The Best Kept Secret of Our Political Divide

“At present, each identity sees the other as its enemy and justifies its own excesses with the excesses of the other, but living in a diverse multi-ethnic democracy means tolerating a certain degree of difference.”

The best kept secret of our political divide is that it has little to do with views on policy and everything to do with identity. In fact, research has shown that political identities are poor predictors of policy views. But what are the major political identities of our time—and what makes them so different from each other?

The dividing lines in our politics are always changing. Up until now, much of the split between Blue and Red has been a matter of differing economic platforms: the Right has wanted freer markets, and the Left has sought more redistribution. But since the early 1990’s, culture has bled into politics and shifted the discourse towards identity issues. The amount of white Americans who identify with their race has doubled, while immigration rates have skyrocketed and political polarization has reached new heights. Today, being on either the Left or Right is less about ideology, which is to say how we understand the world, and more about our cultural orientation and inner sense of identity: what we are culturally attached to and how do we think of ourselves as moral people.

The ascendent identity on the Left is one of multiculturalism. This identity sees itself as a cosmopolitan citizen of the world—not merely as confined to the local and the particular. Rather, this identity is one of a participant in the unfolding global story. It’s more concerned with the shames of Western Civilization than its triumphs, in an effort to identify and empathize with other cultures and civilizations. Anti-racism is the moral compass of the multicultural self, undergirded by the assumption that grappling with the historical oppression of marginalized people is central to transcending inequalities in the present. Often, “whiteness” is understood as a scourge to be overcome. The shadow side of this identity is guilt and self-hatred, the feeling that our unearned advantages have come at the expense of others. Sometimes, however, this can all begin to morph into narcissism.