Identity Politics, a Second Look

Since the 2016 US presidential election, if not before, a fierce debate has raged on the left in Australia and elsewhere as to the relative weight that should be placed on what is often called ‘identity politics’ as opposed to the politics of class or economics. The former is the progressivism that fights for gay rights, racial justice and gender equality; the latter’s defining interest is ending poverty and all forms of inequality. At its best, identity politics builds election-winning coalitions across diverse groups; at socialism’s best, it articulates a coherent platform that appeals to all. The best people on both sides recognise that this is not an either/or proposition: one can and should advocate for both. But, unfortunately partisans accuse one another of imposing a ‘litmus test’ of ideological purity, of giving one set of interests priority over the other. Much of the debate turns on the political role of ‘working class [white] men’: are they oppressed or oppressor?

My own default position on all this is clear, and my book, “Politics for the New Dark Age” is honest in the “Introduction” that the progressive politics I espouse is not rooted in identity alone. The citizens you’ll encounter across the book's twenty chapters are Rawlsian ciphers, stripped of their differences in order to focus on their shared interests. I also share the observation made in Best of the Left episode #1109 that many political leaders who talk first and foremost about identity-based forms of justice are also the least comfortable discussing real economic change. That said, I am not hostile towards identity politics as a philosophy, and consider Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectional approach essentially correct. Chapter IV of my book discusses the inherent tension between the ideological self and the need for compromises to build dominant coalitions. The question is never one (economic justice) or the other (racial and sexual justice) but “both and”. 

A Second Look

This blog post is an effort to take a second look at the issue. My book avoids the topic of “identity politics” – but what would I say about it if asked to give a more fulsome appreciation? Note that this entry will be about the political philosophy of identity, because as a political practice (to which I'll return at the end), coalition-building amongst groups facing multi-dimensional oppression and building linkages across issues is the best and perhaps only way for progressives to win power.

First of all, let’s talk about what (almost) everyone agrees identity politics is not: identarianism. Identarianism (in all its various manifestations) argues that individuals are defined by their group identity, and that this identity grants them an essential and unchanging set of interests shared with everyone else in their group and no one outside the group. The critique often made by conservatives and anti-democrats about identity politics is that democracy is more or less a competition for payoffs between fixed groups with defined interests. Far-right and particularist groups that are strongly distrustful of others advance this sort of politics, and in a sort of mirror-imaging, imagine that their progressive opponents are doing the same. 

But there’s a kernel of truth to their critique. For example, a mistake that many well-meaning pollsters and social scientists make is to reduce individuals to members of a group category and thereby persuadable in terms of group interests. This allows them to ignore economic and other forms of difference within each category. While such approaches may seem like cost-effective campaigning, it discourages coalition-building across group lines and in my experience had led to some very nasty electoral surprises for its proponents. And in some countries, intra-state violence has broken out when politics has been reduced to precisely this form: when social entrepreneurs activate the salience of group identities and portray politics as a “winner-takes-all” battle for political patronage and the spoils of state power.

Communism makes the same mistake, by treating classes as fixed and historically-invariant social groups. Classes, like other types of groups, may have defined interests and even stories that members of the group tell one another about those interests. What distinguishes group-centric stories from true, universal ideologies is that the satisfaction of group or class interests do not prescribe how to regulate a society that includes other groups. Absent a story about inter-group cooperation, class or group pride becomes the politics of dominance by default when power is obtained over other groups The major step that all democrats and liberals, on both right and left, take to distance themselves from this narrow sort of politics is to see every citizen as a member of a single society, with diverse and complex interests that must be taken into account.

A better sort of politics

The second type of identity politics is one that is unique to progressives, and is rooted in our innate distaste for hierarchy and authority. It is to recognise that some categories of people are structurally advantaged (or ‘privileged’) by society and others are structurally disadvantaged (or ‘oppressed’). Many conservatives will be psychologically incapable of recognising this aspect of identity, since they are pre-disposed to see hierarchial social relations and traditional authority as legitimate. But when socially-constructed categories (including race and gender) are used to systematically and structurally discriminate against identity groups, even classical liberals must admit that the much-vaunted principle of equality of opportunity becomes violated in practice even if not in law.

