Standing for Something Is Not ‘Identity Politics’

P erry Bacon, writing in the Washington Post, has produced the latest version of that hoary, perennial column: “here is why conservatives should want to become Democrats, but they are too dumb to know it.” This ancient species of concern trolling is wearyingly familiar by now; I half expected it to conclude with “Max Boot is on vacation.” It is written for the consumption of people who loathe conservatives and conservatism but understand neither. It invariably involves logical fallacies, changes to the settled meaning of words, and straw-man versions of what conservatives actually believe.

Bacon ticks all those boxes. His column, entitled “The misguided identity politics of the anti-Trump Republicans,” commits three fundamental category errors. One, he either completely misunderstands or willfully mischaracterizes what “identity politics” is. Two, his vision of politics is nihilistic: It assumes that nobody (or at least no Republican) actually believes in the principles or causes to which they have devoted their adult lives, or believes that politics exists for any purpose but its own perpetuation. And three, he totally ignores the powerful reasons why conservatives and Republicans very reasonably fear that giving power to Democrats not only results in bad policy, but is also a dire threat to the survival of the American system of democratic, republican, liberal, constitutional government.

Bacon’s thesis is that anti-Trump Republicans such as George W. Bush, Liz Cheney, and Mitt Romney have remained Republicans — instead of joining the Democrats — solely due to “identity politics:”

What’s stopping them from doing more? Identity politics. . . . For many Trump-skeptical Republicans, both elite and rank-and-file, being a Republican, and definitely not a Democrat, is a part of their personal identity. And so far, too few have been willing to prioritize the health of the country over this attachment. . . .

The term “identity politics” has become a pejorative, deployed to suggest that Democrats are too focused on people of color and women. But political scientists say that one of the strongest identities in America today is which of the two parties a person supports and, perhaps even more so, which one they don’t. . . . I know I am asking them to do something hard — I suspect that being a Republican is as central to their identities as being Black is to mine or being Muslim is to people who practice Islam.

Notice, of course, the framing here of what the phrase “identity politics” means: “Democrats are too focused on people of color and women.” This completely misses the point of what identity politics is: specifically, a focus on race, gender, and other group characteristics as a substitute for ideas, policies, principles, and causes. A classic example of identity politics is people voting for a candidate because the candidate shares their race. Another is efforts by a politician to evade scrutiny or criticism by accusing their critics of racism, sexism, etc. simply for subjecting them to the same standards that apply to other politicians. (Witness the mayor of Chicago telling the press that she will only do one-on-one sitdown interviews with “black or brown journalists.”) Identity politics is not limited to electoral politics — it also includes the broader obsession with group identity — but its appearance in our elections is often its most visible manifestation.

Romney’s career has illustrated both sides of the identity-politics divide: when Mormons rallied to him for being one of them; when opponents such as Ted Kennedy and Mike Huckabee went after his religion in varying ways; when he was pilloried as a racist just for daring to run against Barack Obama and got a historically low share of the black vote. Identity politics reduces individuals to the sum of the groups they were born into. It is not actually a complicated concept to grasp. A column on identity politics that won’t or can’t even accurately describe what the term means is unlikely to enlighten anyone about anything.

What Bacon is actually talking about is not identity politics but tribalism, which shares some overlap with identity politics, but is its own distinct phenomenon. Tribalism is the “us vs. them” mentality that results when people rally into groups and define themselves and their worldviews based on those groups. Tribal thinking is, of course, easily and naturally found in racial, ethnic, and gender groups, and it is therefore a predictable byproduct of identity politics. But it also applies more broadly to all manner of self-selected groupings, from the fans of a sports team to the members of a political party.

In that sense, Bacon has a point: Political tribalism runs deep, and it is difficult for people to renounce their tribe, especially if (as is true of Cheney, Bush, and Romney) they were born into it. Then again, if Bacon were serious about psychoanalyzing Mitt Romney, he might have noted that Romney was a registered independent until he was 46 years old, voted in the Democratic primary in 1992, and protested during a 1994 debate with Ted Kennedy, “I was an independent during the time of Reagan–Bush. I’m not trying to take us back to Reagan–Bush.”

This brings us to Bacon’s second fallacy: He simply cannot bring himself to consider the possibility that anti-Trump Republicans actually believe things that put them deeply at odds with the Democratic Party. If you believe in the sanctity of the life of the unborn, you’ll find it very difficult to join a Democratic Party that believes in abortion on demand, subsidized by the taxpayers. If you believe in any measure of fiscal restraint or limited government, you’re likely to have deep qualms about Joe Biden’s Democrats, who have proposed $6 trillion in spending in four months, more than the entire current size of the federal government. Taxes? Guns? School choice? Immigration? The “Green New Deal”? Support for Israel versus support for Iran? On issue after issue after issue, there are unbridgeable gulfs between the parties, and even Republicans who agree with the Democrats on an issue here or there will typically find themselves opposed to the Democratic agenda on many other points. Yet Bacon does not even acknowledge the divergence in the two parties’ agendas, much less the real-life consequences of giving one party or the other the power to enact its policy priorities. This is an especially bizarre thing to omit at a time when the Democrats already control the presidency, the Senate, and the House.

Third, Bacon assumes that Republicans concerned about “the danger of Trump-style politics to American democracy” are not also deeply alarmed at the threats Democrats and progressives have long posed to the entire American system — our democracy, our Constitution, our governing institutions, our free-market economy, our culture. But while those threats may be invisible to some commentators precisely because they have already wormed their way into so many of our institutions, they are, if anything, graver than the threats posed by Trump. Trump may be individually bad, but the Democrats are institutionally bad, and our institutions have a weaker immune system against the sorts of threats that come from the Left.

It is wearisome to repeat them all yet again: the century-old project to replace the written Constitution with anti-democratic judicial fiat under the umbrella of a “living Constitution”; the erosion of the role of elections through the delegation of authority to unaccountable bureaucracies that increasingly resist or ignore elected officials; the segregation of a large sector of the federal budget into programs that spend money on autopilot without ever needing to be reauthorized by anyone who answers to voters; the chronic Democratic attacks on the legitimacy of our elections whenever Republicans win them; the multi-pronged progressive assaults on the freedom of speech (especially political speech), free exercise of religion, right to bear arms, and due process of law; the campaigns to pack the Supreme Court, nuke the Senate filibuster, admit new, heavily Democratic states to the union for purposes of controlling the Senate, destroy the Electoral College, and strip states of two centuries of authority over elections and House districts; the assaults on any effort to protect voter-registration systems and other safeguards of free and fair elections; the campaigns against conservative donors, efforts to jail pro-life journalists, and moves to criminalize honest politics; and the elevation of a dangerous authoritarian to the vice presidency. That is even before we get to the corrosive assaults on American history and culture and the English language itself, or the pervasive effort to make everything a matter of racial identity. Why would any thinking person expect Republicans, even those truly alienated by Donald Trump, to sign up for all of that?

American politics is not a game. The stakes are real, and they are high. Conservatives may, out of principle, feel compelled to abstain from supporting genuinely unfit characters for high office. But it is another matter entirely to ask us to join a party that opposes every cause, every principle, and every institution we believe in, and would — if given sufficient power — leave nothing of any of them standing. When we refuse, it’s not because of identity politics — it’s because of the most important kind of politics there is.