Identity Politics

We hear a lot about “identity politics” these days, and most of it is bad. The basic image is of ever-more strident and intolerant groups who are interested only in airing their grievances, establishing their victimhood, furthering their agendas, and shouting down anyone who disagrees – all at the expense of the greater good. But instead of looking at identity politics as an effort to destroy the social fabric of America, what if we looked at it as part of a slow and often painful journey toward including people in the story that America tells about itself – the story of American Exceptionalism? It’s a story that left a lot of people out.

How are Native Americans supposed to resonate to westward expansion? African-Americans to the sanctity of property? Women to equality? Muslims to the melting pot? And working-class people to the wonders of globalization? When they demand that their voices be heard in America’s story, these people are insisting we expand our definition of community to live up to our own ideals.

As I learned in my travels through the Rust Belt last summer, and from reading J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land, Amy Goldstein’s forthcoming Janesville, and Chris Arnade’s odyssey across America, we are at last confronting the hardships white working-class people have faced in the last 25 years and the alienation many feel from much of today’s America.

They are an integral part of our story – but only to expand our idea of America, not as a wedge issue to divide us. For to paraphrase Martin Luther King, Jr., the arc of our history bends toward inclusion. It’s been a long journey from the Massachusetts Bay Colony to today’s diversity, and we aren’t going back.

A Mission Statement for America, Part 2

Please join me in this ongoing effort to create a working mission statement for America that may help us to hang together lest, as Benjamin Franklin noted, “we shall all hang separately.” (Note to Oval Office: Franklin: a great American, invented electricity, currently dead.) At the end of yesterday’s post, I wrote of four times in our history when leaders articulated a common story to unite us. At least three things bind their stories together: (1) the community (later nation) faced a severe crisis; (2) The stories were aspirational – that is, they tried to inspire future actions, rather than glorify, or even justify, past behaviors; and (3) the later ones built on the ones that had gone before – and sought to expand the community to include those who had previously been left out. As such, they were building blocks in the ongoing project of constructing a nation.

1630: John Winthrop and his small band of Puritans aboard the Arbella faced a frightening and, to them, hostile wilderness, having left behind everything they had ever known, except each other. They had not come to practice religious toleration but to escape it, and they ill-treated almost everyone they encountered, annihilating the Native Americans, hanging the occasional Quaker who wandered into their Massachusetts Bay Colony, banishing Antinomians and all other heretics from their midst, and generally trying to build as exclusive, intolerant and holy a community as they could. Mostly they failed, although one runs into their spiritual descendants from time to time.

1776: When the Framers looked out across America a century and a half later, the Puritan community had been superseded by all kinds of people clamoring for a place: Protestants of almost infinite denominations; Catholics; Jews; Deists; even Black freedman . . .but of Native Americans, slaves, women, and even most non-property owners, there were none. But the Declaration of Independence was also a declaration of war, and so the framers, at least rhetorically, opened their arms to “all men.”

1863: In response to this nation’s greatest crisis, Abraham Lincoln expanded the definition of its community beyond what anyone had ever imagined – extending it to four million slaves who had until then been the property of fewer than 400,000 families. Yet again the job was not complete. Many of the generals who had led the Union army went on to exterminate the Plains Indians; women were nowhere to be found in the new definition; nor were the great waves of immigrants coming to stoke the furnaces of our massive industrial growth.

1963: As Freedom Riders launched a surging movement for simple justice against Jim Crow and American apartheid, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech at Lincoln’s Memorial pushed boundaries further than they had ever been pushed before – even in the face of intractable resistance from those who sought not to broaden, but to constrict, America’s community.*

A floodgate had opened, as others kept coming forward to demand their place in the definition of America, including the gay community, the disabled, and working class whites.

Next up: Identity Politics

*“In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth,” said Alabama Governor George Wallace, also in 1963, “I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny . . . and I say . . . segregation today . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever.”

A Mission Statement for America

A New Series. America has not been this dangerously divided in many years, and the myths that in the past have held us together and shaped our identity as a people are no longer working. Instead, we have become an angry country where, in the words of W.B. Yeats, “everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned” and our public discourse is passionate, poisoned and dangerously illiterate.

It seems a good time to try to rebuild a national myth – or at least come up with a mission statement – that could help unify us. It's not a new idea: Here are four examples from our history:

• In 1630 John Winthrop admonished his Puritan followers that “we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us, . . . we must be knit together, in this work, as one man.”
• A century and a half later, the framers looked out over a far different America and wrote these words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
• At Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln pointed to “the great task remaining before us – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
• And a century later, Martin Luther King, Jr., said beneath Lincoln’s monument: “When we let [freedom] ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

Each of these statements builds on the ones that came before, and each came as the community faced a time of crisis and great fear. As I will try to show in my next post, each sought to reiterate the essence of the American experience – of “American exceptionalism,” if you will – and, more importantly, to expand the definition of our American community to include those who had been left out.

In these days of the great unraveling, we need to restate who we are as a people and build a more inclusive community.