It’s for these reasons that "straight pride" is not semantically the opposite of "gay pride"; nor "mens rights" a response to feminism; and why “All Lives Matter” is not a valid critique of “Black Lives Matter”. One identity serves as a marker of the need for liberation, the other as a rallying cry for the continuation of the supremacy of the status quo. Identity politics in this sense regards some identities as being structurally empowered over others in ways that are measurable in terms of social outcomes that are universally valid. The debate is over what to do about these differential outcomes. Clearly, some kind of reparative justice is necessary. 

The concern I (and others) have about giving this "identarian liberalism" too much emphasis is that securing mere greater recognition or representation of minorities in a statistical sense is not enough to make a full political program, and can result at worst in tokenism and the strengthening of the existing social order. For example, improving equality of opportunity to ensure greater female representation on corporate boards or having more gay or trans CEOs will not change the fact that authoritarian corporate structures will always disadvantage workers regardless of colour, gender or sexual orientation. Having different viewpoints in power is important, but will forever be limited in impact if the inherent hierarchies of the system which intersect with identity are unchanged.  

Identity Politics as Practice

To my mind, the only way to use “identity politics” productively is as a practice which recognises that everyone has multiple identities, some of which may be oppressed and some privileged, depending on context. Amartya Sen has written that we all wear different hats depending on our current social and cultural environment: we don’t have a single identity but rather a complex matrix of social roles. Rather than focusing exclusively on the sources of our own oppression, we should recognise in solidarity that the alienation of anyone from less than full citizenship affects everyone. We should admit when we are lucky, and recognise that expecting help from others requires offering what support we can for their cause in return.

The purpose of this sort of self-examination is not, as right-wing fantasists insist, to conduct an ‘oppression olympics’ and thereby select the individual or group most deserving of political or economic support. Creating that kind of moral hierarchy is precisely the opposite road to take to reach true equality. Instead, we must all begin to empathise with the sources of oppression and alienation in everyone else’s life and recognise that we all share an interest in the elimination of all forms of hierarchy and discrimination. Thus we (including cis white males such as myself) must recognise that the categorical identity to which we belong is complex. We both benefit and suffer from existing patterns of power simultaneously and that our privileges and suffering interact in complex ways. 

This, I believe, is the foundation of good ‘ally-ship’: to approach others’ claims of alienation from a position of empathy and as an opportunity to learn and improve society as a whole. Rather than strive for the Platonic ideal of oppression and privilege as immanent and transcendent forms, we should start from the position of seeing every individual’s subjective experience as authentic and true. Greater equality for some is no equality at all if others are systematically excluded: only solidarity between races, gender and all other categories of difference can result in truly transformative social liberation.

Maladaptive Ethics and the Media

This originated as a more thoughtful take, but I've been ruminating over a quote doing the rounds on twitter: "If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention." The quote reportedly adorned the Facebook page of Heather Heyer, the 32-year old activist who was murdered this weekend in Charlottesville by a neo-Nazi. Sometimes outrage is a useful emotion to motivate us to action, and oppose that which must be opposed. So, here's take number two. 

Societies are learning systems. By maintaining a healthy diversity of opinions and behaviours, which almost every non-totalitarian society must, they’re capable of generating endogenous novelty and internal dynamism. Trial-and-error experimentation offers both adaptability to changes in environmental or strategic conditions, and a capacity for a long-term improvement in the material and social condition of the members of that society. Learning systems operate by establishing implicit and explicit norms and expectations about behaviour over time. A lazy fallacy that some anthropolists and sociologists fall into, however, is to assume that if a norm or behaviour exists it must be adaptive and beneficial. This is in fact the key hypothesis of conservatism: the extant rules and norms that govern a society must be preserved. 

Beyond 'naive adaptionism', we can recognise that evolution is a messy watchmaker, and that the Platonic ideal of a perfectly adapted organism is a myth. As the subjects of evolutionary selection and replication, social norms and practices may be adaptive or maladaptive.  But they could equally be adapted for a different context to the one in which a society presently finds itself (and thus vestigial); non-adaptive but nonharmful; or a ‘spandrel’, i.e. a practice which may evolved by chance that appears functional but whose origin is in fact coincidental. 

Evolution and conflict

Joshua Greene’s ‘Tragedy of Common Sense Morality’ (see here for an overview) posits that open societies are faced with the challenge of making decisions in a context in which different groups in a society operate according to different decision-making rules or ethics. My own book, Politics for the New Dark Age posits that conceptual differences are an inevitable feature of all societies due to genetic, cultural and developmental influences on individual neural development (in other words, that differences within groups are bigger than differences between them). Either way, we will certainly encounter over the courses of our lives beliefs, views and practices that appear alien or repulsive to our personal beliefs. 

