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June 18 - June 25, 2019
The existing core course was built around fifteen texts, beginning with the Hebrew Bible, Homer, and Augustine, continuing through Machiavelli and Galileo, and on to Marx, Darwin, and Freud. The protesters wanted to expand the syllabus to include nonwhite and female authors, not necessarily on the grounds that they wrote important or timeless books, but that their very inclusion raised the dignity of the cultures out of which they came, and therefore the self-esteem of students coming from those cultures.
wider reading list will not necessarily transmit valuable or timeless knowledge that would be educationally important; rather, it would raise the self-esteem of marginalized students and make them feel better about themselves.
Identity politics is everywhere a struggle for the recognition of dignity.
Modernization entails the emergence of a complex society with an elaborate division of labor, the personal mobility that necessarily underlies modern market economies, and the movement from village to city that creates a diverse pluralism of individuals living next to one another.
Identity, which had formerly been a matter for individuals, now became the property of groups that were seen as having their own cultures shaped by their own lived experiences.
Western culture was seen as the incubator of colonialism, patriarchy, and environmental destruction. This critique then filtered back into the United States as postmodernism and deconstructionism in American universities.
University curricula can be more readily altered to include readings of women and minority authors than can the incomes or social situations of the groups in question.
A third problem with current understandings of identity is that they can threaten free speech and, more broadly, the kind of rational discourse needed to sustain a democracy.
The focus on lived experience by identity groups valorizes inner selves experienced emotionally rather than examined rationally.
This privileges opinions sincerely held over reasoned deliberation that may force one to abandon those opinions.
That an argument is offensive to someone’s sense of self-worth is often seen as sufficient to delegitimize it, a trend encouraged by the kind of short-form discourse propagated by social media.
As Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein have argued, the Republican Party has moved much more rapidly toward the extremist views represented by its Tea Party wing than has the Democratic Party to its left.
Political correctness refers to things you can’t say in public without fearing withering moral opprobrium.
The constant discovery of new identities and the shifting grounds for acceptable speech are hard to follow: manholes are now referred to as maintenance holes; the name of the Washington Redskins football team is denigrating to Native Americans; the use of he or she in the wrong context denotes insensitivity to intersex or transgender people.
The more extreme forms of political correctness are in the end the province of relatively small numbers of writers, artists, students, and intellectuals on the left. But they are picked up by the conservative media and amplified as representative of the left as a whole.
The proponents of identity politics on the left would argue that assertions of identity on the right are illegitimate and cannot be placed on the same moral plane as those of minorities, women, and other marginalized groups.
The dynamic of identity politics is to stimulate more of the same, as identity groups begin to see one another as threats.
Similarly, in the United States, immigration has largely displaced class and race as the chief reason why Americans vote for Republican candidates, according to data by political scientists Zoltan Hajnal and Marisa Abrajano.
What makes for a “people,” whose sovereignty is the basis for democratic choice?
Germany, France, Britain, and the Netherlands were all the historical by-products of long and often violent political struggles over territory and culture under nondemocratic regimes.
Nations and national identities are potential obstacles to international cooperation and need to be gradually superseded by a new layer of transnational rules and organizations.
National identities have been created by four main paths.
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The policies that do the most to shape national identity are rules regarding citizenship and residency, laws on immigration and refugees, and the curricula used in the public education system to teach children about the nation’s past.
All existing nations are the historical by-product of some combination of the four and drew on some combination of coercion and consensus.
The hope of these founders was that economic interdependence would make war less likely, and that political cooperation would follow on its heels.
A stratum of young, usually well-educated Europeans are now born in one member state, get their education in another, marry someone from yet another country, and work in multiple locations within the EU and farther afield. They retain an awareness of their birth nationality, but their lives are tied to the EU as a whole.
