K-Sue Park volunteered with the American Civil Liberties Union as a law student, but by the time she was a Critical Race Studies Fellow at UCLA a few years later, she had concluded that the ACLU “should rethink how it understands free speech.” Its “narrow reading of the First Amendment,” she wrote in the New York Times, blinds it to the illegitimacy of “hate-based causes.” “More troubling,” Park continued, “the legal gains on which the ACLU rests its colorblind logic have never secured real freedom or even safety for all.”1
This is as naked an expression of hostility to the rights enshrined in the First Amendment as you’re likely to find. Park sees American society as so stratified that an absolutist commitment to free expression is no virtue. “Colorblind logic,” she insists, is a naïve pretense that should be discarded.
Park wrote in the wake of a heavily publicized violent clash between white supremacists and counter-demonstrators in Charlottesville, Virginia, that left one young woman dead—a horrifying episode that prompted many people to reconsider the limits of free speech. Park’s argument is a familiar one, but it is incompatible with the civic traditions that buttress the right of all Americans to engage in free expression and assembly. In effect, Park argued that the only cure for the ills of bigotry is more bigotry.
“For marginalized communities, the power of expression is impoverished for reasons that have little to do with the First Amendment,” she continued, citing the power of money, fifty years of Supreme Court precedents, and the history of exploitation and violence against minorities. First Amendment rights, she concluded, conflict with the demands of a just society. “Context” is vital, and that “context” should be racial. What she called “spurious claims of ‘reverse racism,’ ”—that is, the notion that anyone, not just women and minorities, can be subjected to persecution—must be dismissed without a second thought. “Sometimes standing on the wrong side of history in defense of a cause you think is right is still just standing on the wrong side of history,” Park concluded.
Unabashed arguments for race-based discrimination intended to thwart economic, legal, and social fulfillment were once rarely encountered in the wild. Sadly, the views expressed in Park’s op-ed seem to be becoming increasingly widespread.
Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Laura Weinrib of the University of Chicago Law School agrees that the ACLU has lost its way. Once dedicated to protecting “free speech as a tool of social justice,” the ACLU now protects the rights of not only neo-Nazis but corporations and public-sector employees who don’t want to contribute dues to unions of which they are not members.2 The rogues!
Weinrib argues that the ACLU’s commitment to protecting the rights of white supremacists in the twentieth century was not a matter of principle but a deft political gambit designed to support Democratic political causes by giving the public a good look at their unsympathetic opponents. In Weinrib’s view, free expression and assembly are valuable only insofar as they advance progressive policy goals.
Even many of the ACLU’s own staffers no longer believe in the organization’s absolutist commitment to free speech. More than two hundred employees signed a letter in late 2017 asserting that the ACLU’s statement of purpose conflicts with its objectives. “Our broader mission—which includes advancing the racial justice guarantees in the Constitution and elsewhere, not just the First Amendment—continues to be undermined by our rigid stance,” the letter reads.3 These and other “racial justice” advocates have convinced themselves that their objectives are incompatible with the Constitution. One or the other has to go.
Park and Weinrib are remarkably candid advocates for social justice. In their view, principles must be tempered in partisan fires. For them, “colorblind” is a four-letter word. Free speech isn’t an unalloyed good if it is applied universally and, therefore, licenses the wrong sort of behavior by the wrong people. This is a curious definition of “justice,” but it is one with a growing constituency.
For these and other activists, getting on the “right side of history” requires that we recalibrate the scales of justice to favor the “marginalized” and their descendants. But who has a legitimate claim to such a privileged status? Identity politics prescribes a particular moral code, but it is not a governing program. It is merely the philosophy. Social justice is that philosophy in practice.
Social Justice
If we think of the objective, blind justice associated with the rule of law as analogous to free-market capitalism, modern social justice is the equivalent of a command economy. In such a system, justice is a finite commodity, like aluminum or wheat, but there is no supply chain. If one person has it, another is deprived of it. Therefore, it falls on a society’s most enlightened to distribute justice to the most deserving. The phrase “social justice” itself would seem to describe a value-neutral proposition to which anyone in his right mind would subscribe. It is, in fact, less a theory of justice than a new way of thinking about how society should be ordered.
The definition of social justice has evolved over the decades. Retributive social justice developed out of the utopian theological movements of the nineteenth century, but it only became an element of the left’s governing program in the mid-to-late twentieth century.
The identity politics practiced by today’s social justice activists has retained its vestigial quasi-religious traits. Though this dogma has traditionally been most attractive to the collectivist left, it has recently found an audience on the populist right. Those who see themselves as members of a “marginalized” class and who seek payback against their perceived oppressors through both state and non-governmental institutions are social justice advocates, whether they know it or not.
Many who dedicate themselves to social justice are pursuing a noble goal: equality and reparation for genuine historical crimes. But harboring a grievance is toxic, and in the hands of an influential set of activists, social justice has turned poisonous. It appeals to our pettiness and stokes envy. It compels us to think of ourselves and those around us as victims inhabiting a complex matrix of persecution. While robbing us of our sense of agency, it entices us to take out our frustrations on our neighbors. It demands that we define people by their hereditary traits and insists that we take subjective inventory of the “privileges” we acquire at birth. It rejects as folly the idea that we are free to rise as far as individual aptitude and merit allow. For social justice’s devotees, the American idea is a lie.
Millions of Americans, even savvy and ideologically astute political observers, assume that the tenets of social justice are just another extension of the American creed. Equality and fairness—what’s so un-American about that? Some might even see attempts to compensate the victims of real historical injustices as a necessary precondition for broader social reconciliation. That’s a decent impulse, but that project has been terribly mismanaged.
American liberals have allowed their movement to be hijacked by an ideology that mimics their style but betrays their traditional values. Liberals appreciate diversity within a cohesive whole; social justice advocates resent assimilation into American culture. Liberals cherish equality; social justice advocates see objective notions of equality as inherently unfair. Liberals support free expression; social justice advocates think free speech normalizes intolerable ideas. Liberals treasure nonconformity; social justice advocates view a failure to conform to certain precepts as a threat.