The purpose of this blog is to ask when we, as political animals, encounter such challenges to our personal beliefs, how can we determine whether (in simple terms) the other behaviour or rules is adaptive or harmless and should be preserved or maladaptive and should be excised? In other words, when do we organise for activism within the context of a democratic society and when do we start punching Nazis in the face?

For starters, it’s certainly possible, and in fact likely, that a given ethic (including your own) may be maladaptive if it did ever take over the population entirely, but that in a mixed society and in lower proportion, it can and should continue to exist as part of an equilibrium balance. The only way to be certain is to put one’s finger on the scale and see what happens. So my advice is always to fight the hardest you can for what you believe in within the context of an ongoing social system and let the system sort it out. If you follow the rules and win, you get to shape the distribution of norms and behaviours of society according to your preferences. 

Not all ideological conflict, however, obeys the comparatively civilised norms of a democracy. As Chapter IV of my book argues, social separatism, revolutionary terror and “politicide” – the violent extermination of political enemies – have historically resulted when political actors  choose to act outside of democratic politics to resolve their inter-group aggression. Such acts inevitably arise from those with authoritarian personalities who desire total decision dominance over all other social actors. The wrong way to pursue change -  the revolutionary way - is to try to break the ongoing social system so as to achieve permanent decision dominance over others by excluding alternative world views. Such behaviours may be adaptive for their proponents, but are parasitic and destructive for the social organism as a whole. They are literally the social equivalent of cancer: selfish organs reproducing wildly and causing the body as a whole to die. 

Social Change and the Media

I suspect that a key historical contingency leading to such revolutionary and society-destroying attitudes is the spread of new forms of media and information technology. Major periods of political and social instability tend to correspond with the spread of new media technologies: the printing press was instrumental in the Wars of Religion, the radio to the World Wars and 20th century genocides, and now social media to the political disruption of the early 21st century. What these technologies share is a quantitative escalation in the amount of information available to leaders and citizens, and how quickly it can be delivered, in ways that appear to dramatically escalate the costs of maladaptions. I see it as inevitable that the initial period of any new period of media technology should see an uptick in ideological difference, with the concomitant risk of real, disruptive conflict.

Of course, one of the ways in which sudden access to new information leads to poor social outcome is by paralysing the decision-making capabilities of leaders and institutions who were socialised to operate in a lower-information environment. Uncertain about what or who to believe and how the new media will respond to their actions, politicians can become either unable to act, or driven to extremes as they overcorrect in response to the new signals they are received. 

The other way in which media incites conflict is by making citizens more aware of differences among themselves that were previously hidden. For example, different social classes become more likely to encounter ‘how the other half live’, religious systems are likely to be exposed to greater scrutiny and differing cultural practices which were previously geographically remote will seem very near indeed. Twitter and other social platforms have become such outrage machines (on both the right and left) because we are no longer able to discriminate between in-group and out-group behaviour. New media increases the likelihood that we have a dyadic encounter with ‘the other’, and without learned social norms to regulate such encounters both sides will likely "defect" from continued social interaction.

Drop out or plug in?

The wrong way to respond this New Dark Age is to try to erect walls between ideological groups and ideas, privileging existing prejudices and beliefs and hoping that we can go back to the good old days when we didn’t need to interact with those people. This parochial instinct for order fuels the right-wing nationalist’s ridiculous ideas on racial and religious separatism. But it also, I believe, lies behind some nanny state, authoritarian tendencies within the left. 

The instinct to retreat into comfortable ideological bubbles, where everyone agrees with one another, is  the very definition of conservatism. Ecological preservation of regressive ideas and ideologies, by creating an environment in which they are immune from exposure to critical or contrasting views, inhibits cultural progress. Mono-cultures that cannot withstand regular contact with mutant competitors are fragile; diversified cultures are adaptable and robust. Specialisation leads to extinction. Some conservatives on the right are always going to be comfortable with that. The left should not be.

