Conservative Criticism of Identity Politics Should Not Be Taken at Face Value

In explaining her thesis, Chua also fails to recognize how conservatives disingenuously dismiss claims about discrimination. In doing so, she assumes that the left is somehow alienating conservatives, when really it’s conservative political leaders who are exploiting cartoon versions of liberal arguments to whip up (and grow) their base. Liberals have virtually no control over this process, but Chua routinely misses this point, failing to identify who is promulgating and promoting these myths, particularly about liberal antipathy toward white people.

For instance, in an interview with Vox’s Ezra Klein, Chua frames the #TakeAKnee protest not as an example of black athletes protesting police brutality and systemic racism, but as an example of “the heartland” and “normal Americans” being alienated by an an attack on the flag and the troops. But that alienation is not some dormant sentiment among white people. It was a systematic effort by the Trump administration, Republican politicians, and right-wing media to discredit the athletes and enforce their version of right-wing political correctness, in which the symbols of American dominance can never be juxtaposed with criticism of American policies.

Just as King, standing before the Lincoln Memorial, appealed to our nation’s high ideals while contrasting them with the realties of anti-black discrimination, the athletes silently protested our still-incomplete Reconstruction. But instead of recognizing the universality of their message, right-wing reactionaries smeared them.

Even when athletes explained their reasoning at length, and even when troops expressed their support for the protest, these right-wing smears persisted. That’s because there’s nothing civil rights activists or anyone on the left can do to calm down right-wing politicians or right-wing media, who must constantly attack the left and all forms of protest to keep their base whipped up.

Indeed, long into the protests, one Fox News commenter professed that she simply didn’t know why the athletes were protesting. This is the ultimate retreat in the face of an argument one simply doesn’t wish to have.

Explaining her anti-tribalism thesis in the Guardian, Chua also sympathetically cites a blog comment from the American Conservative:

I’m a white guy. I’m a well-educated intellectual who enjoys small arthouse movies, coffeehouses and classic blues. If you didn’t know any better, you’d probably mistake me for a lefty urban hipster. And yet. I find some of the alt-right stuff exerts a pull even on me. Even though I’m smart and informed enough to see through it. It’s seductive because I am not a person with any power or privilege, and yet I am constantly bombarded with messages telling me that I’m a cancer, I’m a problem, everything is my fault…

But Chua fails to examine who is telling the writer everything is his fault as a white man. Is it really leftists? Or is it the cartoon version of leftist arguments portrayed in conservative media?

She also fails to see the writer’s point for what it probably is: a right-winger who is flirting with alt-right rhetoric but doesn’t want to look like a monster by actually accepting it. Indeed, Stormfront and Breitbart have both been caught in a game of laundering hard-right views into new venues by pretending to treat them with sympathetic detachment. For instance, despite quoting this anonymous commenter at length as a warning about alienating people with tribalism, Chua leaves out another telling part of his comment:

It baffles me that more people on the left can’t understand this, can’t see how they’re just feeding, feeding, feeding the growth of this stuff. They have no problem understanding, and even making excuses for, say, the seductive pull of angry black radicalism for disaffected black men. They’re totally cool with straightforwardly racist stuff like La Raza.

Ah, the left are the real racists…that old trope! To be clear, the writer doesn’t define “angry black radicalism.” And he blithely dismisses La Raza, a civil rights group, as “straightforwardly racist.” So is this comment really a thoughtful bemoaning of identity-based politics from a reasonable conservative? Or is it just someone who understands how to make their own dismissal of other people’s civil rights sound reasonable to centrists, who also enjoy punching left?

Similarly, Chua and other writers who work at universities as professors often get hung up on campus debates but don’t understand how the right wing exploits campus activism as a stand-in for anything left of center.

During the Klein interview, Chua cited a student who complained about online debates over culturally appropriating ethnic food, such as nachos. Klein responded helpfully by noting that isn’t really political. He’s right. There is no legislation to ban cultural appropriation of nachos. But he also says it’s a talking point that right-wing media like Fox News use as a stand-in for all of liberalism. Chua didn’t follow through on that point, though, arguing instead that all cable news is bad. In this sense, Chua fails to recognize the grift conservative media runs on its audience: urging them to mistake Twitter debates about stuff like appropriating nachos for the actual policy platforms of civil rights groups, the Democratic Party, or the insurgent left. Blaming cable news mistake the format for the substance of the argument and it also falsely equates cables networks like MSNBC and CNN with Fox News, a standard issue version of both-siderism.