So how was an ethos of equality and egalitarianism across lines of class, race, and sex transformed into a bitter ideology that resents classically liberal policies? The mixing of identity consciousness with the precepts of social justice seems to have a lot to do with it. As inherited or ingrained traits supplant experience and deeply held principles as sources of identity, a new kind of identity politics has arisen. When this identity politics is fused with the obligations that social justice activists see as vital collective imperatives, you get something that resembles a religion.
The Cult of Identity
To tell his masterly short story “Harrison Bergeron,” Kurt Vonnegut needed to encumber his characters with a familiar plot device: the ubiquitous and inflexible Big Brother. Published in 1961 and set 120 years in the future, the tale explores the dystopian nature of any society in which everyone is equal. Here, however, equality is measured by incapacity. Every person bears an impairment forced on him by a remote bureaucracy—a mask for the exceptionally attractive, leg weights for the athletically gifted, constant acoustic distractions for the highly intelligent, and so on.
Vonnegut’s story illustrates the moral hazards of ensuring not just equality of opportunity but equality of outcomes. At a time in which Moscow seemed set on exporting Marxism-Leninism to every corner of the globe, Americans recoiled from such hostility to individualism. Vonnegut reasoned, therefore, that such a bleak form of social organization must at first be imposed on a population. Only after it knew no alternative would it turn freely to dreary uniformity as a remedy for freedom’s natural inequities. Vonnegut was wrong. Compulsory homogeneity does not have to be forced on the public by Big Brother. Today, it is being imposed from below and by popular demand.
As the totalitarianism of the twentieth century recedes from living memory, some have begun to look favorably upon alternatives to classically liberal laissez-faire republicanism. Some of today’s most popular alternatives—populism and tribalism—are the primordial ooze out of which despots crawl.
The New York Times is not in the habit of publicizing arguments that appeal exclusively to the fanatical fringe. The sentiments expressed by people like K-Sue Park, who holds a law degree from Harvard and a Ph.D. from Berkeley, are sentiments with broad purchase. The definition of “diversity” in terms of inherited traits has made those who fancy themselves diversity’s most dedicated champions less tolerant of genuine diversity. Those who adhere to a regimented code of identity politics have confused a punitive, retaliatory ethic with a kind of karmic fairness.
This is the final result of a fanatical devotion to identity politics. It exhibits the traits of a religion, and that is how I intend to treat it. “Identitarianism” suffices to describe a set of values and beliefs based on the politics of personal identity.
In Europe, Identitarianism is the opposite of egalitarianism, and it’s closely associated with militant right-wing movements. In France, Génération Identitaire is the youth wing of the Bloc Identitaire party. Members of the German New Right proudly call themselves Identitarians. In the United Kingdom, Generation Identity is a self-described Identitarian movement ostensibly dedicated to the preservation and defense of Europe. It has adopted the Spartan Lambda as its symbol and warns that “self-destruction through a multicultural zeitgeist” is bringing about a Muslim conquest of Europe. This disparate transnational movement is united by the belief that immigration from outside Europe is dangerous, that Islam is incompatible with European values, and that the European Union is a corrupt vehicle dedicated to the destruction of the European identity.4
These sentiments represent only one strain of Identitarian thought. But they are what you get when a political movement commits to abandoning “colorblind logic.” Perhaps the ACLU’s social justice activists don’t realize that they are mirroring the racially anxious nationalist right in Europe and America, but they are.
The Pace of Change
Today, the behavioral imperatives of the social justice movement can be seen everywhere, from the absurd behavior of America’s cultural elite in the boardroom to its youth on campus. From imposing restrictions on speech to weakening the very foundational notions of English common law—most notably the presumption of innocence—social justice is altering the American compact right before our eyes.
According to the New York City Commission on Human Rights, it can now be considered a civil offense punishable by termination and a fine of up to a $250,000 to fail to “use a transgender employee’s preferred name, pronoun, or title.”5 Ignorance is no excuse. Malice is presumed. Therefore, it is recommended that the public make use of fabricated “gender-free” pronouns like “ze” (singular) and “hir” (plural). Forcing made-up words loaded with ideological connotations on the public with the threat of punishment represents nothing less than ideological coercion by the state.
The demands of social justice in the workplace long ago expanded beyond diversity consulting and equal employment opportunity compliance. Firms as large as Comcast and as small as Silicon Valley startups have begun factoring lost productivity resulting from their employees’ political engagement into their operating costs. Following the onset of the pronounced recession that began in 2007–2008, for example, Citigroup began offering its prospective employees the opportunity to defer their work responsibilities for one year to do philanthropic or volunteer work in exchange for 60 percent of their salary.6 This was not a decision based in altruism. Millennials were simply less interested in a career in the financial services sector if it did not make allowances for their heightened sense of social conscience.
Some firms have begun providing their employees with paid time off specifically to engage in political protest, as long as it is the right kind of political protest. The clothing company Patagonia, for example, will even provide bail money for its employees who are arrested while peacefully protesting environmental issues, a category that is loosely defined by the progressive firm. Patagonia employees are also eligible for paid time off for court appearances and meetings with their lawyers. “We hire activists,” said Patagonia’s vice president of human resources, Dean Carter. “If you’re hiring a wild horse because of its passion and independence and then you keep it in the pen, that’s ridiculous.”7
Of course, the social justice left is pretty particular about the forms of political expression it sees as valuable. Particularly on American campuses, some speech is considered so dangerous that it must be suppressed.
In 2015, the University of California system provided its professors with a list of “microaggressions”—modest slights, as the prefix “micro” suggests.8 Often, students are instructed not to shrug off these irritations but to dwell on them and exaggerate their importance. Among the sprawling list of “microaggressions” are expressions that we used to consider boilerplate patriotism:
• “America is the land of opportunity.”
