Identity Politics: Where the Right Gets It Wrong

We are not the “real progressives”; we are the people who fight against them

Picture the average conservative commentator. Every day, he strives to “own the libs with facts and logic,” doing what he believes is his due diligence to advance his cause. Yet, the more he pushes his newest argument, the further he sways his listeners away from his ideas. Why? Because the case he pushes to the opposition is one of their own.

After a painful and predictable articulation of strawmen, he brings out his greatest rhetorical weapon, which he of course thinks will win the argument; that the opposer does not hate his side solely due to his politics, but because he does what they do better. While acting on impulse, it is only natural in a debate to point out when the other party has been hypocritical, but when the conservative decides to make a point of how “diverse” and “progressive” his side is, he is doomed to fail. He has disregarded his core beliefs in exchange for a win, yet, he has won nothing – he has only contradicted what he knows to be true: that repeating these issues of identity holds no genuine value and that they do not actually matter.

You see it time and time again: “I’m a conservative, but the left hates me because I’m black”; “I’m a conservative, but the left hates me because I’m gay”; “I’m a conservative, but the left hates me because I’m a woman”. Those who parrot these tired phrases are oblivious to the obvious truth: that the left simply hate anyone who is not one of them. Their rhetorical techniques do not end the argument in the slightest. Instead, the conservative commentator elevates a redundant theory in a manner he never intended to, and thus, the cycle continues. 

“The left are the real racists/hypocrites” is a running theme amongst various prominent figures of the American right, and while there occasionally appears to be a valid point in this, it typically consists of openly cringeworthy contradictions and blatantly obvious barrel-scraping, to the point where it has been caricatured as a thoughtless scapegoat. This liberal-duplicity tactic was heavily utilised again earlier this year when Caitlyn Jenner decided to make a run for California Governor. The usual suspects took to their platforms to call out hypocrisy or “transphobia” amongst left and right-wing circles. The bulk of this was done as an attempt to call out political hypocrisy on the left, all while lending validity to backwards, left-wing terminology. Not one of them accepted the most basic conclusion: that the left’s main issues lie solely with Caitlyn Jenner’s politics. The left has never once hated Jenner for being transgender - the vitriol lay in the fact that someone who just happened to be a transgender person was voicing the arguments they believe are a threat to their worldview. And yet, rather than focusing on the left’s further intolerance towards differing ideas and their general irrationality, conservatives jumped head-first into an opportunity to dabble with identity politics instead. 

In close parallel, on the other side of the Atlantic, outrage is often sparked up among UK Conservative Party members when Conservatives of non-white backgrounds are criticised. Unless said explicitly, they would be wise to refrain from the “racism” or “sexism” accusations against the left. Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, has been a central figure in this. When the left engages in their harsh criticism of her, Conservatives have been quick to jump in and accuse them of hypocrisy, claiming they are “intimidated by strong, right-wing women of colour”. The only truth to this being that they do hate Priti Patel, but this is not for the colour of her skin or her gender, it is simply her being “right-wing”, most obviously demonstrated by her outspokenness to tackle border controls and migrant crossings into the UK. The left has never agreed with such policies; to accuse their hatred for her as one spawned from “racism” or “sexism” is a foolish and indolent strategy, from which we achieve naught. 

Genuine accusations of being a “race traitor” are not nearly as rife as some opportunistic factions of the right would have you believe. In fact, many on the right pick up on this issue and, instead of disregarding it completely to maintain its futility, they attempt to play it in reverse against leftists… which is then brought up again ten times thereafter. Though pointing out hypocrisy on the left is more than valid, (and we should certainly highlight where our opposition contradicts themselves) we should not do it at the incongruity of our own beliefs. The left enjoys an inbuilt advantage in tugging at the heartstrings of the public, by placing emotions at the forefront of their arguments over logic, but if we are to continue focusing on rationality and critical thought, we must be vigilant on where we place judgement.

Bringing these concepts back and forth into political discourse is not the “gotcha” tactic we would like it to easily be. They should be disregarded completely, not amplified by the people who claim to oppose it. There is no endgame when we wield the baton of identity politics, as the left will never “like” us, regardless of how many of their games we play. When we engage in this never-ending charade of racial-interest group politics, we come further and further from moving past it. Recognising left-wing battles which are, in themselves, non-issues and trying to fight them on their own terms is one of the worst tactics we have in attempting to gain political leverage. By doing so, we strengthen the deemed importance of a flawed left-wing teaching, one that only breeds division and hatred. Retaliation should not be sought in lowering ourselves to the level of those whose ideas we deem to be below us, it is standing above them and dismissing the matters we know to be futile.

We cannot fight what we despise by becoming what we despise. In consequence, we allow our opposition to move the goalposts, all while they laugh at our attempts to alter the discourse. Identity politics alone does us no good and only leads to further sectarian division in a society already so broken by it. If we want to advance the right’s causes, we cannot engage in the kind of thinking we oppose ourselves. We are not the people who believe in “diversity quotas” or “positive discrimination”, nor are we the people who judge the quality of a room by counting how many women are in it. It is not our job to facilitate the expectations and arguments of our opposer, and we must instead shut them down altogether. We cannot afford to indulge in internal inconsistency in our attempts to persuade. We are not the “real progressives”; we are the people who fight against them.