In fact, one of my favorite conservative tropes is a Fox News host debating a college student. Some of these students do well (hey, Parkland activists!), but most are not prepared for a heated television interview. The hosts of these programs use the students as a prop, admonishing them for the benefit of their average viewer, who is a ripe 68-years-old.

Indeed, Chua tellingly and credulously cites another right-wing commenter, this time someone weighing in via the Atlantic about how they finally came home to Trump:

Just after the 2016 election, a former Never Trumper explained his change of heart in the Atlantic: “My college-age daughter constantly hears talk of white privilege and racial identity, of separate dorms for separate races (somewhere in heaven Martin Luther King Jr is hanging his head and crying)…I hate identity politics, [but] when everything is about identity politics, is the left really surprised that on Tuesday millions of white Americans…voted as ‘white’? If you want identity politics, identity politics is what you will get.”

Again, this is just a conservative’s excuse for voting for Trump. Most Republicans ultimately latched onto something, anything, be it anti-Clintonism or getting mad about college students, to justify their vote. The important thing in this analysis is not the face-value of his comment, but understanding that Fox News and other right-wing media gave him something to latch onto so he could stick with his tribal identity as a conservative Republican despite Trump being embarrassing. That’s not the left’s fault. It’s his fault for believing in a cartoon version of leftism and then hiding behind his perceptions of his daughter’s lived experience. And it’s right-wing media’s fault for giving him that excuse.

The idea that liberals can reach a guy like this through the power of reduced tribalism is highly questionable, at best, because his views are a product of his own tribalism. And such an analysis is based on the assumption that liberals have to win committed conservatives, such as the people who are motivated enough to leave comments on blogs, over to their side for victory. They don’t. Instead, they can win over a far greater number of people who already agree with them but don’t feel motivated to participate in politics, including, for instance, the millions of voters who turned out for Obama in 2008 but didn’t vote in 2012 or 2016.

Further, the very idea that identity politics itself is a problem misses how right-wing media abuses even the most well-intentioned arguments around racial justice and equity. For instance, here’s a smattering of how Fox News Channel reports on Black Lives Matter:

Sounds menacing! But how many Fox News anchors have read the Black Lives Matter policy platform? How many times have they interviewed leading black leftist scholars and writers like Cornel West or Briahna Joy Gray?

Yet Chua buys into this right-wing mythmaking, writing:

At its core, the problem is simple but fundamental. While black Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, Jewish Americans, and many others are allowed — indeed, encouraged — to feel solidarity and take pride in their racial or ethnic identity, white Americans have for the last several decades been told they must never, ever do so. People want to see their own tribe as exceptional, as something to be deeply proud of; that’s what the tribal instinct is all about. For decades now, nonwhites in the United States have been encouraged to indulge their tribal instincts in just this way, but, at least publicly, American whites have not.

But who is telling white Americans they can’t be proud of their heritage? Is it a lefty professor somewhere? A student protestor? Someone who gave a speech at an awards ceremony? Chua doesn’t fully account for who is telling them that. And she doesn’t account for the fact that right-wing media constantly lies to its audiences about what civil rights activists actually want.

The truth is that the idea that white people should feel guilty about their existence is a right-wing myth. How do I know? Here’s Cory Booker, a black senator from Newark, New Jersey, getting ready to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day.

Or take a look at Chuck Schumer waving Italian flags at the Columbus Day parade.

Liberal senators seem okay with white heritage, at least for assimilated immigrant groups that we consider “white.” It took the Irish and Italians a while, to be fair. And this celebration of white identity doesn’t include the Confederate flag and symbols of white supremacy. That’s a distinction right-wing media papers over, even as they ignore how much our first black president enjoys a good Guinness.

Finally, in the Klein interview, Chua says that “normal Americans” are alienated by things like speeches at the Golden Globes and feel like their own speech is being policed. Again, where are they getting that idea? Hollywood has no power to police people’s speech. But right-wing pundits constantly attack Hollywood and the entertainment industry as if it does, even as they elevate their own small cadre of right-wing stars to prominent stages.

Scott Baio at the 2016 Republican National Convention.

Clint Eastwood admonishing an empty chair at the 2012 Republican National Convention.

In bemoaning tribalism at its most general level, Chua misses the scam the right runs on its base: smearing left-leaning political activism no matter what the left or actual Democratic politicians actually do or say.