But the leaders of the EU were not in a position to invest much effort in building an alternative new identity.5
This was vividly illustrated by the crisis over the euro, in which the common currency, issued first in 1999, allowed Greece to borrow profligately during the boom years of the 2000s. The Germans, who were perfectly willing to support their less well-off fellow citizens with an expansive welfare state, were not inclined to be so generous with the Greeks when the latter threatened to default. Greece indeed had very different approaches to savings, debt, and practices such as public-sector patronage than did Germany. Berlin, as Greece’s chief creditor, was able to impose crushing austerity on
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The 2000s saw the emergence of an intense debate across Europe over citizenship, immigration, and national identity. Citizenship is a two-way street: it endows citizens with rights that are protected by the state, but it also enjoins duties on them, above all, the duty of loyalty to the country’s principles and laws. This was a particularly neuralgic issue due to the large welfare benefits of many European states: strong opposition arose to providing such benefits to immigrants who did not seem to accept the basic terms of the social contract.
The same Thomas Paine who could only imagine brotherhood with other Christians elsewhere saw the United States as made up “of people from different nations, speaking different languages,” but for whom “by the simple operation of constructing government on the principles of society and the Rights of Man, every difficulty retires and all the parts are brought into cordial unison.”
The American Civil War was, at its root, a fight over American national identity.
Shamefully, the promise of these amendments would not be fulfilled until the civil rights era a hundred years later, and even today it is being threatened by measures seeking to restrict the franchise among minority voters.
Americans can be proud of this very substantive identity; it is based on belief in the common political principles of constitutionalism, the rule of law, democratic accountability, and the principle that “all men are created equal” (now interpreted to include all women).
On the left, proponents of narrow identity politics assert that the U.S. identity is its diversity, or that we are somehow united by our diversity.
Successful democracy, according to him, requires citizens who are patriotic, informed, active, public-spirited, and willing to participate in political matters.
This moral idea tells us that we have authentic inner selves that are not being recognized and suggests that the whole of external society may be false and repressive.
Each person and each group experiences disrespect in different ways, and each seeks its own dignity.
This has created demands for recognition on the part of groups who were previously invisible to the mainstream society. But this has entailed a perceived lowering of the status of the groups they have displaced, leading to a politics of resentment and backlash.
But if the logic of identity politics is to divide societies into ever smaller, self-regarding groups, it is also possible to create identities that are broader and more integrative.
Over recent decades, the European left had come to support a form of multiculturalism that downplayed the importance of integrating immigrants into the national culture. Under the banner of antiracism it looked the other way from evidence that assimilation wasn’t working. The new populist right, for its part, looks back nostalgically at a fading national culture that was based on ethnicity or religion, a culture that was largely free of immigrants or significant diversities.
In the United States, identity politics has fractured the left into a series of identity groups that are home to its most energetic political activists. It has in many respects lost touch with the one identity group that used to be its largest constituency, the white working class.
In the United States, in addition to proving continuous residency in the country for five years, new citizens are expected to be able to read, write, and speak basic English, to have an understanding of U.S. history and government, to be of good moral character (i.e., no criminal record), and to demonstrate an attachment to the principles and ideals of the U.S. Constitution.
In addition to changing the formal requirements for citizenship, European countries need to shift their popular understandings of national identity away from those based on ethnicity.
Germany needs something precisely like Leitkultur, a normative change that would permit a Turk to speak of him- or herself as German. This is beginning to happen, but slowly.
While the United States has benefited from diversity, it cannot build its national identity around diversity as such.
Americans respect these ideas; the country is justified in excluding from citizenship those who reject them.
The real focus should instead be on strategies for better assimilating immigrants to a country’s creedal identity.
Well-assimilated immigrants bring a healthy diversity to any society, and the benefits of immigration can be fully realized. Poorly assimilated immigrants are a drag on the state and in some cases constitute dangerous security threats.
Basic human rights are universal, but full enjoyment of rights actively enforced by state power is a reward for membership in a national community and acceptance of that community’s rules.
Assimilation into a dominant culture becomes much harder as the numbers of immigrants rise relative to the native population.
