In response to past essays I’ve written on identity politics, I’ve been asked to provide a deeper analysis of how identity politics function outside the liberal politics I have so far focused on. For the most part–likely owing to the divisiveness so present in this country–my interactions with right-wing identity sectarians have been fleeting at best.
Social conservatives (evangelical Christians) are the specific group in this set I have the most experience with, but their supernatural reinterpretation of the world and their treatment in it is so foreign, even to the implicit Christian values of social justice, that writing on them deserves its own space (perhaps forthcoming) rather than a parallel to liberal idpol. The more relevant identity sectarians right now are the white identity groups making waves as part of what is being termed the alt-right.
This is the story of getting to know one of these folks, and what listening to him taught me about the way we do politics.
Identity from the Right
On the first day of this semester, I made a passing connection with a student in one of my classes. He’s outspoken and opinionated, which always catches my attention, so over the next few weeks, we end up conversing before and after class. Not long into this process though, I learn that his conservative-leaning politics follow a deeper fault-line into overtly antisemitic and white supremacist territory. He shares an art project of his with me which I won’t describe in detail here, but needless to say, it is quite a jarring piece.
He takes my stunned silence in stride and wants to talk more, perhaps eager to make a friend (or win a convert). On the way to the bus after class one day I mostly just listen. At 22, he’s bitter to the core about starting college later than everyone else he knows. It was unfair, he tells me–something about a female math teacher and the fact that all of his teachers have always held him back. No one really believed in me before, he keeps telling me.
While high school friends went on to bullshit degrees and jobs with their parents’ companies, he started working in construction where he connected to the new set of friends he seems to be taking his political cues from. They helped him to understand that he wasn’t alone or stupid. He was introduced to this idea that white people have to stick together and look out for their own (that’s how everyone else got ahead), and from there, we take off for the moon.
The rest of our talk is dominated by him rattling off conspiracies he’s convinced of. For starters, there’s the cocaine use. He says he’s clean right now–a user, never an abuser–but I’ve also seen him chase an energy drink with a caffeinated soda all within a single class period. In his world, opiates are uniquely prescribed to working class white people as part of a sadistic Zionist master plan to filter them out of the workforce or make them compliant to being worked to death to support welfare for others. He believes this is nothing short of genocide, and to combat it, whites have to use stimulants in order to be the best workers and save the most money. He assures me this is only temporary though. Eventually he believes white workers will achieve total independence and eliminate welfare for people of color, ensuring white survival without needing to continue using drugs.
All the big athletes do it, he tells me, but then quickly drops this line of explanation seeing my muted reaction to a sports reference. Nazis do it, he tries again. This time I’m more concerned with the present tense of his words. Koreans and all the South Americans too.
I push to see if he’s got any deeper thoughts on economics. He’s noticed me reading a book on capitalism, but cautions against too much of an anti-capitalist politic. Sure, there’s big time Jews at the top of everything, but the problem with Marxism is that it erases race from the conversation. My jaw wants to drop. I can literally pull up five or six examples of liberal identity sectarians stating this exact same thing in the last day or two of Facebook posts. Marxism as class reduction and race erasure is one of the most toxic and hotly disputed ideas between socialists and radical liberals in the city we’re walking through. How so? I ask.
Marxists want us to stop talking about racism against white people and act like we can all work together as a single class. He goes on to explain how he believes Western civilization is the birthright of white people, that white people have consistently demonstrated their superiority to other races, and that only recently has this progress been halted by white people being made to feel guilty for their success.
He blames that guilt on multiculturalism and white liberals, both of which he considers Zionist conspiracies to profit off of white success. Welfare is the main policy he identifies as a problem. I point out that white people born in the U.S. make up the vast majority of Americans in poverty and that enrollment in programs like TANF is trending towards racial equality (I’m actually writing a research paper on this). In his mind though white people shouldn’t have to pay for any people of color to get welfare benefits.
As we part ways for the day, he’s still rambling about Zionists, eager to tell me that Christianity itself is a Jewish conspiracy to subdue whites and rob them of what he believes to be rightfully theirs. The bus doors close on his raving thoughts and wild, convinced eyes. And an eerie calm returns to the sidewalk as he’s driven off.
I need a cigarette before I get home. I stand in the shower and shake. It’s his certainty. It’s his conviction. It’s the seamless transitions between Jews, Zionists, and a global cabal of authoritarian tricksters that get me. I’d be remiss to avoid pointing out that leftists entertain similar rhetoric and have trained themselves not to acknowledge this ethnic distinction so central to racialized politics other than their own. To feel so invisible and yet exposed in the whole spectrum of politics in the States, that’s what makes me feel so alone. My support system is thinned and paranoid. When we respect one another we are so cautious not to offend and topple all we want to do with each other. He is blatant, nearly careless with a brashness that betrays a virginity to practical organizing experience.
Returning to Class & Context
Getting to know this kid is surreal. He brags that his friends were part of a group that attended the August 2017 Charlottesville rally where a Nazi drove his car into a group of marchers including people I know. Outside the murder that occurred at this rally, violence is conspicuously absent from the views he expresses to me. Still, his willingness to approach me with an open message of white supremacy is startling to a core I am not yet sure how to face as an individual. But if my Jewish ancestors will grant me this indulgence, his politics are fascinating to try and understand.
