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Is Identity Politics Offensive — or Defensive?
Like most presidential years, 2020 will present rampant pandering,
appealing to voters by race, ethnicity, or sex.
The pejorative understanding of identity politics is that voters are being asked to elevate the accident of their genetic heritage over competence of candidates or, in most exaggerated form, the interests of some subset of Americans over the national interest.
I hesitated in that last sentence over whether “interest” was singular or plural. I’m not as certain that the country has a panoply of interests as I am that individuals do. In the case of the nation, it is built of many blocks of philosophical principle. The American experiment is whether a political construction built of ideas can be made seamless, and it is that goal that defines the national interest.
I am certain that “experiment” is the proper term to describe the nation defended by oceans on the East-West axis and friendly neighbors on the North-South axis. At least Mexico and Canada have a recent history of friendship that made Donald John Trump’s aggressiveness toward those nations jarringly inappropriate.
Mr. Trump’s meanness toward Mexico, which he claims “does not send its best people” northward seems attributable to the racism that permeates everything from immigration policy…
