of “privilege” and prejudice in diversity training sessions. While this is not government compulsion, its spread as a condition of employment should certainly be troubling to anyone who cares about free and vital discussion.
Liberty, Justice, and Individualism for All
You can construct your own idealized vision of “identity politics” that is compatible with liberalism, but actual identity politics has an opposite approach, both in practice and in its fundamental spirit.
Consider that the radical overhaul of society envisioned by the social justice movement requires not only speech policing but extensive behavior policing. Food and clothing, for instance, are easily targeted as culturally appropriative; even posting a photo of oneself with an overly dark tan can trigger charges of racist “appropriation” because of alleged similarities to blackface or “brownface.” The policing also extends to friendships and family relations. In June, the New York Times ran an op-ed suggesting that people text “relatives and loved ones telling them you will not be visiting them or answering phone calls until they take significant action in supporting black lives either through protest or financial contributions.” A recent guide for “difficult conversations about race” used at some federal agencies advises encouraging people to reflect on the racial mix of their personal circle of friends and people they frequently interact with, as well as authors they have recently read, characters in movies and TV shows they have recently watched, and the subjects of artwork they have in their homes.
There is a word for ideologies that declare everything to be political, and it’s certainly not “liberal.” This is velvet totalitarianism.
Indeed, one of the more striking aspects of identity-based “social justice” is that it lacks any vision of personal freedom—or even of a society free from abuse of power. One of its cornerstone ideas—privilege theory—dictates that freedom from discrimination and oppression is an unearned privilege to be ashamed of, rather than a basic right that should be extended to all. This ultimately undercuts the entire philosophical foundation of the civil rights movement and of a rights-based order. Some leftists see this as well. A few years ago, University of California-Merced sociologist Tanya Bolash-Goza, who shares the view that there is pervasive structural racism in America, wrote that the term “white privilege” turns what should be the norm for all—e.g., not being treated as a suspected criminal by police or fellow citizens—into a special advantage unfairly enjoyed by whites.
In effect, progressive identity politics does not aim for a world in which social and political power are limited and deprived of tyrannical authority but instead assumes that one identity group will always be imposing its will on another—and just tries to change which groups control the balance of power.
Ensuring that liberalism does not leave some groups behind is a worthy goal, and it is certainly true that a liberalism which allows such exclusions to continue is not worthy of the name. But modern identity politics is not the answer. It is certainly possible to notice and oppose racial or gender injustice where it exists without reducing people to collectivist labels and scrutinizing every human interaction and every spoken word for racism, misogyny, homophobia, and other bigotries.
Instead of following the path trodden by the social justice movement or by left identitarianism (and embracing such militantly anti-liberal gurus as Kendi or Angela Davis), liberals who care about equal dignity for all and freedom for each individual should advocate for these values in their own voice: a voice that stresses freedom, justice, and individual rights.
Cathy Young is an associate editor at Arc Digital and a contributing editor for Reason.