• “Everyone can succeed in this society if they work hard enough.”
• “When I look at you, I don’t see color.”
• “Gender plays no part in who we hire.”
• “I believe the most qualified person should get the job.”
These phrases promote what the UC system dubbed the “myth of meritocracy.” It is the social justice left’s inviolable conviction that prejudice is a shackle around the ankles of women, minorities, the transgendered, and homosexuals. They are taught that they cannot rise above prejudice without the aid of benevolent progressive authorities.
That conviction has also led its adherents to attack those who do find success, particularly if they do not check the right demographic boxes. Consider the ordeals of the scientists Tim Hunt and Matt Taylor. Sir Richard Timothy Hunt received the Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine in 2001. Taylor, a British astrophysicist, helped design and land a man-made object on a speeding comet in 2014. By all rights, these men should be celebrated for their triumphs. Instead, they were brought low by organized attacks executed by those who did not share their talent but were devoted to social justice dogmas.
“Let me tell you about my trouble with girls.” These were the words that cast Hunt into a maelstrom. He uttered them at a scientific conference in South Korea hosted by an organization dedicated to promoting women in the sciences. “Three things happen when they are in the lab,” he continued. “You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticize them, they cry. Perhaps we should make separate labs for boys and girls.”9
Hunt was talking about his wife, a fellow scientist, whom he met in a laboratory. He concluded, “Now, seriously, I’m impressed by the economic development of Korea. And women scientists played, without doubt, an important role in it. Science needs women, and you should do science, despite all the obstacles, and despite monsters like me.” This line revealed the joke for what it was. Even absent nonverbal cues that the deliberately obtuse ignore to make a point, these were obviously the self-effacing remarks of a seventy-two-year-old man. They probably would never have attracted any notice if it were not for a spiteful colleague in the audience. In dispatches from the conference, Connie St. Louis, the director of the master’s program in science journalism at New York’s City University, eagerly and intentionally misrepresented both Hunt’s quip and how it was received by the audience. The phantom of overt sexism having been invoked, the press jumped at the opportunity to turn St. Louis into a star and Dr. Hunt into a pariah. For a Western media establishment that caters to the perpetually aggrieved social justice left, it was a story too good to temper with mitigating context. Despite no obvious malicious intent, Hunt was forced to resign his honorary professorships at University College London and the Biological Sciences Awards Committee of the Royal Society.
Taylor, too, found himself humiliated by those whose spitefulness was matched only by their lack of scruples. Giddy after his history-making achievement of landing a probe on a speeding Kuiper belt object, he appeared on a broadcast discussing his team’s achievement wearing a shirt adorned with cartoonish images of women in bathing suits. “No, no, women are toooootally welcome in our community,” remarked The Atlantic’s technology writer Rose Eveleth with theatrical sarcasm, “just ask the dude in this shirt.”10
Her comment produced a familiar cyclone of recriminations and denunciations. The scolds who condemned this accomplished scientist made no allowance for the fact that the shirt was a gift from a female friend who had hoped to see it on television. Within days, Taylor was forced to reappear on camera, this time in tears. He had been humiliated, and the rabble was satisfied to see him suffer.
As we will see, much modern social justice activism takes the form of simply cutting the successful down to size. This movement’s more ideologically committed members justify their antipathy toward the thriving and prosperous by convincing themselves that success is an ill-gotten gain. Accomplishments and failures are not earned but bestowed upon someone by higher powers. The idea that work yields reward is just a comforting fable.
For the social justice left, meritocracy isn’t the only myth that must be stamped out. Objective truth is another.
Vulgarity and Seduction
“Historically, white supremacy has venerated the idea of objectivity,” reads an open letter composed and signed by students at the five-school Claremont Consortium in California. “The idea that the truth is an entity for which we must search, in matters that endanger our abilities to exist in open spaces, is an attempt to silence oppressed peoples.”11
What prompted this pseudo-intellectual orgy of self-indulgence? A scheduled appearance on the McKenna College campus of Heather Mac Donald, the author of The War on Cops, an important work of research in defense of America’s police. Some 250 Claremont students found her work intolerable and mobilized to prevent their fellow students from hearing her conclusions. Mac Donald didn’t get to speak; those who wanted her silenced were considered too volatile, too dangerous. Mac Donald’s suspicion of the Black Lives Matter movement, regardless of her argument’s merits, was an unendurable heresy.
In an ironic twist, the students who led that protest were so racially enlightened that they opted to segregate themselves. Protesters who marched against Mac Donald placed “white accomplices” at the front of the line to serve as a buffer against police, who they believe have an itchier trigger finger when confronted by African-Americans.
Racial separatism in service to solidarity and safety is a common feature of demonstrations dating back to the civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century. In isolation, this amounts to a nostalgic reenactment that would not be worthy of much note, except that police don’t seem all that reluctant to pepper-spray unruly white protesters. But this phenomenon is not exclusive to protests and demonstrations. Benign ghettoization is making a comeback, particularly on college campuses, and it has nothing to do with protest culture.
Columbia University recently cordoned off areas of campus exclusively for use by lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) and minority students. President Morton Schapiro of Northwestern University penned an op-ed in the Washington Post defending racially segregated cafeteria tables, insisting that lunchtime isn’t the place for “uncomfortable learning.”12 Students at the University of Michigan recently demanded the establishment of African-American “safe spaces” on their state-owned campus that could not be penetrated by state-run police. Because the state’s police union had endorsed Donald Trump, the students insisted that “placing us in the police’s care is an act of anti-Black violence.”13
We’re no longer talking about separate living conditions for students who want to steep themselves in lifestyles that complement their fields of study. The idea that study has anything to do with it is a pretense that has finally been abandoned.
