Nothing in the world is more dangerous

Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

Martin Luther King

Identity Politics Are Not 'Progressive'

By THOMAS KRANNAWITTER Posted Thursday, June 04, 2009 4:20 PM PT

Progressive Americans — the kind who voted for President Obama — champion progress, change and new eras of, well, everything as hallmarks of their success.

Progressives, by definition, teach the American past as a sad story, the repeat of which should be avoided at all costs. They view with contempt the days when an individual's worth was determined by inescapable incidents of birth, especially skin color and gender, and they congratulate themselves for having evolved beyond those kinds of prejudiced discriminations.

But given progressive Americans' fight never to tread backward, should they not pause, if only for a moment, and ask whether their "progressive" policies and the beliefs upon which they rest are in fact new, enlightened and progressive?

In a candid expression of her "progressive" politics of race and gender, Obama's nominee for the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor, asserted in 2001:

"I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."

But why? Why are the experiences of a Latina woman "rich," while those of a white man are not? Is the wisdom of a "wise" Latina woman rooted in her gender and ethnicity, or is wisdom something accessible by both men and women of all stripes?

Sotomayor's comment captured perfectly the essence of identity politics — the view that one's political significance and the political rights one deserves spring from gender, ethnicity, cultural inheritance and life experiences.

But dividing people into groups and then distributing rewards and punishments, offering praise and reproaches, doling out entitlements to some at the expense of others based on group membership is regressive, not progressive.

It points back to medieval feudalism and, before that, the tribalism characteristic of most of the ancient world where the distinction between friend and enemy was typically rooted in xenophobia.

In the old world, a person's social and political and moral worth was measured by the blood that flowed through his or her veins. To paraphrase the title of Cornel West's influential book on identity politics, race and gender mattered.

But the American Founders rejected old world tribalism for something better, ushering into the world a new kind of politics based on certain self-evident truths, especially the equal, natural and therefore unchanging rights of all human beings.

The principles of the Founding, establishing a true Novus Ordo Seclorum, or new order of the ages, provided for a politics in which race and gender do not matter.

The American Founders, therefore, were the true progressives. Those who reject their principles are not. They cannot lay claim to something new, only something old and reactionary. And nothing stands more opposed to the idea of human equality and equal rights than the allegedly "progressive" suggestion that wisdom is ultimately a function of skin color and gender.

Obama, senators who support Sotomayor's nomination and their adoring fans in the media will inevitably champion Sotomayor's "empathy" — her willingness and ability to see past the law and into people's hearts. Her empathetic "wisdom," by her own admission, is unique because of her color and gender.

But the "empathy" that Obama wants in a Supreme Court justice and the jurisprudence that logically flows from it — should a Latina justice offer special treatment for the legal causes of Latinas because she "feels" what they feel more than she "feels" what others feel? — flies in the face of the just principles of the founding and the long struggle to live up to them in our politics and law.

By embracing identity politics, Sotomayor, and Obama by extension, are biting the hands that feed them. Insofar as Sotomayor identifies herself politically in terms of gender and ethnicity, she and her supporters run into a wall of contradictions.

They attack the very self-evident truth of equal rights — as well as the Constitution designed to offer equal protection of equal rights — that make it possible for a man or woman, black, brown, white or any other color, to be judged not "by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."

We don't live in medieval or ancient times, so we don't need to talk much about her color or gender or other accidents of birth. Instead, let's talk as Americans. And let's hope she and her supporters are progressive enough to focus on her ability to administer unbiased, colorblind, gender-neutral judgment under the law.

Krannawitter is associate professor of political science at Hillsdale College and author of "Vindicating Lincoln: Defending the Politics of Our Greatest President" (Rowman & Littlefield).

The editorial is here

"will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of there skin, but the content of their character..."

Martin Luther King