Actually talking to him provided insight that I think is lacking in today’s leftist and liberal anti-fascist movements. The party lines at this point seem to be either punching Nazis or begrudgingly permitting them an uncontested platform to speak their ideas. Neither idea is necessarily appealing to me, particularly as the left is sorely lacking in organization in the U.S. and as even liberal Democrats are unprepared to offer a viable counter. If leftists offer nothing to poor whites, someone else will and already is. This is near blasphemy in a left-leaning scene where being poor and white is conflated with being a Nazi or other type of white supremacist. While certainly there is overlap between these variables, they are not synonymous.
If leftists desire to be successful, we must undermine white supremacy’s ability to recruit from this base, just as we are actively working to undermine the appeal of liberal concessions from the left. As one of my friends hypothesized, in the case of indoctrinated people like this kid, we have to give them a chance to know us as human beings before introducing identities and alternatives to the conversation. Talking with him did that for me, and I hope it eventually does that for him too. I am disturbed by the imagery he evokes, the politics he recites, his geographic proximity to me, and his age (younger than me by almost a decade), but hearing him in a non-confrontational environment also humanized him for me. I’m not afraid of him.
His complaints are class-based: inadequate education, inability to access the same education and career resources as everyone else, and using drugs to catch up. He’s clearly disturbed by his class status, but has been taught to see it through a lens of race and rugged individualism. He believes his economic status is both a lack of racial solidarity and the presence of a Jewish conspiracy–both attempts at explaining the apparent racial diversity and omnipotence of capitalism without directly naming it.
How many others are there like him? How many other young white men are they reaching?
In his stated focus on identity, a familiar beast becomes visible to me. For every identity sectarian talking about white men being the greatest source of mass shootings in the States (54% since 1982), there is another identity sectarian talking about Black men being a disproportionate source of it (16% since 1982, despite Black Americans being 13.3% of the U.S. population). In a sad twist of irony, both claims can be supported with the same statistics. Both essentialize the other and project him into the mysterious power of every shadow. Both rally around politicians playing their greatest catchphrases and buzzwords on re-tweet. Both perform public displays of power in the streets. Both tunnel into an Americanesque ethnopluralism reminiscent of the European Nouvelle Droite.
And importantly, both liberal and white identity sectarians seem nominally vexed by capitalism, or at least an abstract concept of economic troubles brought on in the current system. Neither however, ground their politics in economic change. Rather, they center a politics of identity, essentially how their particularly favored identity groups are treated in this system. Both view Marxism as reductive, lacking the ability to transform the plight of their groups specifically.
American politics seem inescapably framed around identity right now.
This view is largely generational. Theorist Sophia Burns for instance writes regularly on the need for contemporary leftist base organizing in the States. The absence of such a movement is not entirely a failure of motivation on our part. Capitalism drains us of the energy to do so. Its state arms are more well-funded and integrated than leftists are. In the aftermath of bleak Bolshevik progress, Stalin, the McCarthy era, and intelligence interventions, identity politics stepped in, both for liberals and conservatives. The spectacle of this divide–social conservatives vs. social justice–defines the majority of today’s political commentary in the States now instead.
While I am more familiar with evangelical Christian and liberal identity politics, my encounters with this student have helped me to see how at least some white supremacy is politically structured and framed through a similar lens of identity, rather than an essentialist hatred of others that I think we on the left frequently project onto these folks. Far from an ignorant, backwoods bigot, his politics and religious beliefs reference a sophisticated canon of right-wing European thinkers likely lost on a liberal American audience. Certainly his racism is intolerable and obviously absurd. But this is not a biological fact about him. He even told me that it’s historical (learned from friends), not essential. His adoption of this belief system emerges from a confluence of social factors.
Racism has never so clearly revealed itself to me as a defense mechanism of the capitalist system hiding from his ire.
And, critically, the historical location of his politics means they can be changed again. In fact, all over the world, former neo-Nazis are renouncing the beliefs they once espoused. All identity sectarians can change their politics. We simply have to reach them and provide a better alternative than the one they’ve been given. This last part is actually the easier task because it is so obvious. Capitalism is the defining omnipresent economic system from which our contemporary experiences of oppression emerge.
Are We in it To Win?
Working together is the riskier social ask. We have everything to gain, and the powers that be have everything to lose, when we refuse to be divided across discrete identity lines. But what radical liberal wants to collaborate with a blatantly Jew-hating white supremacist? And what neo-Nazi wants to collaborate with a Black activist Gender Studies major?
Indeed, the idea of actually talking (rather than just listening) to my fellow student, with the goal of collaborative political organizing no less, is more than distasteful. But, if I am to profess a material dialectic, then this is a struggle I already accept. Importantly, that is not to say that I must work with, endorse, or provide a platform for Nazis. I may not ever work directly with this student, but I must and do see that he is a fellow proletariat in the revolutionary struggle against capitalism. And every potential recruit to their base is a potential recruit leftists can seize from underneath their racist philosophy, and mobilize towards the greater good.
