Interview Excerpt: “Conservatism in a Divided America” Book Discussion

Today, we share an excerpt from a video discussion moderated by Jacob Kildoo (full interview here). Jacob had the opportunity to sit down with George Hawley and Jesse R. Merriam to discuss Hawley’s book, Conservatism in a Divided America: The Right and Identity Politics.

JM: The first question that really came to my mind as I was reading the book is how our new identity politics—if it is a new identity politics—is different from the older versions. So Dr. Hawley talks about the fact that identity politics was not born necessarily with the New Left, which is the conventional narrative—that we had a political identity where identity is not a significant part of electoral politics, then you get the New Left and various ethnic and sexual grievances that form voting blocks, and then you get an identity politics. Well Dr. Hawley’s book is probing that and questioning whether that narrative is true. So I’m curious whether he thinks that what the New Left created in terms of identity politics—how it’s different form older versions.

GH: Sure, there’s a lot there. You’re right that I do think there has been an identity element to U.S. politics going all the way back to the colonial era. I think you can think about the religious politics of the day, from even the late 1700s, as being a kind of identity politics. But I also do think it’s true to say that identity politics as we understand it since, say, the 1970s is distinct from earlier varieties of what you called grievance politics—[what] you could call the earlier iterations of the feminist movement and the civil rights movement and related movements that were springing up throughout the 20th century.

I think that the more recent iterations of identity politics ,though, are distinct—and this is not my own original idea; other scholars have made this argument—in that it has taken a much more adversarial approach to what, for lack of a better term, we can call the “dominant culture.” If we think about the narratives around early feminist movements, around the earlier civil rights movements, there was a push for incorporation of these disadvantaged groups into the mainstream bourgeoisie white American society—that is that the sort of boundaries of the mainstream need to be expanded to incorporate these other groups who needed to be brought in as equal members, be it women, be it African Americans, be it migrant workers, whoever is the group in question.

But I would say that more recently, I don’t think that’s been as much the norm. If we think about, say, we know some of the post-Civil Rights Movement trends we saw in the push for African American rights, where we see the movement toward sort of a “black power,” “black is beautiful” [approach], and an insistence that these different identity groups should be allowed to continue to exist on their own terms rather than simply be incorporated into the pre-existing mainstream of American life—in particular the mainstream white, Christian, middle class American life—and an insistence that actually now feminists should carve out some distinct space for women [and] blacks should not feel the need to “assimilate” into white society, that they should be allowed to set their culture according to their own term and be treated as equals nonetheless.

So I would say that that is a crucial distinction as we think about the development of identity politics over the last hundred years or so.

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