In early 2017, Frank Furedi, a professor at the University of Kent, stuck his neck out by protesting the “safe space” movement on campuses. He said that this concept led faculty and administrators to defend the idea that Jews, conservatives, African-Americans, Asians, LGBT students, and others cannot interact with one another without feeling menaced. “The popularity of identity politics among insecure Millennials threatens to fracture campus life to the point that undergraduates are inhabiting separate spaces and leading parallel lives,” he wrote.14 He’s right. In the name of Identitarian social justice, the next generation has embraced racial, religious, and political segregation and censorship. This isn’t progress. It’s regression.
In much of the rest of the world, identity politics is just called “politics.” In nations forged over millennia with a distinct ethnic or religious heritage or in countries without an egalitarian tradition, personal identity is largely indistinct from the national or subnational character. The United States is different. This is a nation built not upon heritage but a common idea. It is an idea built upon the concept that all men and women are created in God’s image, equal and free. The standards it sets for itself often go unmet, but America’s ideals have nevertheless guided its political evolution since the Founding.
Today, as a virulent form of identity politics gains broad and bipartisan credence, that idea is under attack. A bastardized notion of equality has compelled Western elites in politics, media, and academia to view the accomplished with suspicion. Since victimhood, not capability or achievement, opens doors, claims of victimization are proliferating. Americans are being divided into two perceived and often overlapping classes: aggressors and their victims. This division has heightened tensions among individuals and groups that brandish competing claims to victimhood. The inevitable result of this trend will be tribalism, oppressive communitarianism, and the perception that individuality is a dangerous form of deviancy.
From the legitimate scholarly examination of cultural distinctions, social power dynamics, and trans-generational memory, a poisonous brand of social justice was born. It is the very antithesis of justice. It is a doctrine that infantilizes its adherents while making them belligerent, and it is exclusive to no political creed. It has Identitarian devotees on the left and the right. It professes to value equality, but its central tenet is vengeance. It is as vulgar as it is seductive.
The vindictiveness and envy inherent in modern social justice can be made to seem less obviously contemptible when festooned with academic pretensions. It’s no wonder, then, that so many men and women of letters have devoted their careers to concocting a dubious scientific doctrine around unfalsifiable claims. Arguably the most famous of these is the feminist doctrine of intersectionality.
Intersectionality
Social justice has birthed a variety of complementary splinter ideologies, but few have been as successful as intersectionality. Even its most devoted adherents disagree about its definition, but the basic idea is well-defined.
Institutional racism does not run parallel to patriarchal discrimination, intersectional theorists contend. Anti-gay bias is not completely distinct from class-based persecution. These pathologies are interrelated; they “intersect.” Practically, “privilege” is enjoyed by those with one or more of the following traits: white, wealthy, heterosexual, male. Those who lack at least one of those traits suffer some discrimination, but prejudice is doled out in degrees. A gay white man suffers less prejudice than a black heterosexual woman, to say nothing of a poor, disabled, Native-American lesbian, and so on. This is intersectionality.
The scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw has done more than most to formalize and popularize intersectionality. In a 2016 TED Talk, she describes the theory as an effort to break up an old model of civil rights and social activism, which she derisively calls “a trickle-down approach to social justice.” Writing in the Stanford Law Review in 1991, she provides a real-world example to help define intersectional theory in practice: the “Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill scandal.”15 Crenshaw argues that Hill was disadvantaged because of her status as a black woman alleging sexist harassment by a black man:
This dilemma could be described as the consequence of antiracism’s essentializing Blackness and feminism’s essentializing womanhood. But recognizing as much does not take us far enough, for the problem is not simply linguistic or philosophical in nature. It is specifically political: the narratives of gender are based on the experience of white, middle-class women, and the narratives of race are based on the experience of Black men.
The notion that Hill’s accusations did not receive a fair hearing both in the press and on Capitol Hill seems divorced from any empirical assessment of reality, but that’s not the only bit of objectivity that intersectionality tosses out the window.
In an academic context, intersectional theory is a perfectly legitimate conceptual framework for understanding prejudice. As an organizational philosophy, however, it resembles a Marxist ideal: all struggles against discrimination are linked because they all originate from the same fundamental source of inequality. For Marx, that source was class. For intersectional feminists, it’s identity.
In theory, intersectionality is a source of strength for the social justice left. It unites otherwise disparate elements of the liberal activist base in a common cause. In practice, however, intersectionality is a trap that saps its enthusiasts of legitimacy, as the corruption of the Women’s March of 2017 demonstrated.
When Donald Trump won the presidency, hundreds of thousands of angry activists took to the streets, marching for days on end. This movement was not blemish-free, and on Inauguration Day, violence in its name erupted across the country. The Women’s March was the antidote to these destructive passions.
For two days in January, millions of people marched in opposition to Trump. The demonstration was peaceful, powerful, and, most importantly, sympathetic. It was not long, however, before the intersectional feminists who organized this event sullied their group’s reputation.
Among the Women’s March organizers was the self-described feminist and Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour, who enjoyed tremendous cachet on the left. The ACLU, Demos, and other left-leaning organizations praised her effusively. Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand dubbed her one of the “suffragists of our time.” Sarsour repaid these favors by putting her supporters in the awkward position of having to defend her frequently aberrant behavior.16
Though supposedly a feminist, Sarsour has essentially endorsed Saudi Arabia’s medieval treatment of women. She has said that Riyadh’s formerly tight restrictions on the rights of women, like driving a car, were offset by the state’s paternalistic welfare policies. Moreover, this was a tradeoff that any woman would be silly to turn down. “I wish I could take their vaginas away,” Sarsour wrote of female activists like Ayaan Hirsi Ali. A Somali-born Dutch-American lecturer and writer, Ali was a victim of genital mutilation at an early age. “You’ll know when you’re living under Sharia Law if suddenly all your loans [and] credit cards become interest-free,” Sarsour wrote. “Sounds nice, doesn’t it?” These are the intellectual compromises demanded of those who would surrender to authoritarianism, and Sarsour seems eager to submit.
