If identity politics exists it's probably not that bad. Explain your disagreement in detail.

Via Boston Review.

In Saturday's post-mortem on the Bernie Sanders campaign, contemplating the idea of the Sanders strategy for winning as a kind of bona fide and sort-of-Marxian theory (that certain classes of oppressed voters will respond to a certain kind of economic analysis of their situation and this is the way to get them to vote in greater numbers than they normally do) that has now been definitively shown to be false, I found myself wandering into some very big topics without adequate preparation, perhaps, and saying some things that maybe sounded more adventurous, or horrifying, than they actually were, and because I'd like to keep using these thoughts, I thought I'd spend some time pulling back to couch them in a more traditional political-science discourse.

Excruciatingly traditional, in fact, with the help of the trusty old Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and beginning with old Aristotle, who named the subject, πολιτικη επιστημη, politikē epistēmē, the science of things related to the polis, city stuff, by analogy with (say) physics, φυσικη επιστημη, physikē epistēmē, the science of material bodies, and so forth.

Politics

The idea of "politics" has a bad reputation, going back a ways, used, as Jordan was saying in the comments,

to refer to an aspect of some other part of life -- in an office; in a school; among a group of friends; in any institution like high-end science or academia; in the art world or anywhere in culture -- they're talking about this unfortunate, bad element; they're saying, this is the part that isn't about the merits or about justice or ethics; it's that other, impure thing...the component that we all know and hate, but can't expunge, and eventually have to master if we're going to get anywhere

which is too bad: Aristotle was thinking about the practical methodology of achieving something he believed was particularly important and desirable, in which he included not only government and education but ethics itself as a subpart of "political science", aiming at

nothing less than the human good. “Even if the end is the same for an individual and for a city-state, that of the city-state seems at any rate greater and more complete to attain and preserve. For although it is worthy to attain it for only an individual, it is nobler and more divine to do so for a nation or city-state.”

"Politics" in the pejorative sense is the opposite of that, being the part of one's behavior as a citizen or member of an institution that is not aimed at achieving the institution's ends—jockeying for position and harming enemies and avoiding hard work. So much so that when Czech dissidents began trying to reinvent the Aristotelian idea of politics between the late 60s and the early 90s, in a polity where everybody in government was a hundred percent devoted to politics in the bad sense a hundred percent of the time, they found themselves calling the thing they wanted to do "antipolitics", to capture that. But I don't know, it didn't really work out, and in the long run Czechia just transitioned from bad-politics socialism to bad-politics capitalism, though nowhere near as bad as Russia, and all the beauty of the Prague Spring and the Velvet Revolution was folded into history, where it remains to this day.

But politics also implies policy (as a translator in my day job working now and then with discussion of European public policy issues, especially German, I'm continually forced to ask myself in a particular instance whether Politik or politique or politica should be translated as "politics" or "policy" because the answer isn't obvious). And policy is the supremely important issue of politics, in terms with which Aristotle would be comfortable, because that really is the goal.

One of the things Aristotle doesn't attend to at all that's of high importance to us is the question of who gets to hold office, because in the first place he was living in an Athens that had already been conquered by his old pupil Alexander of Macedon (and Aristotle was close friends with the Macedonian viceroy in Athens, Antipater), so it wouldn't have been a question of any practical relevance, and in the Athenian tradition everybody was an office-holder—that is every citizen, all the adult male non-slaves—and he didn't discuss a concept of representation, though he had some general ideas on the who-should-rule question that we'll be looking at in a minute.

Democracy

Plato, Aristotle's teacher, writing before the Macedonian takeover, had an idea about the kinds of people who should rule a well constituted republic, and the thing that bothered him the most was the concept of a representative democracy, which he thought was a recipe for disaster:

Plato (Republic, Book VI) argues that democracy is inferior to various forms of monarchy, aristocracy and even oligarchy on the grounds that democracy tends to undermine the expertise necessary to properly governed societies. In a democracy, he argues, those who are expert at winning elections and nothing else will eventually dominate democratic politics. Democracy tends to emphasize this expertise at the expense of the expertise that is necessary to properly governed societies. The reason for this is that most people do not have the kinds of talents that enable them to think well about the difficult issues that politics involves. But in order to win office or get a piece of legislation passed, politicians must appeal to these people's sense of what is right or not right. Hence, the state will be guided by very poorly worked out ideas that experts in manipulation and mass appeal use to help themselves win office.

I really hate this argument. It makes me sick. As a small-d democrat, I can't stand the idea that some people are unqualified to contribute just because they went to crappy schools or work with their hands. I hate it not so much for "instrumental" reasons (issues relating to whether it will provide a good result in terms of prosperity or material success) as for its privileging of instrumental reasons—the implication that if you want your life in the polis to go smoothly you'd better leave the yobs out of the decision making process. I think it's an injustice to suppose that there are citizens who are too stupid to contribute. I'm serious about this.

