Ideology and Culture

By Mike Gonzalez – Introduction –  The political purpose of identity politics is to divide the country into groups as a strategy to change America completely. Identity politics sees people’s beliefs and interests as determined by their membership in specific groups, particularly sex, race, sexual orientation, and disability status. It is an enemy of reason and Enlightenment values. Identity politics and critical theory are intended to transform America from a culture that values the work ethic and responsible individualism to one that directs distribution of group privileges, as individual natural rights are discarded in the rush to collectivism. Gonzalez defines identity politics as, the deliberate creation of pan-ethnic and other identity groups with the idea that members of these groups should get compensatory justice and adopt the culture of victimhood that this encourages. The book’s purpose is to explain how and why the elements of identity politics came together, who was behind the ideology’s rise, and what we can do about it. The book explains the rise of identity politics, the doctrines and philosophies behind it, and its threat to American liberties. Our government has created ethnic and sexual categories whose members have been instilled with resentments against the country and its system and given real financial benefits for nursing those grievances. Insisting on group grievances thereby perpetuates the identity groups. If we stop this vicious cycle by cutting off the funding we can free ourselves from the grip of identity politics. The book traces the origins of identity politics to the late 1960s and 70s when the white establishment panicked over the black riots. They offered temporary racial benefits to pacify the groups supplying the rioters. They accepted leftist activists claim that there was an analogy between the suffering of Blacks and the experience of Mexican Americans, Chinese, Puerto Rican, Japanese, and other specified groups. The analogy was later extended to women as a group. Activists sought to move the country away from its limited government traditions and toward the centralized state planning drawn from Kantian, Hegelian, and Marxian worldviews. The book’s goal is to change how the nation thinks about identity politics and identity groups by exposing the actors and the theories behind it. The first four chapters of Part I describe how the main ethnic and sexual categories were created. In Part II, Chapters 5, 6 and 7 explain the ideological basis for such category creation; Chapter 8 concludes the book by offering policy corrections and practical political solutions for ending identity politics. To this end, the book seeks to help us understand identity politics genesis and purpose. A particularly dangerous component of identity politics is the coercive diversity to which we must pay lip service. Our children were traditionally taught that all Americans regardless of origin are united in a common cause. The new diversity is its opposite. The intent of identity politics is to divide America into semiautonomous, formal, and cohesive subgroups that have distinct outlooks, aspirations, privileges, and rights. “Social justice” requires the redistribution of resources to members of identity groups. When diversity of race becomes the lodestar, diversity of views is banned. An example is the suppression of speech that the gatekeepers of identity politics label “hate speech”. The speed which identity politics has become acceptable is bewildering. Identity as a member of one of these groups confers a claim to victimhood, which has been elevated above individual accomplishment.  Self-image and self-esteem are powerful motivators affecting our chances of success or failure. Identity politics instills self-doubt and encourages you to nurse grievances. Those who go around in search of racial or sexual slights are setting themselves up for a lifetime of self-inflicted grief – they are trading in self-reliance, self-respect, and success. If ever there was a Faustian bargain this is it. We are living in this victimhood culture today. The goal of social justice warriors is not equality but their new definition of equity – equal outcomes, the reverse of equal opportunity. In academia, critical theory seeks to replace Western culture by a full frontal attack on the Enlightenment tradition of liberal democracy. Since it relies on the creation of groups and giving people incentives to adhere to them – the ability to claim oppression is the key to the bank – eliminating group making’s subsidies can rid us of identity politics.. Identity politics is a not grassroots movement. It is an elite project. Pan-ethnic umbrella groups, such as Hispanics and Asians, were created by political activists, intellectuals, philanthropists, and their allies in the bureaucracy. Philanthropy had a tremendous amount to do with creation of identity politics, particularly the Ford Foundation’s grants. Fostering resentment is an effective bonding agent of solidarity for forming groups into voting blocs. Terms such as “minority”, “person of color”, and “privilege”, were introduced to promote the sense of grievance and resentment that is the lifeblood of identity politics. Mexican Americans began to be consolidated into a voting block by Saul Alinsky. His groups trained the Hispanic activists who used Ford Foundation money to fund the ethnic special interest organization La Raza and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF). The intellectual leaders of identity politics saw philanthropy as a powerful tool to advance their agenda, especially with the Ford Foundation. The creation of an Asian identity group was spearheaded by Chinese-American and Japanese American Marxists indoctrinated by the Black Panther movement. Feminists in the 1960s were also influenced by the work of early Marxists.  In 1974, the Census Bureau created the first National Advisory Committee On Race. Gonzales explains the role of the Census Bureau’s National Advisory Committee in the establishment of identity politics, and the way radical organizations have used them to insinuate themselves into the policymaking process. The idea was to first force Americans to divide themselves into ethnic groups through the Census and other means, and then imbue them with grievances, and tempt them to identify with such groups in perpetuity through a system of entitlements like affirmative action, set-asides in… Read More