Most neutral observers would conclude from all this that the drawbacks of associating with Sarsour outweigh the benefits, but the logic of intersectionality forbids prudent dissociation.
As long as her activism resonated with the left, Sarsour’s liberal allies were content to ignore her excesses. While delivering the keynote address to a Muslim-American conference in 2017, however, Sarsour violated this unspoken compact when she insisted it was the duty of Muslims to engage in “jihad” against President Donald Trump.
Rather than chide Sarsour for this reckless instigation, her compatriots went to the mattresses to defend it. Bizarrely, they claimed that only Sarsour understood the true Quranic meaning of the word “jihad.” The word denotes only peaceful dissent, they insisted, not warfare or violent resistance. Never mind that this alleged misapprehension is apparently shared by a good portion of the Muslim world—many adopted Sarsour’s line uncritically. “Right-Wing Outlets Read Violence into Sarsour’s Anti-Trump ‘Jihad,’ ” the website The Daily Beast declared. “Muslim activist Linda Sarsour’s reference to ‘jihad’ draws conservative wrath,” the Washington Post insisted. “The people disagreeing with [Linda Sarsour] clearly don’t understand what Jihad means,” Professor Marc Lamont Hill of Temple University postured.
However heavy the burden of defending Sarsour and the tarnished Women’s March, the logic of intersectionality prevented the social justice left from abandoning her. The same phenomenon is observed in the movement’s veneration of Assata Shakur, whose birthday the Women’s March celebrated in 2017 as a day of “resistance.” Shakur is perhaps better known by the name that appeared on court documents when she was convicted of the execution-style murder of a New Jersey state trooper: Joanne Chesimard. A black-power activist implicated in a variety of violent crimes and robberies, Shakur was convicted of eight felonies in 1977, including first-degree murder, before she fled the United States. She currently lives in communist Cuba, a fugitive from American justice.
Several months later, the organizers of the Women’s March, Tamika Mallory and Carmen Perez, defended their organization’s association with the Nation of Islam’s anti-Semitic figurehead, Louis Farrakhan. “People need to understand the significant contributions that these individuals have made to Black and Brown people,” Perez said of “Minister Farrakhan” and his associates. “There are no perfect leaders.”17
Intersectional ideology unites those who would be mounting otherwise disparate and disorganized campaigns of resistance against discrimination, but it also forces its adherents to surrender discretion. Maybe Sarsour is friendly toward the most repressive aspects of patriarchal Islamism, but she hates Donald Trump and she calls herself a feminist, so she’s “one of us.” Sure, Shakur robbed, vandalized, incited violence, and killed a cop, but she also hates white supremacy and capitalism. She too is one of us. To abandon one is to abandon all. Intersectionality has rendered the “Sister Souljah moment” obsolete.
Flowers for America
In the spirit of Vonnegut, more and more university students are attempting to make up for the supposed inabilities of their peers by neutralizing the advantages of others. Anyone who disagrees too loudly with this enforced leveling is subject to ostracism or worse. Students of assumed “privilege” are taught that their contributions are inherently less valuable and that the fruits of their labors are never entirely their own. The power to crush fragile young psyches is attributed to challenging words and ideas.
America’s young adults are eagerly enlisting in a new war against transgressing speech and conduct. This crusade has matured beyond the standards of “political correctness,” a term that describes behavior that is downright quaint compared with that which aggravates today’s censorious radicals. These young adults and the stultified elders who teach them intolerance are still largely confined to academic institutions and liberal opinion journals, but this self-imposed isolation won’t last. Their grievances are being adapted for mass consumption.
The information age has seen the destruction of barriers that once impeded entry into elite political debates, and good riddance to them. This development has, however, proved to be a double-edged sword. There is a largely beneficial stigma associated with tuning out of politics and current events; apathy is not a virtue. But not everyone is inclined to do the homework necessary to understand and opine on politics with any insight. It takes work to know what you’re talking about. Identity politics and social justice provide a convenient method by which the ill-equipped can engage in politics and be taken seriously.
From the “social awareness” of commercial brands to the latest Marvel comics superhero film; from the faces that grace American currency to “race mixing” in fantastical young adult fantasy novels; from the chauvinism of “Taco Tuesdays” to the potentially traumatic imagery evoked by the surname “Lynch,” trivialities preoccupy the minds of American social justice advocates.
This isn’t politics or policy. It has little to do with the direction in which society will develop. At most, this is a substitute for substantive political engagement. These and other controversies made for the social media age produce the illusion for social justice advocates that they are engaging in genuine political discourse. In fact, they’re only obsessing over popular culture.
Wanting to engage in politics in an informed and sophisticated way is commendable. It should be encouraged. Unfortunately, those who once served as gatekeepers to that discourse have abdicated their responsibility to ensure that it remains erudite. In service to the dictates of social justice, the barriers to entry into political dialogue have been lowered to the point of virtual nonexistence.
This phenomenon could be dismissed as trivial had it not matured alongside the idea that victimhood not only deserves sympathy and redress but also confers virtue. The value attached to historical grievance has led to the proliferation of grievances. Everybody’s got a claim to persecution, and he’s submitting that claim for reimbursement.
Piety and Prejudice
Otto Warmbier was just twenty-two years old when he died. The former University of Virginia student had been held captive in North Korea for seventeen months before the regime unexpectedly released him. When American authorities received him, however, Warmbier was in a virtual coma. He was unresponsive to stimuli and showed signs of physical abuse at the hands of his captors. While in captivity, Warmbier also suffered at the hands of his countrymen back home.
