New Right Identity Politics
Recovering a Pre-Liberal Politics
This past Tuesday was a disaster for Republicans. Zohran Mamdani won the mayorship of New York City, Virginia elected the first female Muslim to Lt. Governor (Ghazala Hashmi), the notorious John Jones (who in private chats had wished death upon his political opponents and their children) won as Virginia’s Attorney General, and in general, political outcomes in New Jersey, New York, and Virginia swung hard toward Democrats. Meanwhile, Republicans were consumed with an in-house squabble over Tucker Carlson’s interview with Nick Fuentes, once again proving the GOP is, without Trump, an unserious political party.
Zohran Mamdani
The day before Mamdani’s win, the Republican candidate for the Ohio Gubernatorial tweeted out, “End identity politics.” Among a certain coalition on the right—composed of older Boomers and some Gen Xers, “principled conservatives,” libertarians, and moderate centrists—“identity politics” is still exclusively associated with the left and is a scourge in American politics. On this reading, identity politics is a rejection of the Declaration and the Constitution, as well as Lincoln’s defeat of the slavery faction, and the crowning policies of the Civil Rights era that prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, sex, nation of origin, and religion. In other words, identity politics is intrinsically leftist, and the Right, whether old or new, should have nothing to do with it.
Mamdani is giving the middle finger to venerable American traditions. He has cast himself as the ‘true American,’ transgressive of everything America used to stand for. Mamdani has proposed taxing white neighborhoods and redistributing the money to poorer minority areas, a type of racial jizya; he has published ads in foreign languages; he has boasted of his Islamic bona fides (but he’s not a sincere Muslim); he is a foreign-born (Uganda) immigrant who actively and openly resists assimilation. Yet as Zineb Riboua has shown in a well-argued piece, Mamdani is not an Islamicist or socialist; instead, he is a radical leftist who traffics in racial resentment and ethnic exploitation undergirded by a post-colonial, third-world ideology of retaliatory conquest.
As Riboua contends, “Mamdani’s … convictions echo the Algerian Revolution’s core belief that the oppressed occupy history’s moral vanguard and that their liberation redeems human dignity. In the United States, a nation without colonies, he adapts this anti-imperial ethos to a society steeped in guilt and redemption narratives. Mamdani repurposes the lexicon of Third World liberation for American soil, transforming decolonization into a scaffold for moral and political identity.”
We must understand our enemy if we hope to defeat him.
Identity Politics Left
Given all this, criticisms of Mamdani are entirely warranted. And in a sense, the conservative rejection of Mamdani’s identity politics is right. The kind of identity politics espoused by the Left is either contrived or manipulated. Mamdani is rootless, an international nobody; he is a charlatan who will wear any identity as a skinsuit to build a coalition and amass power. Mamdani’s identity (or identities) is not a beautiful way of life inherited from his ancestors that contributes to human life according to God’s design. Instead, his identity is exclusively a negative impression of what he hates. He will become anything and adopt any identity in order to destroy the nemeses of Western and American civilization: whites, Christians, males, and a patriarchal society ordered according to God’s word. As such, to reject Mamdani is to reject identity politics; instead, we must transcend individual identities and find a common way of life around universal moral and political principles.
The other kind of identity politics on the left is that of unbridled choice, unconstrained by anything in nature or society. Don’t like your gender? Take hormones and get sex-change surgery. Don’t like your country of birth? Partake in U.S. visa scams and bring your whole family to America and reestablish your native culture in an ethnic enclave in Texas or New York. Don’t like the religion of your parents? Swear off God altogether until it becomes unbearable, and then become a “spiritualist.” Whatever works, baby. You be you. But whatever you do, don’t be inauthentic.
This form of identity politics is neo-gnostic. It views the essence of humanity as a disembodied consciousness having no natural or harmonious relationship to the physical world (including one’s body), other people, or divine realities. In order to be true to one’s authentic consciousness (i.e., chosen identity), it is permissible—nay, it is required by the dictates of human dignity—that the world yield before one’s personal demands. Everything outside the Self is malleable, a wax nose to be twisted in order to give the Self what it wants.
