Identity politics that entirely excludes a quest for civil rights? I could present you with some magazine articles that all use the term the way I do. But you could look for those yourself.

So we're just not talking about the same thing. What is the goal of the kind of identity politics you're talking about? The goal is to just be separate? Could you give an example of that?

Btw, I also see your kind of identity politics as contradictory: politics is a path to a united voice. If you want to be separate, you don't engage in politics, you move to Liberia.

So we're just not talking about the same thing. What is the goal of the kind of identity politics you're talking about? The goal is to just be separate? Could you give an example of that? — frank

I've written plenty in the thread. You're welcome to read and engage.

politics is a path to a united voice. If you want to be separate, you don't engage in politics, you move to Liberia. — frank

This too is utterly wrong and bizarre. The very essence of politics is the management of antagonism between competing claims. There is no politics without this disunity. It's no accident that one of the most famous - if not still hotly debated - definitions of politics was Carl Schmitt's declaration that politics begins with the demarcation between friend and enemy. Politics is as much exiling your minorities to Liberia or confining them to ghettos as it is in achieving a 'united voice'. Unity is anti-poltical. There's a good reason why fascist politics is very much about the elimination of politics - all the better for 'unity'.

'Personalities' are made up in back rooms, Serious politics are about what we are to do. Because the rich intend to destroy the world rather than lose two-pence, we have these silly personalities instead of thinking.

Unity is anti-poltical. — StreetlightX

Peace is anti-military, yet it's the goal of every war. As it stands, I don't really understand the definition of identity politics used in this thread. So we'll leave it there?

I don't really understand the definition of identity politics — frank

That much is clear.

Cool. It's like Snakes Alive said: politics ends when the parties get bored (or offended in unenlightened's case) and walk away.

He thinks the threat of some kind of violence keeps people in the struggle. I say it's that we just fundamentally care about each other.

We're both right.

As it stands, I don't really understand the definition of identity politics used in this thread. — frank

Neither do I.

Now, the civil rights activist's point was quite simple: all politics has an effect on the identity of those involved, therefore, all politics is identity politics. This is, in some sense undeniable. But here's the issue: this doesn't mean that identity politics exhausts what politics can involve. All politics is identity politics, but all politics isn't just identity politics. It's like how all humans have noses, but that doesn't mean that humanity is defined by their noses. So again, how do we cash this out? If not identity politics, then what? — StreetlightX

How about looking up "identity politics" in the dictionary?

Identity Politics per Merriam Webster:

politics in which groups of people having a particular racial, religious, ethnic, social, or cultural identity tend to promote their own specific interests or concerns without regard to the interests or concerns of any larger political group — Merriam-Webster.com

So identity politics has to do with emphasizing a particular feature or property of an individual as opposed to several features or properties of an individual. So if you think of yourself as a black man, or a homosexual more than you see yourself as a human being, then you would probably vote for things that help black men, or homosexuals rather than what helps all of humanity. Essentially, identity political voters are self-centered one-issue voters. How do you see yourself? What is the primary characteristic that defines what you are? Is it your race, your sexual preferences, religion, or is that you are a democrat, republican, socialist, liberal, or do you consider yourself a human being first and foremost and all those other qualities are secondary?

(or offended in unenlightened's case) — frank

No Frank. I'm not offended, I'm on strike.

I think your team has a scab (strike-breaker).

Identity Politics per Merriam Webster:

politics in which groups of people having a particular racial, religious, ethnic, social, or cultural identity tend to promote their own specific interests or concerns without regard to the interests or concerns of any larger political group — Merriam-Webster.com — Harry Hindu

This is not at all a good definition of identity politics. Identity politics is not at all about groups promoting particular interests over general ones. If anything, that's just a definition of politics as such: all politics is the advancement of particular, competing claims in and of society. What is new in identity politics is the basis upon which such claims are advanced, a basis precisely understood as 'identity'. Here is an actual political scientist writing on the topic:

"What makes identity politics a significant departure from earlier, pre-identarian forms of the politics of recognition is its demand for recognition on the basis of the very grounds on which recognition has previously been denied: it is qua women, qua blacks, qua lesbians that groups demand recognition. The demand is not for inclusion within the fold of “universal humankind” on the basis of shared human attributes; nor is it for respect “in spite of” one's differences. Rather, what is demanded is respect for oneself as different" (Sonia Kruks, Retrieving Experience).

