White Identity Politics, White Supremacy, and White Nationalism

Identity is the nuclear weapon of political strategy.

The two parties have used different strategies throughout their histories to cobble together winning coalitions.  Republicans from Reagan through W. Bush often led with ideological pitches, promoting limited government, but the party insiders usually concentrated on business interest groups, promising particular policies that were friendly to the contributors.  Republicans were always happy to tolerate the occasional racist dogwhistle, but it was always in the background of the ideological and interest stuff.  At no time did they ever appeal to a white identity group, because whites simply didn't think of themselves in those terms.

Identity politics has been a staple of the Democrats for much longer.  A coalition of African- and Latino-American identities were locked into the party structure about the same time that Reagan pretty much collapsed the Democratic ideological infrastructure, and rapidly became a major base for any successful strategy.  Democrats also played interest politics behind the scenes, but identity was a starting point for any successful campaign.

Then things changed.

Before I go on, I need to define "identity politics" in more detail.  We all know the term, but it seems that no two people have exactly the same definition for it.  Here's my stab at it.

Identity politics transcends the more traditional interest politics.  With interest groups, the basic coin of the realm is policy:  a group wants something done for them, and they'll vote for the party that's most likely to do it for them.  But the cohesion of an interest group usually stops at the thing they agree they all want.  An individual may be a part of multiple interest groups, and balance those interests to get the best overall deal.  Interest groups may have members, but the allegiance of those members is fluid.

But when you're a member of an identity group, the identity reigns supreme.  There may be a slate of policies that benefit the identity, but ultimately the appeal is about power, not interest.  An identity group sees itself through the lens of its disempowerment and/or oppression.  The answer to that disempowerment isn't a policy.  Instead, it's the acquisition, maintenance, and wielding of political power.

So, unlike the interest pitch, which is essentially "vote for us and we'll do the thing you want", the identity pitch is more like "vote for us and we'll give you a seat at the table, where you can make your own policies instead of relying on us to make them for you".  But the price for the power that could accrue to the identity was that its members had to subordinate all of their interests to it; picking policies a la carte simply wouldn't fly.  It was all or nothing.

Identity politics is about power, plain and simple.

2008 was the first watershed moment, where the Democrats realized how potent the identity strategy was.  Nominating an African American said "we'll give you a seat at the table" better than anything else could.  The traditional black and latino identity groups were rapidly supplemented with women, the LGBT community, and the beginnings of a specific "millennial" identity.  It was dynamite.

It also caught the Republicans flat-footed.  Not only had the financial crisis largely discredited their ideological underpinnings, but it was clear that they'd brought a knife to a gun fight.  They got crushed, and they then had eight long years to think about exactly how they got crushed.

In retrospect, in 2016, somebody like Trump was almost inevitable.  After spending lots of time wondering how they could counter the potent weapon of identity, the answer should have been obvious:  they needed to get their own identity group.  They just didn't see one that was readily available.

But Trump did.  White people aren't used to thinking of themselves as disempowered and oppressed, but Trump was able to sell them on it, and it's been the animating force in the GOP ever since.  And, once he'd managed to forge a white identity group, his group was bigger than any of the groups the Democrats could put together.  He'd brought a nuke to a gun fight, and he was perfectly happy to set it off.

To be sure, many whites were and are horrified at the idea of a white identity.  Whites have traditionally had a sort of noblesse oblige mandate to operate under what they viewed as an "American" identity, which could be slowly leavened with little bits and snatches of the best cultural elements from any ethnicity or nationality.  Many whites still believe in that.  (I still believe in that.)  But Trump built a coalition of whites who were sufficiently downtrodden and frightened to buy the into the standard identity playbook.  And it worked.

So this brings us to the first difficult question:  Is the "American" identity racist?

Full disclosure:  I am a 61-year-old white man, of upper middle class means.  I believe strongly in the "American" identity.  I believe that there is a unique American culture.  I believe that it has remained vibrant for almost 300 years by using what is now called "cultural appropriation" very effectively.  I don't view my identity as white, but I do view myself as American.

That said, I acknowledge that I'm a member of the in-group.  I've never had to fight to preserve my status.  When my culture is leavened with the best bits of other cultures, its impact on me is negligible.  In contrast, when someone of another identity shucks off his/her old identity in favor of the American one, the impact is wrenching.