The regime arrested Warmbier for allegedly stealing a North Korean propaganda poster as a souvenir—a “crime” that his roommate said never happened. For this alleged insult to the dignity of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Warmbier was sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor in a gulag. Meanwhile, among Western social justice enthusiasts, there was little sympathy for the young captive. Instead, upon his capture, Warmbier was mocked and attacked for having the temerity to offend the world’s last Stalinist dictatorship.18
“It’s just tough for me to have much sympathy for this guy and his crocodile tears,” said former Comedy Central host Larry Wilmore. The comedian mocked Warmbier for evincing “privilege” by presuming he could commit what he sarcastically referred to as the “international crime” of poster theft. “This might be America’s biggest idiot frat boy,” the left-wing web-based magazine Salon wrote of Warmbier. Huffington Post contributor La Sha chided the student for the “reckless gall” he displayed in upsetting the Kim regime, behavior she attributed to his “being socialized first as a white boy, then as a white man” in America. Never mind the fact that North Korea held at least three other American citizens in captivity at the time of Warmbier’s release, all of them of Korean heritage.
It didn’t matter that Warmbier was being abused by a despotic regime that was using him to advance its geopolitical prospects at America’s expense. For Warmbier’s critics, all that mattered was their presumption that he had probably behaved with the carelessness they believed to be typical of his race and sex. In any other context, we’d call that prejudice.
Among the plotlines to which social justice advocates cling with religious conviction is that of the United States as an inherently bigoted and sexist nation. Lingering prejudice pervades virtually all its institutions. Even prominent Democrats like Hillary Clinton have advanced this notion by blaming her 2016 loss, in part, on America’s misogyny. This is an article of faith shared by many of her fellow progressives.
To test this proposition, researchers devised an experiment. Two professors of educational theater were enlisted by the international business school INSEAD to memorize the behavior, mannerisms, and dialogue of both Clinton and Donald Trump in their three presidential debates. Clinton would, however, be played by a man, while a woman would portray Trump.
The results of that experiment shocked even its designers. Audience members discovered previously unknown wells of sympathy for Trump’s voters because his message struck them as “more precise” when delivered by an assertive woman. By contrast, Clinton’s caution and timidity were dubbed by one audience member “punchable” when displayed by a man. It never previously occurred to these rooms full of urban liberals that Clinton might have failed on her merits rather than as a result of American misogyny.
A New York University News review of the experiment concluded that the test had raised “as many questions about gender performance and effects of sexism as it answered.”19 Foremost among those “questions” has to be why the social justice left’s assumptions about gender bias manifest in ways that so closely resemble bigotry.
Too often, what is obviously stereotyping to outside observers is written off as a necessary evil by those who indulge in them. Blanket statements and generalizations may be unfair to individuals, but they highlight grander historical trends and are, therefore, valuable. It doesn’t seem to faze the activist class that their “greater truths” are built on a foundation of lies.
“The Right to Be Believed”
Another belief that thrives today among advocates of social justice is the idea that America somehow condones sexual violence. These activists correctly note that ossified private institutions have historically shielded serial offenders in their midst from punishment. That is a real and long-standing injustice that society is slowly recognizing and correcting. But these activists do not stop there. They contend that we live in a “rape culture”—a society so forgiving of violence against women that its institutions cannot be trusted to mete out proper justice.
Those who decry this alleged “rape culture” have a habit of demanding that evidence-based prosecutions be subordinated to empathy. For years, college campuses heeded this demand. There, secret tribunals adjudicated criminal cases to achieve a result preferred by social justice advocates, even if that made a mockery of due process.
“To every survivor of sexual assault,” Hillary Clinton wrote amid her quest for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, “You have the right to be believed.”20 Nothing should so offend an American as the idea that an accuser has “the right to be believed” because of a status conferred at birth. It is an assault on the rule of law. Wars have been fought to rid mankind of these shackles.
Clinton was not describing accusations of harassment or discrimination but felonious brutality. She was not talking about claims against public figures or deliberations in the court of public opinion but allegations that should be the exclusive province of the criminal justice system. “The right to be believed” exposes the lie that the social justice left seeks only fairness. In practice, the “right to be believed” is a notion that has led to the destruction of many innocent young male lives.
One of the most notorious beneficiaries of the “right to be believed” was Crystal Magnum, an African-American stripper who in 2006 accused a number of young white men on Duke University’s lacrosse team of gang rape. The investigation into this incident was a debacle. The prosecutor, Mike Nifong, was fired, disbarred, and spent a day in prison for his unethical efforts to convict the accused despite a lack of incriminating evidence. Still, the lives of the men Magnum accused were permanently damaged. Many of the victims of that scandal have found it difficult to secure or retain employment. One was compelled to change his name. Magnum was later convicted of stabbing her boyfriend to death and sentenced to fourteen years in a North Carolina prison.
The lessons of that episode were lost on Rolling Stone’s reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely. In 2014, she penned a (literally) unbelievable tale for her magazine in which she “exposed” a gang rape initiation ring within a University of Virginia fraternity. Her implausible yarn of systematic sexual assaults on women, one of whom was allegedly violated repeatedly atop a pile of broken glass, was eventually retracted in its entirety. The students accused of mass rape sued their school for overreacting to that story, which had suspended the charter of not only the fraternity in question but all fraternities on campus. Today, Erdely is disgraced, and her story cost the magazine that once employed her $1.65 million in damages. Still, these young men will find their reputations scarred, perhaps for the rest of their lives.21
The Duke lacrosse players and the Virginia fraternity brothers were only some of the highest profile targets of a culture of social justice. Theirs is the wrong identity—young, male, white, and born into comfortable surroundings. These innocent lives were to be sacrificed to an ideological objective. The fact that their cases had to become national scandals before their names were cleared is sobering. How many more victims of a petty, vindictive, ideological crusade don’t make national headlines?
The great jurist Sir William Blackstone wrote that it is “better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.”22 Not everyone agrees. “If I was running [a college], I might say, ‘Well, you know even if there’s a 20 to 30 percent chance that it happened, I would want to remove this individual,’ ” Governor Jared Polis, a Democrat from Colorado, averred. “If there’s ten people who have been accused, and under a reasonable likelihood standard maybe one or two did it, it seems better to get rid of all ten people.”23
For classes of unfortunate birth, guilt is presumed. They call this progress.