In a way, I don't even care if the society in which working people are equal citizens with highly-educated people is less "successful" by some material standard than one in which they aren't (most relevant standard for me is Singapore, run by an educationally designated elite, compared to rough-and-tumble Taiwan, and in fact they aren't particularly different in terms of material success, and another one is Costa Rica, whose citizens seem to have decided at some historical moment that they preferred equality). But at the same time, it's so hard to answer: what's wrong with me? Why would I want stupid or ill-educated people running my country? I feel I can't answer Plato's arguments, as much as I hate it.

But there's one particular more instrumental way of challenging it by challenging the premises, starting out in the 1950s, that grabs me:

One approach that is in part motivated by the problem of democratic citizenship but which attempts to preserve some elements of equality against the elitist criticism is the interest group pluralist account of politics. Robert Dahl's early statement of the view is very powerful. “In a rough sense, the essence of all competitive politics is bribery of the electorate by politicians… The farmer… supports a candidate committed to high price supports, the businessman…supports an advocate of low corporation taxes… the consumer…votes for candidates opposed to a sale tax” (Dahl 1959, p. 69). In this conception of the democratic process, each citizen is a member of an interest group with narrowly defined interests that are closely connected to their everyday lives. On these subjects citizens are supposed to be quite well informed and interested in having an influence. Or at least, elites from each of the interest groups that are relatively close in perspective to the ordinary members are the principal agents in the process. On this account, democracy is not rule by the majority but rather rule by coalitions of minorities. Policy and law in a democratic society are decided by means of bargaining among the different groups.

The kind of knowledge mastered by an educational elite isn't after all the only kind of knowledge: everybody knows something nobody else knows, and there's nobody who's incapable of making a contribution.

Aristotle adds a category to Plato's list that might reflect the sense of representativity to the mix; democracy, he says, would be the rule of the poor, and oligarchy the rule of the rich, but "polity", not altogether clearly defined, would be something more general in which more people would have a voice.

Identity

The "interest groups" of Dahl's approach are where I want to come down in that discussion, where if the voices of individuals aren't necessarily heard they are at least represented, or heard by their chosen representatives, with a note that every person can be represented, intersectionally, by some number of different groups, standing for their trade, their religious affiliation, their ethnicity, gender, age, hobbies, making room for each different kind of perception as equally or similarly important to the perceptions of experts, elites, the people who are automatically taken seriously. I can't emphasize enough how much such a range might compensate for the lack of diversity on any of these grounds shown by a classical elite.

Because after all we should know by now that the educational elite can be remarkably stupid, whether they're Harvard MBAs convinced that nothing matters in government but the tax and regulation policies they long to eliminate, or Harvard comparative literature or even political science majors unable to comprehend why President Obama failed to throw all the bankers in jail in 2009, or idiots like David Brooks looking for a list of policies so bland that nobody can disagree with them. A good government composed of a lot of different interests capable of looking at things from a variety of different perspectives, fighting for their own perspectives and offering their own concessions, speaks with a better voice than a collection of philosopher kings; Plato was wrong!

The development of mostly female African American voters in the US over the past decade or so is my chief example of this, and the chief thing that's made me see it. These are people who are generally right about everything, employing a pretty sophisticated analysis of the ground situation as a group, and who seem to be on the point of winning a presidential election (they're smart enough not to care, in the urgencies of the historical moment, that their candidate isn't black, though they certainly cared in the different world of 2012). An "identity politics" affiliation is the best thing going on in our politics right now, where a sort-of-Marxian appeal to economics is the most abject failure.

The fact that individual citizens may have an attachment as emotional as rational to their group (but keep in mind that they belong to more than one group) doesn't disturb me at all. Why wouldn't their emotions have a validity of their own? So I can't understand the objection to "identity politics" at all; people ought to feel free to look after their interests as black people or East Asian immigrants or Roman Catholics or transgender persons just as much as they should look after their interests as union members or farmers or high school principals, which are identities too! (As are hedge fund owners, though they shouldn't have much demographic pull.) Why not? Answers such as "identity politics is bad" will not be accepted.

I think one problem is an idea of how public policy should be debated, along lines laid down whether by Plato or David Brooks of magisterial dispassion and objectivity, the bloodless debate of those who are wise, or, technically, not really affected by the outcome. Fuck that shit! They're lying! They too are affected by these decisions, if only in their tax liabilities. Let them be as open as the poor person! Let them admit what they're open about! And if you can't, I'll put out my own theory, which you won't like.

But really, there ought to be a legitimate place for emotion in political debate.What's problematic there is the kind of emotion that doesn't correspond well to a real world, like the emotional certainty of rightwingers that they belong to the necessary majority and don't have to make any concessions at all, in the characteristically obnoxious identity politics of white people in the US. There's no need to attract such voters, though! they're not the majority, and they really don't deserve so much attention.