Or else to quote yet another political scientist, Corey Robin: "[Identity politics] tries to sidestep the critical role and need for argument, the need to craft a coalition and mobilize around a set of ideas and interests. Rather than build a case, people appeal to a condition. I'm not against a politics based on conflict, on arraying one group against another. I'm against building those conflicts on spurious appeals to "you're one of us." Even if that "us" is an oppressed group. ... All of us are divided in multiple ways, first and foremost within ourselves. That's what politics at its best does: to craft a commonality out of that preexisting division. Identitiarians begin with the most spurious identity of all--the undivided self--and build from there."

This is a reprise of what I said earlier: "There's a difference between "I advocate X because I am Y", and "I advocate X because of problems A, B, and C, that affect Ys". That there are issues that disproportionally affect, say Indigenous Australians, or First Nations people, and to engage in political action to address those issues is not identity politics." People - and apparently dictionaries - often confuse the two, and it is harmful and mystifying.

It is not identity politics to argue on the basis of particular interest. That's a vapid understanding of identity politics. Democracy itself is the accommodation and adjudication of particular interests, without which it would not have any raison d'etre. Identity politics is to argue for particular claims on the basis of identity, rather than the articulation of concrete problems: the imbalances of power, of unjust social burdens, inequity of participatory access and so on. All of these can disproportionally affect particular identity groups, without attempts to redress those issues as being identity politics. Simple rule: if you're arguing on the basis of identity, that's identity politics. If you're arguing on the basis of an injustice that affects who you are and who you can be, that's just politics as such.

Another social psychologist examines the issue:

Haidt's almost there but he goes wrong at the last minute. He properly recognizes, to begin with, that politics is the space of competing claims. He also gets right the opposition between civil rights and so-called 'bad' identity politics, even though he wrongly classifies civil rights activism as a species of identity politics in it's own right. But he really messes up when he conflates 'bad' identity politics with the institution of a distinction between 'us' and 'them'. This should be so obvious a point that it's amazing anyone misses it: such a distinction is in no possible way a prerogative exclusive to identity politics, let alone a defining feature of it. Even forgetting that such a distinction is itself at the basis of any and all political action, it misses entirely the specificity of identity politics: a politics practised on the basis of identity claims! The bloody name of it.

As Kruks wrote, identity politics works on the basis of particular identities (as she writes, "it is qua women, qua blacks, qua lesbians that groups demand recognition), and not just some generic, unspecifiable distinction between 'us and them'. To equate identity politics with exclusion is to equate identity politics with politics, and argue for the extinction of the latter. Politics is founded on exclusion:

"What characterizes democratic politics is the confrontation between conflicting hegemonic projects, a confrontation with no possibility of final reconciliation. ... To conceive such a confrontation in political terms requires asking a series of strategic questions about the type of ‘we’ that a given politics aims at creating ... This cannot take place without defining an adversary, a ‘they' that will serve as a 'constitutive outside' for the we’. This is what can be called the ‘moment of the political’, the recognition of constitutive character of social division and the ineradicability of antagonism. Theorists who are unable or unwilling to acknowledge this dimension cannot provide an effective guide for envisaging the nature of politics." (Chantal Mouffe, Agnostics: Thinking The World Politically).

No wonder Haidt ends on a bunch of platitudes about 'working together' and 'creating trusting environments'. He doesn't want the end of identity politics. He wants the end of politics. Coming from a social psychologist, it's not that surprising.

There are just different ways to understand the term. In the US, Charlottesville is an example of pathological identity politics. Calling it politics is a little odd, because there is no one goal of white nationalists and some of their goals are absurd.

I'm sure you don't want to resort to a priori examinations of meaning. Let's just look at how people actually do use the terms. What we've established is that there's more than one meaning to "identity politics." That way we don't end up declaring both the Oxford and Merriam Webster dictionaries to be wrong.

Because the term actually came into use in the US during the Civil Rights Movement, the way the average American uses the term may by influenced by that.

This isn't an arbitrary quibble about a priori meanings. It matters how identity politics is understood, because its conflation with politics as such - as Haidt and half the participants in the thread are wont to do - leads to calls for nothing less than the suppression of politics, and in its wake, democratic politics. How we understand identity politics matters to how we understand politics in the larger sense. If we don't understand its specificity, we don't understand politics. And if we don't understand politics, we say stupid things about it.

And given that the 'average American' is a black hole of stammering vacuity, its best not to use that as our index of anything worth anything.

Lol. Ok.

This is not at all a good definition of identity politics. — StreetlightX

It's the other way around. Your definition is not good at all. Your definition is way to general. If identity politics is just politics, then what use is the word, "identity politics"?

As I explained, identity politics is a form of modern tribalism.

