By
Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Pioneer Journal
In the
1992 American presidential campaign, candidate Bill Clinton
famously argued that “It’s the economy, stupid.”
He used the
recession in the United States at the time as one of the means
to successfully unseat George H. W. Bush.
But in
in this November’s midterm elections, so-called identitarian
politics, not economics, will be the major factor – despite
the fact that the Great Recession of 2008 and its aftermath
has been much worse than previous downturns.
The
Democratic Party’s base has increasingly become the home of
people of colour and of women, while white males skew towards
the Republicans.
In the 2016
presidential election issues of identity -- race, religion,
gender and ethnicity -- and not economics, were the driving
forces that determined how people voted.
These are
the findings of political scientists John Sides of George
Washington University, Michael Tesler of the University of
California at Irvine and Lynn Vavreck of the University of
California at Los Angeles, co-authors of the new book Identity
Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the
Meaning of America.
The two
candidates stood further apart on identity issues than any
major-party presidential candidates in 40 years, so this
became more strongly related to how Americans voted in 2016
than in any recent presidential election, maintain the
authors.
It’s not
that economic issues didn’t matter. But racial attitudes
“shaped the way voters understood economic outcomes.”
Bart
Bonikowski, a professor of sociology at Harvard University, in
“Ethno-nationalist Populism and the Mobilization of Collective
Resentment,” published in the November 2017 British Journal of
Sociology, argues that in the contemporary political climate,
the fear of cultural disruption has become pervasive on the
right.
The reason
for this is that many Donald Trump supporters have long held
strong ethnonationalist sentiments, but these have only
recently become politically salient, as Trump, and other
Republicans before him, “have actively stoked fears of
demographic and cultural change and channeled them into
powerful resentments toward minority groups.”
That’s why
many academics are wary of identity politics, seeing it as a
double-edged sword.
In his new
book Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of
Resentment, Francis Fukuyama, a professor of political science
at Stanford University, deals with this issue.
“A lot of
these recognition struggles flow out of the social movements
that began to emerge in the 1960s involving African-Americans,
women, the LGBT community, Native Americans, and the
disabled,” he told the Chronicle of Higher Education in an
Aug. 27 interview.
“These
groups found a home on the left, triggering a reaction on the
right. They say: What about us? Aren’t we deserving of
recognition? Haven’t the elites ignored us, downplayed our
struggles? That’s the basis of today’s populism.”
Populist
nationalism springs from the demand for recognition and
therefore cannot simply be satisfied by economic means,
especially given the insecurity caused by economic disruption
plus rather rapid cultural change.
While every
single one of these struggles is justified, “the problem is in
the way we interpret injustice and how we try to solve it,
which tends to fragment society.”
In “An
Anatomy of Radicalism,” in the Fall 2018 issue of the journal
American Affairs, Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein also
acknowledges that modern
theorists and practitioners of identity politics, at their
best, “capture people’s actual experiences, and their keen
sense of exclusion and humiliation. That can be helpful and
even important, but it is hardly a basis for reform.”
It is not clear exactly
what it does, he maintains, "aside from giving people a sense
of having some kind of home. It is probably best understood as
a plea, or a demand, for understanding and respect. That
should not be diminished. But where exactly does it lead?”
No comments:
Post a Comment