The most important identity-politics politician in America today is Sarah Palin.
If you’re wondering why that sounds strange, it’s because identity politics in America is firmly associated with the left. Identity politics conjures up feminism and gay rights, and hyphenated civil-rights movements like African/Hispanic/Asian-American.
In fact, the right has typically condemned identity politics. Identity politics is criticized for demanding “special rights” for its members, undermining what to hostile outsiders are playing fields already level. Identity-politics movements are rebuked as angry. They operate from a mentality of “victimology.” Their members are excessively sensitive to slights.
Many commentators even attribute the rise of the right that rode to power with Ronald Reagan and dominated American politics for a quarter century to reaction among middle Americans against the demands of identity politics and the social movements they represented.
So what does it mean to say the locus of identity politics is now on the right in America?
It means that identity politics is at the heart of Tea Party America. The foot soldiers who marched on Washington in September and dominated last August’s town halls are a mobilized constituency with profoundly held convictions which are indistinguishable from their sense of identity. They see themselves as being the keepers of the true meaning of the foundational documents and figures of American history. As keepers of this faith, guardians of “freedom”, they feel uniquely attuned to trespasses of the proper role of government, of states rights and of the privileged place of Christianity in America.
They call themselves the “Real Americans”. Many of us may remember this formulation from the Vice Presidential rallies of Sarah Palin, the national politician who has earned their greatest devotion. Others might remember that when he was caught in his famous “macaca” moment, George Allen was contrasting an Indian-American videographer to his supporters, whom he equated with ”America and the real world.”
The “Real Americans” believe themselves on the march. While talk radio has long been their national town square, today the major organ of their movement is Fox News and their reigning prophet is Glenn Beck. They see themselves in a struggle not only against the liberalism of Obama America, but as well against moderates (like Dede Scozzafava and even Newt Gingrich) for control of the Republican Party.
This week’s publication of Sarah Palin’s autobiography and its accompanying promotional tour promise a celebration of Palin’s leadership of the “Real Americans”. Above all, we will see a reliving of the slights and abuses—victimization—Palin, and through her the “Real Americans”, suffered at the hands of liberal America. Along the way, we will be engaged by the kind of group think that is often impenetrable to outsiders.
For Americans who have been baffled by the contrast between Sarah Palin’s political ambitions and what appears to them to be her stark lack of qualification for higher office, identity politics makes sense of things. Her qualifications are what she embodies: “She is one of us.” She has a visceral connection with “Real America” no other politician enjoys. She is the providentially viewed leader of the largest and most dynamic identity-group movement in the United States today—perhaps 20% of the population.
In the name of patriotism, the Tea Parties have been marked by analogies of Obama to Hitler, shows of arms and threats of secession. It’s easy to point out how the excesses of the movement replicate what identity-politics critics have claimed over the years. But it is the group’s demands, which differ fundamentally from traditional identity-group politics, which most command our attention.
The demands of “Real Americans” invert what earlier movements of identity politics stood for. Typically, identity movements have demanded a seat at the table. They experienced themselves as systematically kept from the seats of power and well-being and justice that others—those at the American table—took for granted.
The difference with the “Real Americans” is that their claim is not to a seat at the table but to the table itself. Their ideas of American values and the meaning of freedom feel marginalized to them—and symbolically stand for their own feelings of group marginalization.
Unlike earlier movements, their experience is not of being locked out but of dispossession. Something once theirs, they feel, has been taken away. In this, their identity politics shares important elements of nationalist movements. “Real America” is where nationalism meets identity politics. Liberalism and social movements have altered the very makeup of the table, they insist. The “real” American table is now in peril of being lost forever and urgently needs to be restored to its original purity. The “Real American” experience is an internal diaspora in their homeland.
This presents a novel and more difficult problem for American political culture than past identity movements. The mechanisms of resistance and accommodation that have come into play in the last century have dealt with seat-at-the-table struggles. American society is being called upon to assemble a fresh formula to tackle the “whole table” identity-group politics of this country’s “dispossessed.”