So here’s my question to critics of ID politics (not sure if @ebruenig is one, but this tweet is a convenient foil): What of the commonalities it reveals? What of the alliances it makes possible?
Are we supposed to believe that white Americans would be able to diagnose the opioid crisis, possess the political vocabulary to describe it, and the identify the strategy to address it, without a generation of black scholarship on the Drug War?
Or that libertarians would understand the machinery of government surveillance, or its impact on citizens, absent the identity politics of Muslim Americans?
And I'll bet serious Internet Bucks (TM) that @lindsey_brink and Stephen Teles drew heavily on "identity politics" scholarship when they were trying to get a handle on how government regulations are strangling everyday Americans.
My point is rather simple, but (I think!) important: identity politics isn't just a mode of action or method of mobilization, even though those are the grounds on which most of its critics attack it. It is also a mechanism for investigation. It is epistemic.
We know more about American politics, we understand it better, because of group-based political investigation and analysis. Broad Lilla-style liberal political analysis will always and consistently miss these things. That's why identity politics doesn't necessarily balkanize.
It also creates new connections, reveals old ones, gives expression to affinities. And while Lilla might say that there's nothing identity politics can tell us that a sufficiently motivated body of liberal researchers couldn't also uncover...
...well, in response, I gesture toward the whole of American history.
Wait, no. I mean this @jtlevy piece. This section in particular is key.
niskanencenter.org/blog/defense-l…
niskanencenter.org/blog/defense-l…