In the long run, I am a firm believer that the same information technology that brings new awareness of difference also operates in the longer run to forge new, inclusive communities and identities. Cultural norms and practices that are genuinely maladaptive will die off in favour of strategies that deliver better payoffs. A mixed cultural equilibria will shift until a new stable arrangement is found. Through a process of repeated interaction, new community norms are forged that, even if they do not lead to agreement, create to a modus vivendi or agreed terms on which the debate is to be conducted. Some of those norms, particularly against ideological cancers such as fascism and nationalism, will have to enforced by speech and deeds that demonstrate they are not to be imitated. So long as brave people like Heather Heyer are willing to act in favour of their democracy, I have confidence it will prevail.

Respectability Politics and the Great Free Speech Panic of 2017

So, it’s 2017, and we’re going through a moral panic about freedom of speech. For cynics, the peril in which the right to freedom of speech finds itself is yet more evidence that we’re entering a new political dark age. This culture war is mainly being fought over the issue of protest and no-platforming right-wing speakers on US university campuses, and thanks to Anglo-Saxon borrowing Australian and British conservatives are also getting in on the act. Many smart, liberal(-ish) writers who should know better – Andrew Sullivan, Jon Haidt, Richard Dawkins, Bill Maher - and papers of record like The Atlantic, Guardian and Boston Globe are piling on. The latest skirmish involves lefty West Coast radio station KPFA cancelling a launch event for Richard Dawkins' new book on account of his excessive and discriminatory singling out of Islam as part of his New Atheist polemics against all religion. 

Don't Panic . . . .

Moral panics are ridiculous in general, relying as they do on the cherry-picking of highly-emotive anecdotes, and this one in particular galls me. Do people wringing their hands about free speech in student politics not remember what being a teenager/twentysomething was like? Universities are always going to be full of young people who take their beliefs too seriously and have poor impulse control. Part of becoming an adult is learning how not to engage with people who hold different views: which strategies are effective (mainly ignoring the trolls) and which aren't. The moralists want to take away young idealists’ capacity to make  mistakes and have these kinds of confrontations for themselves. Talk about coddling! 

Moreover, there’s no practical solution here that doesn’t involve a serious violation of student rights to protest and assembly. Aware of the power of student movements to have a real impact on social debates, conservatives have always sought to shut down campus democracy and turn tertiary institutions into degree factories. By protraying the inconveniences of a handful of (overpaid) loudmouths as a threat to Western civilization and democracy, the boosters of this narrative play into the hands of those whose own committment to personal liberty and the free contest of ideas is conditional and limited. 

Moreover, there’s things about the people pushing this panic that I find repellent. Such men, and they are almost exclusively middle-aged white men, frequently combine their punching down at young progressives with deeply misguided views of their own about feminism and Islam. Dawkins is in many respects the poster boy for this kind of public "intellectual". As much as they profess to care about freedom of speech, they mainly seem interested in their own freedom as powerful men to express bigotry unchallenged. In the end, the so-called ‘liberals’ and centrists who spread the myth that freedom of speech is under assault are at best being useful idiots for conservatives who want to shut down (progressive) student political activism.

 . . .but there is a discussion to be had

And yet on the particular issue of freedom of speech, I agree there is an debate here. Of course there is: when the rights of individuals rub up against one another, politics is required to resolve the issue of where the boundaries lie. Readers of Politics for the New Dark Age will recognise that I take a strong stance on individual rights and I don’t believe that no-platforming and boycotts are a particularly effective form of protest. Odious people should air their odious views, if only to demonstrate how genuinely ridiculous they are to and to prevent them from claiming martyrdom. Using social power to censor offending speech does in fact reveal authoritarian tendencies among those progressives that pursue it. I would prefer that intellectual strife be embraced as a generative and creative process for social learning.

But, unlike the Haidts, Dawkins, Sullivans and Mahers of the world, I just don’t care very much about the freedom of speech of conservatives. Culture war skirmishes at universities are not in the top ten issues affecting the ordinary voter, and probably wouldn’t break the top one hundred. The Dawkins issue is particular no-brainer: by sponsoring a book launch, KPFA was associating their brand with Dawkins' and they are well within their rights to protect their reputation by disassociating themselves from him. For both sides on this one, the question of delineating the correct boundaries of rights appears to be less important than the tribal affiliation of the speaker. In other words, this is a political issue that can only be resolved through power, not an issue of principle that can be resolved through argument. 

