Some Thoughts About Identity Politics from A Professional Politican
Last night I was reading Collective Action: A Bad Subjects Anthology, a compilation of writings from the Bad Subjects Collective. A lot of the work impressed me, but I found Matt Wray’s contribution – Left Conservatives – especially thought-provoking. Wray’s work was a summary of a symposium held on the subject of left conservatism and focused for me a number of thoughts that had been sorta floating around in my head.
Left conservatism, for those of you out of the academy, is the school of new leftists that reject a cultural studies/deconstructionist/critical studies approach to the left. Left conservatives focus on economic issues and take a more classically Marxist/materialist dialectic view of history by analyzing class rather than race or gender. While I would generally classify my position as a left conservative one (I’m a Democratic politician, after all), I think it is too easy to dismiss the contributions of the cult-studs left. Intellectuals like Tom Frank (Baffler, What’s The Matter With Kansas, Conquest of Cool, etc.) rightly blast the narrow focus of the cultural studies crowd, and the John Stewart/Wonkette crowd’s liberation from the sometimes starchy language of the academic left makes for effective political communication for younger folks, it is too easy is to dismiss the gains realized by identity politics in the ‘80s and ‘90s.
When I first got involved in leftist circles in the early ‘90s, it was nothing to hear some pretty sexist language thrown around by progressives. And that went double for Democratic politics. While the ‘70s had sensitized a large cohort of people to the feelings of minorities, a strong strain of sexism had survived the sexual revolution. Further, hetrosexism was similarly common in these circles.
That has changed, I’m happy to report, somewhat. It is now almost inconceivable to me to imagine either sexist or hetrosexist language being tolerated in the lefty circles in which I circulate and it is increasingly rare to hear any of it Democratic circles either. In Toledo (where our president of council is a gay latino and our mayor is black), we have seen a real expansion of an awareness of the offensive/inappropriate nature of sexism/hetrosexism. I am not naïve enough to believe that this means that people have left their prejudices behind, but at least we are sending clearly improved social signals. That’s something. Cycles of concern by the left from identity politics to more strictly rigorous economic/class studies seems to be healthy. Maybe there’s something to that dialectics business…
-Keith McCrea
Reviews Editor/Democratic Party Hack