US President Donald Trump greeted by former US President Barack Obama after delivering his inaugural address. Xinhua/Press Association. All rights reserved.
Identity politics has become the driving force of US politics and it has
brought along the scourge of ethno-nationalism. But to many of us living
outside the United States, it’s nothing new. Take a look at Europe. It’s
riddled with ethno-nationalistic populism in such places as Hungary, Italy, Germany,
Sweden, and many more: all inundated by politicians betting on ethnic
identity politics to court the masses.
Or take my home country as an example, Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Here, ethno-nationalism is engraved into the constitution, primarily reflected
in stringent ethnic quotas put on public offices. As a result, identity
politics is the only form of politics. Almost every party has an ethnic prefix;
the presidency consists of three members representing major ethnicities; and
the country is thoroughly Balkanized so that every ethnicity is politically
autonomous, with some cities being in an apartheid-like state. Each policy is
judged through the ethnocentric prism, and weighed on the principle of how much
it affects the standing of one’s ethnicity compared to the others. And when
ethnic affiliation becomes the sole criterion for political office, the more
radical you are, the more authentic you appear.
Needless to say, in all the aforementioned places identity politics favours
the political Right. Sheri Berman notes that identity politics is “more
powerful and efficacious … for right-wing populists” since they are trying to
win over a
more homogenous group. But more importantly, that homogenous group is
almost always the country’s ethnic majority, whose ethnocentrism is easily
stoked by presenting them with a paltry minority as a bogeyman.
The US hitherto seemingly had a bulwark separating it from the abyss of
the institutionalized tribalism of my country, called the two-party system,
where both parties had a laissez-faire approach to ethnic and racial identity,
so to speak. It is true that since the mid-twentieth century, minorities have
had a leaning towards the Democratic Party, and the white majority towards the
Republican Party. But they were drawn in by the economic ideas espoused by the
parties, with minorities generally being less well-off.
However, since the mid-twentieth century, income inequality has
persisted across racial and ethnic groups, in some cases being even
worse than in the 1970s. Indeed, race and ethnicity are now the
best predictors of income inequality, rather than class. That has created the
opportunity for the ethnic distribution between parties to solidify, entrench
itself, and eventually culminate into contemporary identity politics. As
Francis Fukuyama lucidly
puts it, “The Republican Party is becoming the party of white people, and
the Democratic Party is becoming the party of minorities.”
In all fairness, that was somewhat the case ever since the Democratic
Party supported the Civil Rights Act. But now, income is not the litmus test of
party affiliation. It’s race. It is getting increasingly harder for whites to
see themselves as Democrats, and for minorities as Republicans.
The good news
That isn’t to say that identity politics hasn’t had positive effects. The
current
115th Congress of the United States is the most ethnically diverse in
history, after a steady increase in minority representatives. There seems to be
no indication of reversing course. Just last month, the first
Muslim women were elected to Congress and a number of African
Americans have made history by becoming the first black gubernatorial
nominees in their states. There are many more milestones to come. It comes
as no surprise that the Democratic Party is doing all the heavy lifting in that
field, perhaps owing to their embrace of identity politics. No doubt, it’s a
more innocuous type of identity politics than its white ethno-nationalist
counterpart.
But sure enough, identity politics still favours the homogenous ethnic
majority, as seen by a president exclusively pandering to his mostly white
voter base. Not only that, but his unwillingness to decry white supremacy and
his sole goal
of erasing the first black president’s legacy led Ta-Nehisi Coates to
aver that “he is a white man who would not be president were it not for
this fact.” In the end, the US has come to bear an eerie resemblance to the
institutionalized tribalism of my country: economic issues such as income
inequality, which are inextricably tied to race, leave no clear alternative to
identity politics; and ethnicity is being seen as a sole claim to political
office. Then identity politics seems unavoidable. It’s just a matter of choosing
the lesser of two evils.
As is now commonly known, the US is
on a one-way track to becoming a minority-majority nation. Although a
conglomerate of ethnicities won’t be as homogenous as a single one, they will
certainly be a majority. Neither paltry, nor in the minority any longer, they
will become a potent political force and a coveted voter base. In that case,
might the Democrats’ identity politics play out in the long haul, making them one
of the few cases of successful left-wing identity politics? Indeed, the great
question seems to be: will the Democratic Party rein in identity politics for
short-term gains, or reap its latent harvest?