To the conservative mind, identity politics like this must be utterly repudiated. To organize politics around identities is trouble; it leads to absurd policies harmful to everyone involved (such as transgender bathrooms, the destruction of women’s sports, and child genital mutilation), and it severely distorts who humans are and why we exist. America was never about identities, but about the timeless moral and political truths expressed in the Declaration of Independence.
Identity Politics Right
While the Right ought to roundly reject both the contrived and manipulated forms of identity politics, to reject identity politics altogether would be a mistake. The Right should not reject identity politics simpliciter merely because Mamdani and others have embraced a sick form of it. Instead, the New Right needs to accept a healthy identity politics. In fact, the truth cuts deeper: there is no politics apart from identity. True identity—who you are—is not chosen, but given. You are born whether you want to be or not, to parents and in a family and nation that you did not choose. Your race and ethnicity are not up to you; nor is your gender, the language you learn, and the religion your parents teach you, the food you eat, and the local and national holidays you celebrate. None of us is of our own making. Instead, we are the product of not just our parents, but of thousands of people working together over hundreds of years in cooperative endeavors to build a civilization that will be passed down from one generation to the next.
Politics is about preserving one’s own way of life, and then ideally elevating it from bare subsistence to partake in the good life. To be political is to practice the virtue of exclusion: those people over there are not like us, and therefore they cannot be part of our society. This is the basis of nationalism, that nations are distinct people groups with unique ways of life, and that the task of the political is to socially organize people groups into their own cities, nation-states, or commonwealths. What is good and salutary for one people may not be for other peoples. Therefore, different forms of government arise to fit the people as they are—their temperament, social dynamics, virtue, and intelligence—and to help them achieve the best life they can collectively.
While there are certainly general natural and divine principles that can be known by all men and are useful to all societies, how each people in their political life implement these truths may and will look very different. This is not a form of relativism, but the admission that there is a wide variety of human existence that falls within the bounds of the permissible.
A healthy form of identity politics on the right will admit that America is not a propositional nation, a melting pot or toss salad, or a dumping ground for the world’s poor and miserable. Those liberal ideas all surfaced well after the founding in an attempt to dilute America’s original identity, turn her into a global project, and force her to accept immigrants from every corner of the world.
Recovering American Identity
What is the political identity of America? In his book, Albion’s Seed, David Hackett Fischer rightly notes that the bulk of the American population during the colonial and founding periods “shared many qualities in common. All of them spoke the English language. Nearly all were British Protestants. Most lived under British laws and took pride in possessing British liberties.” It is historically undeniable that America’s identity is that she descended from British and northwestern European peoples, that she was a Christian people (and 98% Protestant in 1776), who spoke the English language, who inherited the British constitutional and common law as the foundation of their own law (even though the Americans made many changes), and who found political guidance and inspiration in both the Old and New Testaments.
Liberalism only “worked” in America because these identities were commonly known and accepted. In homogeneous societies, one’s ethnic, religious, social, and commercial interests cohere and form a common substratum that does not have to be debated or questioned. Accordingly, in such societies, ‘neutral’ rules of procedure and decorum arise to help establish norms necessary for the efficient functioning of complex civilizations. The people have a collective understanding of what their rights are, how they ought to be exercised, and what their bounds must be; they share in common what liberty is and when it turns into slavery or license; they assume without question that everyone should go to Church on Sunday, not be obscene in public, and pick up their own trash.
Yet liberalism collapses when the substratum itself is questioned: when the very identity of the people is under attack, is challenged and diluted through pernicious ideologies and mass immigration, and is demoralized through an endless rain of slander, slurs, and accusations.
Thus, if America hopes to regain her strength, to preserve her historic people and way of life, and not be plundered of her wealth and inheritance by international pirates, then she must recover her own identity politics. She must ask and answer with force and conviction what her identity is. And then she must have the political will to once again practice a politics of exclusion and preservation if she hopes to remain America much longer.