What makes identity politics a significant departure from earlier, pre-identarian forms of the politics of recognition is its demand for recognition on the basis of the very grounds on which recognition has previously been denied: it is qua women, qua blacks, qua lesbians that groups demand recognition. The demand is not for inclusion within the fold of “universal humankind” on the basis of shared human attributes; nor is it for respect “in spite of” one's differences. Rather, what is demanded is respect for oneself as different" (Sonia Kruks, Retrieving Experience). — StreetlightX

It's not about recognition of their identity as a woman, black or lesbian. It is about the recognition of equal rights. Their identity is what is recognized and the reason they are being denied equal rights, so their identities are recognized, but not their equal rights. It shouldn't be about one's identity. That is divisive. It should be about equality under the law, despite one's identity. You shouldn't get special treatment because of your identity either. We see it all the time when the wealthy and elites get a pass instead of doing the time for their crimes.

Alot of people are under that impression. But the logic is exactly the same, and it's simply arbitrary to think identity stops at biology.

This is one of the reasons I explicitly tried to outline some other models of politics in the OP. People simply don't really have a very good grasp of what politics can involve other than claims underwritten by identity, and even those who say things like 'avoid identity politics at all costs' list nothing but identity politics as an alternative! — StreetlightX

Or as I said on page 2, "So this seems like one of those silly 'I can make moves to interpret anything as x' games."

"Well, if we define identity in this way instead, and . . . "

If identity politics is just politics, then what use is the word, "identity politics"? — Harry Hindu

Identity politics isn't just politics, that's the point. You'll excuse me if I take the word of a political scientist over some internet rando.

Identity politics isn't just politics, that's the point. — StreetlightX

You've seemed to have about 25-30 different points in this thread, none of which seem to be the same as anything you've explicitly said.

It's too bad we can't just directly speak with the "particularly well-spoken civil rights activist" in question.

I found a columnist claiming that "All politics is identity politics"--Eleanor Penny, in an article for New Statesman America.

She says, "But those who want to single out 'identity politics' soon run into a problem: all politics is grounded in identity. All politics requires that we build coalitions around a shared picture of reality, a shared image of the future, deeply rooted in our image of ourselves, and what justice or progress might look like."

So, first she's equivocating.

But even aside from that. Not all politics fits the description she gives above.

For example, there are monarchs or dictators who make laws. That doesn't require building a coalition around a shared picture of reality. Of course, one could also redefine politics as necessarily having coalitions built around a shared picture of reality, but then it's going to turn out that we're not really saying anything aside from announcing the unusual ways in which we're going to be employing terminology.

That's not the only counterexample. It's just one of many we could give, for every aspect of her description.

But the equivocation--which is straw-manning in context--is the bigger problem.

She says, "But those who want to single out 'identity politics' soon run into a problem: all politics is grounded in identity. All politics requires that we build coalitions around a shared picture of reality, a shared image of the future, deeply rooted in our image of ourselves, and what justice or progress might look like."

There is a difference between voting for a politician because we share an “image of the future” and voting for a politician because she is a woman. The latter is how I think most conceive of identity politics.

:up:

You'd think so, but then people in this thread :groan:

I remember Christopher Hitchens always railing on identity politics. I had to include this biting quote of his from Letters to a Young Contrarian.

I remember very well the first time I heard the saying “The Personal Is Political.” It began as a sort of reaction to the defeats and downturns that followed 1968: a consolation prize, as you might say, for people who had missed that year. I knew in my bones that a truly Bad Idea had entered the discourse. Nor was I wrong. People began to stand up at meetings and orate about how they felt, not about what or how they thought, and about who they were rather than what (if anything) they had done or stood for. It became the replication in even less interesting form of the narcissism of the small difference, because each identity group begat its subgroups and “specificities.” This tendency has often been satirised—the overweight caucus of the Cherokee trans-gender disabled lesbian faction demands a hearing on its needs—but never satirised enough. You have to have seen it really happen. From a way of being radical it very swiftly became a way of being reactionary; the Clarence Thomas hearings demonstrated this to all but the most dense and boring and selfish, but then, it was the dense and boring and selfish who had always seen identity politics as their big chance.

You'll excuse me if I take the word of a political scientist over some internet rando. — StreetlightX

Just one political scientist. They don't all agree. If you're only interested in the idea of one political scientist and not the rest of us "internet randos" then why did you even bother posting this thread?
:roll:

This strikes me as all very right

No one is able to see themselves as a political actor. — StreetlightX

Unfortunately, political agency has been increasingly reduced to action via consumerism. Take for example the very first question regarding climate change in last night's presidential debate. The moderator asked Cory Booker, a vegan, if people should follow his diet. Rather than tackle corporate-based structural issues that are the predominate source of the problem, the solution is formulated, exclusively more or less, as a burden on the individual consumer.

