It’s impossible to square the circle of #BelieveWomen

Let’s think back a month ago, to what turned out to be a pivotal moment in the 2020 campaign: Elizabeth Warren’s bizarre claim that Bernie told her a woman could not win the presidency.

The dishonesty of the attack on Sanders was so manifest that the takes barely need to be re-enunciated: her campaign was stalling so she lied about Sanders, hoping to re-focus media attention on herself while riding the most cynical aspects of MeToo into a poll bounce. Bernie faced an accusation, and since the only properly woke response to an accusation is immediate and uncritical acceptance, he was going to be dinged no matter what happened afterward. (Only, hilariously, he was not dinged. It was actually Liz whose campaign was ruined by the stunt. And this signals, I hope to god, an end to this bullshit).

This is all very basic. Good writers have already covered it. You don’t need me to rehash it any further.

I would like to talk, however, about how this highlights larger and more fundamental problems within the #BelieveWomen/#MeToo cinematic universe–problems that must be confronted if the people who seriously believe in the goals of these movements wish to accomplish anything other than securing book deals for a handful of shitty writers. My framing device here will be a concept introduced by Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, in their 20-year-old critique of identity politics. This has to do with the split between hard “identity,” a fixed and firm conceptualization of identity that carries immense rhetorical weight but does not hold up to theoretical scrutiny, and soft “identity,” which views identities as protean and constructed–a more theoretically sound concept that has very little purchase in everyday discourse.

To start with an aside: it’s important to note that the malignant strains of identity politics presently infesting liberalism have been around for decades. It’s just that they didn’t have much utility until the Obama years–when it became clear that the promises of Hope and Change really just meant more means testing, more austerity, mass deportation, the wanton destruction of the planet, and an acceleration of our Forever Wars. The Democratic Party had to shift gears. In response to a crushing defeat in the 2010 midterms, their media apparatus decided to aggressively pursue identitarianism. This came with two benefits: 1) It allowed them to differentiate themselves from Republicans and motivate supporters while still sharing 98% of the GOP’s policy positions (this is where we get the logic about it being, like, so important for kids to see Black Panther); and 2) it provided an easy means of discrediting any material politics (“if we broke up the banks tomorrow, would that create more trans CEOs?”). Very little has changed within cultural studies-based understandings of identity over the last 20 years, as will be demonstrated from our review of Brubaker and Cooper’s piece.

Brubaker and Cooper posit that

“Identity,” is both a category of practice and a category of analysis. As a category of practice, it is used by ‘lay’ actors in some (not all!) everyday settings to make sense of themselves, of their activities, of what they share with, and how they differ from, others. It is also used by political entrepreneurs to persuade people to understand themselves, their interests, and their predicaments in a certain way, to persuade certain people that they are (for certain purposes) ‘identical’ with one another and at the same time different from others, and to organize and justify collective action along certain lines. (4-5)

As a category of practice, identity is morally neutral–its goodness or badness depends upon what ends its evocation is utilized toward. The trouble is when this category of practice is spun into a foundation of analysis, at which point the conception of identity becomes reified, made to appear as sort of an inatlertable given. “We should,” the authors note “avoid unintentionally reproducing or reinforcing such reification by uncritically adopting categories of practice as categories of analysis” (5).

Now, you may be fine with the notion that identity markers are un-transcendable, that they serve as the primary or perhaps even exclusive determining factor of a person’s being, worth, or moral stature. That’s what’s called an essentialist point of view. There’s trouble, though, because essentialism is (at least nominally) rejected within most bodies of academic thought. The more prevailing frame is called constructivism, which posits (correctly, I feel) that there’s nothing magical or inevitable about identity groupings, that they are instead social constructs and can therefore eventually be transcended even if their present-day effects are very real. This, the authors note, points to the fundamental contradiction of how identity is actually understood:

We often find an uneasy amalgam of constructivist language and essentialist argumentation. This is not a matter of intellectual sloppiness. Rather, it reflects the dual orientation of many academic identitarians as both analysts and protagonists of identity politics. It reflects the tension between the constructivist language that is required by academic correctness and the foundationalist or essentialist message that is required if appeals to ‘identity’ are to be effective in practice. (6)

Basically, “identity” has been formulated in such a way that it can be utilized in a essentialist sense even while its purveyors issue rote denials of its essentialism–like how someone can shamelessly use the #VoteLikeBlackWomen tag while claiming to not regard black women as ideologically monolithic. Or, more generally, by asserting that social problems can only be addressed by listening to Oppressed Group X or Y, (which is done most commonly as a response to left-materialist suggestions for change), as if all members of those groups would understand each issue identically and would suggest the same response. This is a dishonest and incoherent approach to politics, but it prevails because of its utility–that is, because it poses no real threat to existing power structures.