Now let's look at this issue from its power dynamics.  Members of the "American" identity have been in the enviable position of picking and choosing which cultural widgets to appropriate.  It gives them the ability to think about policy and politics in terms of something other than raw power.  Other identities don't have that luxury.  They are dependent on the noblesse oblige of largely white, largely middle-to-upper class Americans.

But the alternative to the in-group granting power to various out-group identities is a dynamic where everybody views things only in terms of raw power, and that devolves into the Hobbesian "war of all against all" in short order.  So my answer to whether an American identity is racist or not is that it's the wrong question.  The right question is, "Is the dominance of a white-mediated American identity something that can be inclusive enough and just enough to beat the alternative of an identity free-for-all?"  I'd answer "yes" to that question, but it's not a slam-dunk, and it definitely requires obedience to the noblesse oblige ethos to be successful.

Meanwhile, the genie of a "white" identity is out of the bottle, thanks to Trump and his... uh... innovative political strategy.  Which brings us to the second set of difficult questions:  Is there any difference between "white identity politics" and "white supremacy" and/or "white nationalism"?

Remember:  Identity politics is fundamentally about the acquisition, maintenance, and wielding of power for the identity group.  And a "white" identity, unlike the "American" identity, must operate on an equal footing with all the other identity groups.  In short, it must acquire, maintain, and wield power, largely at the expense of other identity groups.

That sounds a lot like white supremacy to me.

"White nationalism" is a similar story, but here we need to distinguish between "white nationalism" and "American nationalism".  Nationalism is a term that's had pretty tough sledding for the last half century or so.  That said, I'm usually proud of being an American, I believe in American exceptionalism, and, as I said above, I believe in an American identity.  All of those things have at least a peripheral relationship to vanilla-flavored nationalism.  If you corner me, I'll throw a bunch of caveats in front of my answer, but I'm by and large an "American nationalist".  (I'm also a huge fan of win-win foreign policy, but when push comes to shove, I know which side I'm on.)

The considerably more problematic definition of nationalism is one that advocates for a homeland for a particular ethnic group.  Ordinarily, I'd scoff at that being applicable to anything with "American" as an adjective in front of it.  However, in light of the recent "send her back" rhetoric, it needs to said:  If your definition of nationalism is based on your race, then white nationalism and white supremacy are pretty much the same thing.   And since we've demonstrated that white identity politics and white supremacy are the same thing, the same goes for white nationalism.  QED.

So this is really, really bad.  Which brings us to our final, and most difficult, question:  How do we fix it?

If identity is truly the nuclear weapon of political strategy, then some of the language of nuclear diplomacy might be helpful.  Two terms:  "No first use" and "arms limitation".

Since identity has already be used, we're kind of in the post-Hiroshima era of identity politics.  It's been used against an unsuspecting enemy with great success, but everybody has a nuke now, and the next exchange is going to be ugly.  Going forward, both sides need to back off.

This is likely to be a bitter pill to swallow for the Democrats, who thought they had a sustainable asymmetric advantage here.  But it turns out that they don't and, furthermore, simply because of demographics, the Republicans have an H-bomb instead of a fairly modest fission device.  If the Democrats continue to use the same tactics, there will be significant leakage of voters from the "American identity" camp to the "white" one.  That doesn't end well.

Still, we're not going to do away with identity politics completely--nor should we.  Like it or not, there really are groups that are significantly disempowered, and for whom the acquisition of power is a completely reasonable political defense.

And this may be where "arms limitation" comes into the picture.  Getting ourselves out of this horrible dynamic will require that all parties understand that there have to be bright lines circumscribing the use of identity.  The natural progression of the current trend ruins everything, and ultimately degrades our most precious asset:  the American identity.

I'd like to say that I'm sanguine about being able to de-escalate this, but I'm not. Still, this seems the only way to get the friggin' genie to go back into the friggin' bottle.  Perhaps a recognition that white identity politics = white supremacy = white nationalism will start to peel away some of the Trumpkin fellow travellers.  It's one thing to accept his horribleness to enact some parts of the conservative agenda.  It's quite another to destroy the culture that you're purporting to save.