The “Job Interview”
In the autumn of 2018, the confirmation process for the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, which had almost reached its predictable if contentious conclusion, suddenly exploded in a storm of social justice activism when Kavanaugh was accused of having committed sexual assault at the age of seventeen. The accusation itself was the beginning and end of the evidence against him, but the arbiters of political discourse seized the opportunity to explore their own experiences and let their own preconceptions lead the way.
Along the way, something snapped in the national psyche, and the antisocial dogmas that underlie ideological social justice were laid bare—an affinity for racial hierarchies and race-based preferences, antipathy to due process and the presumption of innocence, reduction of individuals to nondescript representatives of their taxonomic class. Prominent reporters, editors, political professionals, and celebrities displayed with absolute self-confidence what can only be described as bigotry.
Testifying before the Senate, Kavanaugh defended himself against accusations that had progressed from the unsupported to the absurd. Although his obviously unfeigned indignation persuaded many, his enemies portrayed the understandable passion of a falsely accused man as the unsavory behavior typical of his race and sex. “It’s not just that white men are allowed to be angry and women are not; it’s that white men’s anger can be used to their benefit,” the columnist Rebecca Traister wrote.
Judge Kavanaugh, whose thirty-year career was unspotted by even a hint of impropriety, was now accused of gang rape, but Maureen Dowd of the New York Times branded him as one of the “entitled white men acting like the new minority, howling about things that are being taken away from them, aggrieved at anything that diminishes them or saps their power.” The Times’ news editors headlined the report of his testimony, “Kavanaugh Borrows from Trump’s Playbook on White Male Anger.”
Matthew Dowd of ABC News urged his fellow “white male Christians” to “give up our seats at the table.” Senator Mazie Hirono passionately concurred. “Just shut up and step up,” she roared in the direction of “the men in this country.”
The economist Paul Krugman said Kavanaugh’s performance was not about the existential threat that being found “guilty” of sexual assault in a mock courtroom would pose to the judge and his family but “the rage of white men” and the “threat to their privileged position.” The Boston Globe’s Renee Graham compared Kavanaugh’s “white male superiority complex” to the pathology that led the infamous Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb to kidnap and murder a fourteen-year-old boy for fun. Christine Fair of the Georgetown University faculty insisted that Kavanaugh and those “entitled white men” who look like him deserve “miserable deaths” involving posthumous castration.
The former tennis star Martina Navratilova insisted that Kavanaugh represents “the epitome of White Male Privilege,” while the actress Margaret Judson declared that “white male privilege was palpable” in the room as the judge attested to his innocence. The novelist Stephen King wrote that Kavanaugh’s picture should accompany the dictionary definition for “white male entitlement.”
Those who defended Kavanaugh from the unsubstantiated claims against him were not spared this repulsive treatment. When Donald Trump said the ordeal to which Kavanaugh had been subjected had been traumatic, John Harwood corrected him in the New York Times: “[M]ore accurately,” he wrote, the judge’s behavior was indicative of “trauma for white men unaccustomed to trauma.” Senator Lindsey Graham’s heated condemnation of his colleagues’ conduct was simply an attempt to beat back the challenge from feminists and people of color “demanding a seat at the table.” To the columnist Alexis Grenell, Senator Susan Collins’s forty-three-minute speech elaborating on the thinness of the claims against Kavanaugh was the act of a “gender traitor.” Collins and the “white women” like her were acting to “uphold a system that values only their whiteness.”
The critical mass of influencers who engaged in these public displays of chauvinism could be confident that their prejudices were shared by the members of their professional class. There would be no repercussions for their transgression against not only fairness but basic good taste. They had internalized social justice’s nostrums, convincing themselves that judiciousness was found not in a dispassionate evaluation of the evidence before them but in a subjective assessment of race, sex, and collective power dynamics.
This was no longer about Brett Kavanaugh. It wasn’t even about sexual assault. It was about vengeance.
The Identitarian Right
Mark Lilla, an outspoken liberal critic of the Identitarian left, has observed that identity politics has destroyed the art of argumentation. “Classroom conversations that once might have begun I think A, and here is my argument, now take the form, Speaking as an X, I am offended that you claim B,” he writes.24
Lilla has since broadened his critique of Identitarianism to include much of society outside the classroom. What began as a humbling and enlightening quest for racial and cultural awareness has become a competition among victimized classes to determine who is the most oppressed and to capitalize on that status. Thus, Lilla observes, the left has established that it is impossible to truly understand the experience of anyone with discrete racial, cultural, biological, or sexual traits. And if we cannot understand others’ experiences, we cannot truly empathize with them. And empathy is the acknowledgment of shared human traits and conditions. It’s all that stands between us and sociopathy.
The right has long known that this kind of divisive identity politics is ugly, anti-intellectual, and deleterious to national comity. And then, in 2016, it forgot.
In many ways, Donald Trump beat the social justice left at its own game. Trump inculcated in his supporters a sense of grievance that was philosophically alien to conservatism, convincing his most enthusiastic voters that forces greater than they were responsible for their lot in life. Their identity—be it white, conservative, Christian, or whatever you like—was not just looked down upon by elites in positions of power, but also discriminated against.
By appealing to Identitarianism to win the Republican presidential nomination, Trump drove an eighteen-wheeler through the standards that had governed political discourse on the right. Out of this breach cascaded a familiar horde that went by a new name: the “alt-right.”
The alt-right was not a conservative movement. Its members were not shy about condemning conservatism as a philosophy that had failed to “conserve” much of anything—at least, the idealized, bygone America that they thought was worthy of conservation. Its members were nakedly hostile toward non-white immigrant groups, and its leaders did little to tamp these base sentiments down. The alt-right rejected the idea of limited government, and some of its admirers mocked reverence for the Constitution as mere idol worship.25 The alt-right is hostile toward an extroverted foreign policy, preferring instead to retrench behind the walls of Fortress America. It has no use for what it sees as the pompous religiosity, false moralizing, and self-defeating decorum of social conservatism.
