Jeff Goldstein is right — it’s time to declare war on identity politics:
The one way to put a stop to “white supremacy.”
Three years ago, writing in the Federalist, I noted how the Left’s embrace — and political deployment — of identity politics had given rise to, and become a perverse justification for (in its own hive mind), white supremacy, a blunt rejection of the collective call by the Left and academia to demonize whiteness.
I pored over and unpacked the “alt-right manifesto” of an influential “thought leader” of the movement and found what was easily recognizable: a progressive strain placing it on par with La Raza, BLM, CAIR, and Occupy (now Antifa). It’s essentially Farrakhanism in a bedsheet.
The El Paso shooter, if we believe his manifesto, was, for all intents and purposes, a confused National Socialist. He trafficked in identity and grievance politics while supporting much of the Green New Deal. He railed against capitalism and jobs lost to automation. He’s a leftist — as were the Nazis — who found himself part of an unprotected class; the Dayton shooter supported, in addition to Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, Antifa, which may have actually provided him gun tips in advance of his eventual spree killing. He, too, was a leftist.
This is why conservatives should deplore all identity and grievance politics, regardless of the color they take. Intersectionality, however, is the Left’s stock and trade, from the academy to the media to Hollywood. Until that is marginalized, you won’t kill white supremacy, despite pleadings by the editors at National Review.
Here’s why: Many of the motivations of the white supremacist movement, which Vox Day couched as “alt-right” in his alt-right “manifesto,” were predictable and — again, however perversely — understandable: in a political and cultural ethos wherein white straight Christian males have become one of the last “identity groups” eligible for collective hostility and scapegoating, there was bound to be defensive pushback. In my piece, I commiserated with some of the alt-right’s concerns while rejecting its underlying philosophy; I counseled the rejection of all identity politics and intersectionality, suggesting instead a return to founding principles: constitutionalism, federalism, republicanism, the rule of law, assimilation, and — most crucially — individualism, individual rights, and autonomy.
Read more: The American Spectator
Image credit: spectator.org.
