The limits of the liberal religion analogy. David Azerrad writes:
Anyone who has thought about identity politics—the great intellectual disorder of our age—must conclude that the term obfuscates more than it illuminates. Identity politics is first and foremost not a politics of identity, but an obsession with oppression and victimization. Only those who claim to be victimized get to have their identity recognized, affirmed and honored.
Where we once bestowed on monuments, civic buildings, and streets the names of great generals, statesmen, and authors, today we only honor members of victimized identity groups. They get museums, holidays, commemorative stamps, movies, and books sanctifying their suffering and celebrating their accomplishments, both real and fake (George Washington Carver did not invent peanut butter). Their purported oppressors—men, heterosexuals, and above all, white people—are denied this privilege. They must atone in perpetuity for the sins of their fathers.
In Congress, for example, one finds a Congressional Black Caucus, both a Hispanic Caucus and a Hispanic Conference, an LGBT Caucus, a Congressional Caucus for Women’s Issues, and nothing stands in the way of Representatives Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib starting a Muslim Congressional Caucus (for those not persuaded by identity politics, there is, of course, no need for such groups). It goes without saying that there is no Caucasian Conference, Heterosexual Cis-Caucus, or Congressional Caucus for Men’s Issues. To the identarians, white, male, and straight cannot form identity groups because they sit atop the structures of power.
In her thoughtful essay, Molly McGrath coins the term “Sacrificial Politics” to describe our current political dispensation. Sacrificial Politics, she correctly observes, is a “Christian-influenced” ideology driven by “the sacred and the desire for sanctity.”
Under this pseudo-religion, victims of collective oppression are endowed with sacred status and all must defer to them. Any one particular individual is not required to have personally suffered to be held sacred. He must only belong to a victimized group and, McGrath reminds us, follow the script assigned to his group. Hell hath no fury like the opposition visited on an African American who criticizes affirmative action (McGrath calls those who refuse to think of themselves as victims, Defectors. Given the ferocity with which they are denounced—Justice Clarence Thomas has repeatedly been compared to a member of the Ku Klux Klan—I think Heretics would be more fitting).
Most intellectuals, who are both thoroughly secular and religiously illiterate, are deaf to the Christian echoes in contemporary Leftist politics. McGrath is not. Her analysis reminds us of Nietzsche’s wry observation in The Genealogy of Morals: “It is the Church which repels us, not its poison—apart from the Church we like the poison.”
[David Azerrad, "Social Justice Rites,” Law & Liberty, February 17]
