HONESTLY, THE GOP WOULD PROBABLY BE SMART TO ENCOURAGE IT: The Left’s Toxic Identity Obsession.
The modern activist left was reared on toxic identity politics, and it seems disinclined to abandon this addictive poison without a struggle.
As Democrats come to terms with a new era of Republican dominance, leftists have rallied around the idea that they constitute a “resistance.” It’s no fluke that this term evokes images of beret-clad partisans gathering around lantern light plotting the sabotage of railway lines; they fancy themselves a rebellion against an illegitimate regime. It’s an invigorating fantasy, but a flimsy and self-serving one. Gallingly, the liberal anti-Trump resistance doesn’t share the organizational competence or unity of purpose demonstrated by the underground anti-fascist movements they seek to mimic. The modern left is an amalgam characterized by enforced ideological homogeneity with a multicultural face. Increasingly, however, it’s a face that resents its own multiculturalism.
Take, for example, the so-called “Women’s March” that will descend on Washington D.C. to protest the inauguration of Donald Trump on January 21. The masses gathered in opposition to Trump will create the appearance of unity, but a closer examination of the coalition united by their antipathy for the incoming administration paints a portrait of a movement at war with itself. . . .
Obviously, this kind of racial advantage-seeking creates moiety where none previously existed. It unnecessarily robs this movement of cohesion and, thus, efficacy. If Trump is the unique threat liberals claim him to be—one so mortal that it’s a fight they have equated themselves to anti-Nazi resistance efforts—it stands to reason that the left’s perpetual grievance-measuring contest could be put on hiatus for the time being. It would seem that is asking too much.
This kind of fractious identity-based stratification is not a phenomenon on the decline, either. A generation of liberals raised on identity politics is only now coming of age.
Decades of college diversity seminars bear their weak and misshapen fruit.