As the culture wars have continued to generate ever more intensely conflictual rhetoric, identity politics and “identitarianism” have come in for widespread criticism — not merely from conservatives but also from left-leaning liberals. Where conservatives see identity politics as part of a corrosive and even narcissistic turn away from traditional morality, liberals instead balk at it as inhibiting a rational and universalistic program for politics. Both conservatives and liberal critics, albeit for very different reasons, see identity politics as a source of fragmentation.
A 2016 essay in The New York Times by Mark Lilla, a professor of intellectual history at Columbia University, exemplifies this anti-identitarian thinking. Lilla calls for “the age of identity liberalism” to be “brought to an end” because it has “produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups.” For Lilla, identity is enervating the political resources of an older left, supposedly able to rally around ideals everyone could get behind. This political tension has only increased as “identity politics” has been rendered synonymous with dubiously liquid and hotly contested terms like “woke” and “critical race theory.”
The backlash comes with its own popular history of identity politics’ origins. A recent version of this popular history is articulated by Yascha Mounk in his new book, The Identity Trap. In a viral thread promoting the book, Mounk offers a genealogy of the “new ideas about race, gender, and sexual orientation” which, he says, constitute a “novel ideology” that “radically departs from the traditional left.” Mounk suggests that the “trap” of a particularist identity politics and “woke” ideology originates in the theories of postmodernists like Michel Foucault and postcolonial theorists like Edward Said and Gayatri C. Spivak, among others.
There is only one problem. This is the wrong origin story. Far from being the spawn of postmodernism, identity politics dates back over a century and half earlier, to the cultural shifts that created the modern world. As the philosopher Charles Taylor has shown in a wide range of books and essays, identity politics is rooted in a fusion of Romanticism’s ethic of authenticity and the Enlightenment notion of popular sovereignty. The goal of identity politics is what Taylor famously dubbed “recognition.” Although it is not popular to say it, the oldest form of such politics is not based in race, gender, or sexual orientation, but rather in nationalism.