By the same method that allows liberals to accurately state that white men commit the majority of mass shootings, we can also understand that white people still make up between 61.3-76.9% of this country. What possibility do we have of any political, let alone revolutionary, changes in the status quo without mobilizing these people? Answering that question demands a critical eye to strategy. Liberal idpol largely recruits from this base through abstract appeals to morality and empathy. White idpol, however, is directly appealing to their own conditions. If you were poor, pissed off, and stuck in poverty, how would you frame your politics? Are you going to focus on being an ally or accomplice to other struggles (which often assign blame to generalized ideas of people identified like you), or are you going to invert that model and focus on your own struggle? Where intersectionality is a post-Marxist attempt to unify these kinds of individual struggles that typify liberal identity sectarian discourse, white idpol is picking up what liberals exclude.
We can make hierarchical assessments of liberals and white identitarians arguing that white identitarian politics implicitly advocate for violence while liberals do not. But this excuses the vast atrocities committed abroad by liberal nationalist administrations, and diminishes the failures of these same administrations to curtail the domestic militarization of police or to dismantle the racist injustices of the judicial system. The espoused racist beliefs of white identitarians are the subtext to liberal policies on welfare, criminal justice, domestic surveillance, and foreign policy. In tandem they keep blue jeans and gasoline cheap for an insulated American consumer class too overworked and policed to dare stop and ask how. Both liberals and white identitarians point to identity and see a pantheon of gods who must be appeased or crucified, but neither demand to know why. Instead, in their conspiracies and hypocrisies, they become as irrational and superstitious as the social conservatives even I am otherwise hesitant to relate them to too directly.
Capitalism is a force that exploits us, whether our politics are sound or not, whether we are racists or sexists or perfect accomplices in every social struggle. It is a force that genders labor, that racializes labor, that genders and racializes our maniacal expressions of frustration at the system, and a force that works us all to disability and death. It is the why and it is the how. Our experiences are different, there is no doubt about this, but the system that implements and enforces these conditions is shared. The commonality of this exploitation explains how poor whites, poor Jews, rich women, and rich Blacks can all exist in the same world despite the pervasiveness of racist and sexist oppression. Wealth dictates security, dictates ability to evade and overcome oppression. Wealth positions our oppressors in power over our lives. Wealth is built on the systematic robbery of a multi-racial, multi-gendered exploited class.
When I am organizing and writing and laboring to overgrow capitalism, it is not selective economic change that I desire. It is all-encompassing. I want an end to the economic exploitation of us all, of people, of animals, and of the planet. If it has not been obvious to identity sectarians that they are included in this vision, that we are laboring for Black women and white men, for queers and cripples, for church moms and opiate addicts, for street kids and refugees, for farm animals and coyotes, for every one and all of us, then we should all try harder to make this truth plainly known and beyond reproach. Likewise, if it has not been clear that solidarity does not equate to endorsement of white supremacy, neo-Nazism, or the identity politics of liberal democrats, we have also failed to communicate what must be plainly made known.
I empathize with identity sectarians. Their politics are a belief system we have all been historically raised on as the only possibility for our liberation. I did not spring out of the womb and into the streets preaching Marxism or anarchism. My politics are hard won through the blood and sweat and orders to disperse that accompany trying to make that struggle successful. When I say to both liberal and white identitarians that I am not interested in identity politics, it is not an omission based on my own ignorance, it is neither color-blindness nor shame of self, but instead it is an exhaustion rooted in practice, in theory, and a vulgar determination to win.
I am no longer interested in reducing the whole of oppression to interpersonal aggression and dynamics based on conveniently but falsely discrete categories that somehow break all other bounds of context to make us impossibly anything but victim or abuser. I am no longer interested in identity as a vehicle out of this mess or in identifying with capitalists and politicians because they fuck like me or look like me. I am no longer interested in remaining at this scale when together we stand a chance against the system that determined these divisions we’ve misplaced in each other’s bodies, when without that system, without its manufactured scarcity and divisions of labor, we might finally taste the freedom it troubles us to now describe, that freedom which is liberty from hatred and violence and trauma and shame and a history of the same passed down through us. Is this a departure from “leftism”?
Everyone is a potential comrade. Even the folks who make my blood boil and my back ache and my chest quiver and my voice shake. They just haven’t been connected to the right analysis yet. This is where I want to root my politics.
The gods of this world are turning a profit off every blog post and every Facebook share, and every land seizure and every laid off worker’s welfare walk of shame. Every reinvestment, every competition, every political slogan printed on a tee shirt and a glossy poster board, enamel pin, and bumper sticker, tallied up in the digital-mechanical silence of banking, accounts paid and accounts received. They don’t care who we hate or who we are, what we believe in or whether we believe in them. They know hatred is a pimple they can pop in the economics of world war infinity, and belief is relative so long as we’d do anything, so long as we’d kill for the little piece of fast food thrills, apartment living, and pornographic fantasy we get in return.
And I think they laugh when we fight among each other. And I think they know they’re safe when we’re fighting each other. And I think it’s past time we stormed Mount Olympus for something more.