I remember Christopher Hitchens always railing on identity politics. I had to include this biting quote of his from Letters to a Young Contrarian. — NOS4A2

Ah of course this was written in 2001. A good rule of thumb with Hitchens is that by and after the 90s most of his political thought is vapid and can rightly be ignored.

What if we all talked about who we are and what our concerns are and concrete ways to address them? And interlaced the political theory with that?

-but this is a philosophy forum!

If the philosophy leads you to the singular, the concrete, then its exhausted itself conceptually and can only say the same thing in different ways, leading finally to a decadent rococo self-complexifying. Its a machine that feeds on contemporary events (I'm guilty here too) as grist for the mill. If the singular thing is to be believed then theory is a ladder to be kicked over, tho used when appropriate.

-but Kant on the french revolution

No

It may not be what you're talking about -- but doesn't that make sense of why someone might say "All politics are identity politics"?

I don't know if I'd say that assumptions about groups -- like "Gays are against Trump" or "We are a progressive bank because we have a picture of women playing rugby" -- are exactly what I'd call identity politics either. But there is a sort of short-circuiting going on when all that we have are the display of identities linked to some kind of political support. But, as I said, I'd say that this sort of mistake -- and I'm willing to call it a mistake -- isn't what identity politics is about.

So how are we moving beyond identity politics then? Or do you just mean to point out this as a kind of mistake?

Unfortunately, political agency has been increasingly reduced to action via consumerism. Take for example the very first question regarding climate change in last night's presidential debate. The moderator asked Cory Booker, a vegan, if people should follow his diet. Rather than tackle corporate-based structural issues that are the predominate source of the problem, the solution is formulated, exclusively more or less, as a burden on the individual consumer. — Maw

But is this not just 'consuming' the debate, to satisfy one's demand for examples of corporate consumerism to attack? Isn't this a shoring-up of identity? Atheists like to make the move of saying the proper reaction to theological talk is not to disprove God, but to just leave that conservation be and go on with what matters to them. so

It may not be what you're talking about -- but doesn't that make sense of why someone might say "All politics are identity politics"? — Moliere

Because what happens is basically a confusion of process for product: identities (black, woman, gay, American) are results, products of an articulation arrived at in the course of complex social, historical, and cultural negotiation and development. One of the (necessary) means by which this negotiation takes place is politics, making it one (inescapable) ingredient that goes into the final, baked cake that is identity. Now, politics does alot more than just bake identity-cakes (not all politics, not most politics, aims merely to shape identities), but that it does, is inescapable. In is in this sense that one might say that 'all politics is identity politics': if you engage in politics (or if politics engages you), you end up, whether you like it or not, articulating the contours of identity (among other things).

But this is very different from taking identity as the explicit site of political action, of taking identification itself as a kind of political process: "I am woman, therefore, vote for me"'; "We put rainbow flags on our advertisements, so buy our products". This obscures process for product: this is what it means to engage in 'identity politics', where identities themselves are taken for (stand-in for) the very process which produce them. There's a interview with Deleuze where he talks about the difference between what he calls 'majorities' and 'minorities', which, for our purposes can be understood as those with established identities ('majorities'), and those who remain in the process of articulating theirs ('minorities'):

"The difference between minorities and majorities isn’t their size. A minority may be bigger than a majority. What defines the majority is a model [read: identity -SX] you have to conform to: the average European adult male city-dweller, for example … A minority, on the other hand, has no model [Identity - SX], it’s a becoming, a process. ... When a minority creates models [Identities] for itself, it’s because it wants to become a majority, and probably has to, to survive or prosper (to have a state, be recognized, establish its rights, for example). But its power comes from what it’s managed to create, which to some extent goes into the model, but doesn’t depend on it. A people is always a creative minority, and remains one even when it acquires a majority [an identity]. It can be both at once because the two things aren’t lived out on the same plane." (source, my bolding)

This confusion of process for product is what confuses so many people about identity politics, which is in many cases just assumed to be 'any kind of politics which has any bearing at all on identity'. Which is completely stupid because it's a confusion that ends up just equating identity politics with politics tout court, and then you end up in the disastrous situation where politics itself is taken for 'the problem' (because 'everyone knows' identity politics = bad boogeyman). This is why anyone who thinks this is just merely a verbal dispute is pretty dumb, insofar as the stakes for thinking politically - for understanding what it is we are even talking about when we talk about and of politics - are pretty high.