Here we find a rhetorical move that is foundational to contemporary identity politics: leaning on popular but theoretically indefensible understandings of terms and slogans while claiming that we actually understand these terms and slogans in obscure ways that are unpopular and rhetorically weak. Simply put: this is a lie.

Brubaker and Cooper go on to explain that “weak or soft conceptions of identity are routinely packaged with standard qualifiers indicating that identity is multiple, unstable, in flux, contingent, fragmented, constructed, negotiated, and so on. These qualifiers have become so familiar–indeed obligatory–in recent years that one reads (and writes) them virtually automatically. They risk becoming mere place-holders, gestures signaling a stance rather than words conveying a meaning” (11). And the parallels here to Intersectionality are manifest–like how class is perfunctorily nodded toward but never substantially engaged with, or how what is purported as a means of understanding a multitude of identity positions is, in practice, a victimhood hierarchy that’s used to determine the (in)validity of people’s actions and observations. As long as we keep allowing people to hide within this double-conceptualization, we will continue promulgating an understanding of social problems that contradicts itself so fully that it cannot lead to any actionable analysis.

This is fairly obvious now, in 2020, with identitarians having taken control over our liberal institutions and failing miserably at enacting any but the most superficial of changes. But in 2000, Brubaker and Cooper pointed out the simple fact that “weak conceptions of identity may be too weak to do useful theoretical work. In their concern to cleanse the term of its theoretically disreputable ‘hard’ connotations, in their insistence that identities are multiple, malleable, fluid, and so on, soft identitarians leave us with a term so infinitely elastic as to be incapable of performing serious analytical work” (11). And so they wondered, naturally, ““What is gained, analytically, by labeling any experience and public representation of any tie, role, network, etc. as an identity” (12)?

I find the answer pretty simple: leaning on an intellectually dishonest understanding of identity allows writers to cosplay as radicals without giving up any comfort, status, or power. Liberal leadership (by which I mean, those with power in academic and media spaces, as well as the center-right mainstream of the contemporary Democratic party) embraces this charade, as they realize it poses no threat of disruption or upheaval. Conservatives (Republicans, and more generally those in power in business and finance sectors, as well as the military), however, despise this, and are ideologically unaware enough that they regard it as an actual threat, and react to it with physical and fiscal violence (mass shootings are domestic terrorism are conspicuous examples, but selective austerity is much more commonplace and causes more harm on the whole). But now, most terrifyingly, a whole generation of young humanists have found themselves inculcated into this belief system but utterly unable to interrogate its foundational contradiction. They don’t realize it’s a grift.

This is why the left-leaning criticisms of Warren’s’ campaign stunt fell so flat, even when they were being issued by writers with whom I usually agree. Warren was accused of cynically misappropriating the #BelieveWomen mantra. Writers explained that, actually, everyone knows that we shouldn’t seriously believe every claim by every woman, that the hashtag is instead meant to encourage people to simply be more empathetic and less dismissive to women who claim to have suffered abuse. This is the same fundamentally dishonest contradiction we find in the split between hard and soft identities. The hashtag isn’t #BeSomewhatLessIncredulous. It’s #BelieveWomen. It a blunt mantra, a demand so intense and absolute that no one could possibly take it literally–that it sometimes comes packaged with some post-facto qualifiers does not change this; it just makes its purveyors seem dishonest.

Warren’s stunt failed because most people could see through it. We recognize self-contradiction as easily as we recognize cynicism and hypocrisy, and unless someone has an awful lot of charm we tend to react negatively to all of those traits. A movement founded on such a flimsy edifice is never going to attract outsiders and is never going to achieve anything of value. It’ll elevate a small number of people and make everyone else even less likely to engage with social justice going forward.