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On Provoked, Scott Horton throws out an idea that isn’t hard to recognize if you lived through 2008–2011: after the federal government, together with the banks, bailed out the big players while a lot of ordinary people got wrecked, two mirror-populisms appeared — the Tea Party on the right and Occupy Wall Street on the left. Both, in different ways, were pointing at the same thing: the state–finance marriage, the bailouts, the feeling that “there’s money for them, not for us.”
Horton’s read is that this was dangerous for the establishment. Once people at the bottom started comparing notes — “hey, you rural conservative, and me, urban student… didn’t we get burned by the same people?” — a weird but effective coalition was possible. According to him, that’s exactly the moment when the identity-politics menu got pushed hardest: race vs. race, young vs. old, straight vs. LGBT, region vs. region, veteran vs. non-veteran. The point wasn’t expanding freedom; the point was to keep people from talking about money, banking, regulatory capture, and corporate welfare. Classic “turn-them-against-the-neighbor” stuff.
He’s not the only one who’s noticed something like that. Writers like Mark Lilla have argued that U.S. liberalism tied itself to a style of identity politics that fragments the electorate and weakens the majorities you actually need to govern. Others on the left have warned that if all the political oxygen goes to recognition battles, the economic structure stays exactly where it is. So even if we can’t prove a secret meeting where “big business + Democrats invented identity politics,” it’s fair to say that in the 2010s identity became very easy to weaponize for division — which is the core of Horton’s point.
I keep getting told I have to “pick a side,” but the two sides on offer are obsessed with priorities I don’t share. So instead of pretending to be a team player for a team I don’t actually like, I’ll just say it: neither the contemporary left nor the contemporary right describes what I believe. Not because I’m a bland centrist, but because both have drifted away from a civic, plural, freedom-first idea of America.
You can actually find versions of this concern in writers as different as Alexis de Tocqueville (worried about overgrown central power), Francis Fukuyama (worried that recognition politics can crowd out shared identity), and Mark Lilla (worried that the left fragmented itself). I’m basically in that family of complaints.
Let me start with the left, because there are parts of the left I agree with. I’m for equal protection. I’m for not discriminating by race. I’m for people living how they want without the state or their neighbors harassing them. That’s basic liberalism.
But a lot of modern U.S. progressivism ties those good goals to two things I don’t buy:
An ever-expanding welfare/administrative state. It treats “more government” as the automatic answer, even though government and large corporate actors are already deeply entangled. If the state and big business are already in the same bed, I don’t see why I should fatten the state further. Tocqueville warned about this “soft despotism” a long time ago — power that’s not brutal, but is everywhere.
Any moment may be our best or worst and nobody can discern the correct evaluation of actions across time.