Some on the right might contend that this movement was a natural response to a political vacuum. Writing in February 2015, the conservative columnist Ramesh Ponnuru observed that the sprawling field of Republican presidential candidates had no use for immigration hawks, despite the unpopularity of permissive immigration regimes among the party’s grassroots voters.26 The Federalist’s Ben Domenech noted that a populist counter-reaction to the false consensus on immigration policy Ponnuru identified should have been anticipated: “If a large . . . portion of the country wants existing bipartisan immigration laws to be enforced, and one party tells them ‘Yes,’ but means ‘No,’ and the other party tells them, ‘No’ but means ‘You’re a racist,’ then it’s only a matter of time before some disruptor is going to emerge to call them out for their game.”27 Trump’s ascension wasn’t predicated on Identitarianism; it was a legitimate response to a blind spot almost universally shared by the political class in Washington. To those who longed for it, though, Trump’s rise presented an opportunity to legitimize white identity politics.
The alt-right is a funhouse-mirror reflection of Identitarian movements on the left. White nationalism is perhaps the primordial form of identity politics in America, and its program is social justice for white people. Its members revel in self-pity. They are hypersensitive to perceived slights against their race or their culture. They are convinced that society has erected insurmountable obstacles in their paths to success because of their heritage. They seek only fairness, they contend, just as their progressive counterparts do.
There is a case to be made that Trump’s attack on liberal speech- and thought-policing was a necessary antidote to the left’s excesses. That may be the kind of resentment politics that satisfies many conservatives, but it is still resentment.
Some conservatives will see these admonitions as just more political correctness—“virtue signaling” for the benefit of an effete coastal audience. Maybe they don’t agree with Trump on everything, and maybe they find his willingness to tolerate the intolerable off-putting. Yet for many on the right, he is the avatar of an overdue backlash against a dominant cultural ethos that resents them and their values.
That is undoubtedly a sincere belief, but it also concedes that Trump contributed to precisely the same Balkanization of the American electorate that the right resented when the left was doing the Balkanizing. Conservatives cannot reject the identity politics practiced by their adversaries while simultaneously adopting a style of it for themselves. Only the most cynical would knowingly embrace such hypocrisy.
How Republics Fail
Although they may be indistinguishable to outsiders, warring tribes in close geographic proximity are consumed with their relatively modest distinctions. Identitarians on the left and the right are those undifferentiated neighboring tribes, and they are coming to blows. This may not be a fleeting bout of national hysteria either. Intellectual foundations are being laid to legitimize political violence.
College administrators and professors advocate forcible censorship on the grounds that certain types of speech are just not productive. The editors of college newspapers from the Harvard Crimson to the Georgetown Hoya to the Oberlin Review publish works with no loftier objective than validating their student body’s worst impulses. Ostensibly responsible political actors whitewash brutality as a legitimate response to the trauma associated with distressing speech.
It is increasingly common to hear social justice activists equate discomfiting or objectionable speech with acts of violence, and not in a metaphorical sense. Those activists are just as liable to view reactionary activities—including public disturbances, property destruction, and even the physical harassment of their opponents—as alternative forms of expression. Since they conflate offensive speech and violence, a violent response to speech isn’t just reasonable; it’s necessary. It’s practically self-defense.
From the massacre of editors and cartoonists at the offices of the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo to the attempted slaughter of provocative cartoonists in Garland, Texas, a disturbing number of self-described liberals—ranging from cable television hosts to figures as prominent as the secretary of state—thought these acts were at least understandable, if not entirely warranted.
From the darkest corners of the alt-right’s online haunts to the ivy-covered halls of academia, language that dehumanizes political adversaries, depicting them as one-dimensional creatures of singularly malevolent intent, is rampant. It is inevitable that that kind of incitement will yield real violence.
Media outlets devoted extensive coverage to acts of violence committed by Trump supporters against anti-Trump demonstrators in 2016. Perhaps the most under-covered story of that election year, though, was the organized violence targeting Trump supporters. In city after city, gangs took revenge upon persons attending pro-Trump events. The attacks by both sides portended a grim future typified by street violence. Even after Trump’s inauguration, the fighting between Identitarian factions on the right and the left did not abate. Indeed, it only grew worse.
What Went Wrong?
The miracle of America is that its egalitarian spirit and capitalist value system have produced the most powerful engine of social and economic equality humanity has ever witnessed. Progress toward true equality in America is a project that will, in all likelihood, never be complete. Striving toward that goal is noble even if the ideal is unattainable. Furthermore, the study of cultural and individual distinctions and social inequities is perfectly legitimate. But from a healthy awareness of identity and the desire for self-actualization a strain of crippling self-pity has emerged. Identitarian activists have made paralyzing victimization a virtue.
The social justice movement and its ill effects didn’t materialize overnight. The United States is, in a way, the culmination of the enlightened principle which states that the legitimately oppressed are entitled to redress. That was a relatively novel innovation in the late eighteenth century. It was a product of ideals enshrined in America’s founding documents, which were themselves the paradigmatic revolution brought about by Enlightenment thinkers like Immanuel Kant, John Locke, and David Hume. In that sense, the modern social justice movement is not an aberration but an extension of America’s magnanimity. That does not, however, render this movement’s excesses any less dangerous.
Identitarianism and social justice can be understood only through the lens of history. These related ideologies were shaped and, in many ways, bastardized by generations who sought to remake the honorable American ethos in their own image. Distinguishing the conventionally Anglo-American conception of justice from the bitter vendettas that masquerade as righteousness and equality could not be more urgent. The perversions that today’s modern activist class calls social justice have roots in centuries of Identitarian thought in America. We must evaluate that history critically if real egalitarian virtue is to be saved from association with and corruption by this thing that calls itself justice.