Well before Pat Buchanan’s polarizing 1992 speech about a “cultural war for the soul of America,” the lexicon of identity politics — political correctness, multiculturalism, gender studies, angry white males, the religious Right, etc. — was deepening divisions between groups and exhausting our sense of commonality as a people. Todd Gitlin, New York University professor of culture and communications and author of “The Twilight of Common Dreams,” fears that the obsession with our differences as reflected by identity politics will prevent Americans from coming together to address deeper, more important problems.
Q: A critic said you view identity politics–in which people define themselves by ethnicity, gender, religion or sexual orientation–as a descendent of fascism. How so?
A: I don’t think I said it in quite that way. I think that identity politics, when pressed to its limits, disqualifies people from having a position, because it is more interested in who you are than what you think. The strength of American society is that it offers people a way to transform themselves–“You can be all you can be if you join the Army.” It’s an individualists’ culture. And that, in some ways, is glorious. It says to people, “You are not finished, you just started.”
But identity politics tends to tell them: “OK, you are Jewish, you are Irish, you are black. And therefore you must act in A, B and C ways. You must have the following tastes. You must marry within the group. You must think as the group wants you to think.” That’s (not) very true to reality.
Q: How much cultural division and fragmentation can this society tolerate and still sustain a sense of common good for all?
A: A lot, if we address our deep social problems, and as long as sufficient numbers of people feel it’s their country, too, and they are making some headway. The idea of headway makes people more tolerant. And the obverse also is true: The gulf between the rich and the poor, anxiety about the future–that’s when we start looking for enemies. And since we don’t have foreign enemies anymore, we look inward.
Q: Is there political danger in having so many Americans with fervent allegiances to group identities?
A: The risk is when it gets out of hand. The most dangerous identity group in America are right-wing whites who think they are the real country and the government are the usurpers. The danger of playing identity politics is that everyone can claim one. If there is nothing holding people back and nothing holding them together, then you are on your way to Bosnia. Now America is not that far gone by any means, and I don’t think it’s headed that way. Because, unacknowledged, there are still a lot of things holding people together as Americans.
Q: Such as?
A: Everybody goes to the mall, right? One day to eat Chinese food, the next to eat pizza or tacos. The owner of a Chinese restaurant in New York also sells pizza–for his Jewish customers, he told me. That’s America. At some level people know they’re not living in little enclaves. Where is the republic of Dominican Republicans? Of Slovakians? We don’t organize that way. Almost all of us speak English, and if we don’t, we want to. So we are not in danger of breaking up. But I think we are in danger of losing our hold on democratic possibilities and our ability to govern ourselves. (Self governance) is hard to do in any case, and it is especially difficult if people are not willing to look beyond their immediate group.
Q: How would you define the common culture in the country today?
A: I think of it as “multiculturalism light.” It’s popular music heavily based on black, and to some degree Latino and to some degree Scottish-Irish-English musical traditions. It’s a visual culture that includes all kinds of elements from lots of places. It’s a casual, nobody-is-better-than-anybody-else culture, which means the culture is very spongy and is constantly looking for new styles to popularize. So part of what we have in common is, if you’ll pardon me, Disneyland and McDonald’s and soap operas and commercials and Calvin Klein and Michael Jordan and pop. It may not be a deep culture, but it is something that makes Americans recognize themselves abroad. You take an African-American, or Irish-, Jewish- or Latino-American and drop them into Paris or Africa, and they’ll quickly discover just how American they are.
Q: You’ve criticized the Christian Right, one of the major identity groups in the so-called culture wars. Have they contributed anything positive to the debate about American values over the past decade?
A: I think they’ve bent the debate in an unhelpful direction by purporting to be the sole interpreters of family values. There is a very serious discussion to be had in this society about families and about values. But if it were an honest discussion, no one would come to the table with clean hands. Not just in the United States, but everywhere in the industrial world, there is a convulsive change going on: the rise of divorce, the lengthening of life expectancy, the decline in infant mortality, the drive for freedom, the growth of–I don’t know what to call it–a restlessness.
Women going to work was the crucial element that snapped a two-century-long agreement about what a family was. The anxieties people feel are because they don’t quite know what their roles are anymore, but it has to be worked out in good will. It cannot be worked out on the assumption we are better off as a Christian republic than as a democracy.
Q: Some theorists see value in the emergence of these group identities and allegiances. They may lead us to new insights and a reinvigorated democratic process–provided we embrace the differences. Do you agree?
A: Part of what it means to be American ought to be to accept–embrace is a fine word–the right to difference. The danger is of turning difference into an obsession. It is a matter of proportion. I can understand why after the many indignities and barbarisms practiced on people of color and gays and others, they need to affirm who they are, to turn what was once a stigma into a badge of pride. The question I’m trying to raise is, “and now what?” Because we’ve been there. That is a point affirmed 25 to 30 years ago, when black power generated the Latino movement, the American Indian movement, the women’s movement, the gay movement and various spinoffs. But what has been the price paid in terms of overall political dissent? And where do we go from here?
Q: Has identity politics peaked?
A: There are many people knocking around in the identity world who are restless and dissatisfied, and who are also aware of their political weakness, and who are therefore exploring new ways of understanding their situations. Most people have to be shaken to change their minds. What happened in the late ’60s was for many people a liberation and it was an important moment in history: the beginnings of the women’s movement and the gay movement. Now, people want to rest. They are conserving something they fought for, which was the right to be different. Today, the question is: Can they be different and common at the same time? I don’t know the answer.
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An edited transcript.