Respectability Politics

The moral panic over free spech is a classic example of how social position shapes political personality, and issue about which I have written previously. For affluent white (liberal) men (including myself), there are very few ways in which they [we] do not benefit from the status quo. Libertarian views are overwhelmingly more likely to be held by privileged men (nb: this relationship does not go the other way: men are not necessarily all libertarians), and as a result freedom of speech has much higher salience to them. This is particularly the case when either a) otherwise progressive individuals worry that immature student protesters might make them embarrassed  around their other elite friends, or b) if they suspect (on the basis of their own more crypto-conservative views) that one day they might find themselves subject to protests.

Centrist elites hold firmly to the belief that society is already sufficiently meritocratic (of course it is, they're at the top!) and that steps by the left to address racial, gendered or economic inequalities will only get in the way of action on the yuppie social issues they care most about. When inter-sectionalists ask them to empathise with how their preferred policy stances can affect other identities and interests in unforseen ways, they perceive that as an ask to diminish their own power and perspective rather than expanding it. My own book, Politics, does not employ identity politics as an ideological framework. But as a tactic, coalition-building amongst groups facing multi-dimensional oppression, and building linkages across issues, is the only way that progressives can and must win. Even (especially) if it causes existing elites within the left some discomfort in adjusting to new realities. 

In this regard, the moral panic over freedom of speech suggests itself to me as a manifestation of respectability politics. There’s a quote from Martin Luther King Jr that seems apt for discussion:

“I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the [greatest] stumbling block in [the] stride toward freedom is. . . the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; . . . Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”

So as often through progressive history, we have a bunch of middle-aged affluent, centrist men dictating to a group of young people (with a high proportion of women and minorities) how they should behave in their pursuit of political ends. If they are genuine about wanting what’s best for the left, they need to get out of the way, and stop punching down in the name of their own self-serving aggrandisement. 

The left and body sanctity

The central conceit of Politics for the New Dark Age is its rejection of a universal understanding of human nature. I posit that societies exist in evolutionary stable equilibria consisting of a mix of different personality types and that politics can largely be understood as a mechanism to generate dynamism and progress from the conflict between them. The rejection of universal rationality makes some uncomfortable; nowadays, I tend to point people with concerns towards Joshua Greene’s “Moral Tribes”, and Johnathan Haidt’s “The Righteous Mind”, both of which do a great job of introducing this concept to a general audience from positions of expertise in psychology. 

I have responded to Greene elsewhere; today’s blog will speculatively tackle one aspect of Haidt’s Moral Foundation theory. To re-summarise, Haidt posits that individuals have multiple moral system, some of which progressives and conservatives share (care/prevention of harm and fairness), and some of which they don’t (loyalty and respect for authority). I have argued elsewhere that politically salient personality cleavages (authoritarianism v libertarianism, progressive v conservative) can be understood as reflecting where these moral systems disagree, and that universal liberal social contract norms can be understood as reflecting where they converge.

The problem with sanctity

But where does Haidt's fifth category (‘sanctity’) fit into this scheme? Haidt himself often seems unsure, despite the central role it comes to assume for him in explaining the differences between progressives and conservatives. What is sanctity? From a biological perspective, sanctity simply reflects our innate avoidance of disgusting things, primarily as it relates to food, sex, and hygiene. The existence of such a mechanism makes evolutionary sense, as does its repurposing as part of a cultural mechanism. Rotten food tastes bad and you probably shouldn’t eat it. But beyond that, many cultures have complex food laws and rituals which embody local knowledge and expertise about food sources where the danger or opportunity is not intuitively obvious to individuals. Because moral systems create motivated action, the adaptive salience of such a mechanism is intuitively obvious.

Haidt claims that sanctity is of higher importance to conservatives than progressives. Conservatives tend to be obsessed with [sexual] purity, and a desire for cleanliness and order are important components of the conscientiousness trait which underlies political authoritarianism. And because the purpose of disgust is to motivate action, disgust and excitement are often strongly interlinked in human behaviour. Thus, it’s a cliché that many conservative figures who decry certain sexual practices in public find them exciting in private. We are aroused by moral violations, and that arousal sometimes finds expression in paradoxical ways.

Not just conservatives

What interests me, however, are manifestations of the sanctity trigger on the left. Unlike what Haidt believes, when you scratch the surface even just a little you find they’re widespread. Anti-vaccination paranoia is not merely a result of lack of education by fringe right-wingers, it’s also widespread amongst highly educated and socially-conscious people who are genuinely disgusted by the thought of injecting 'diseases' or 'chemicals' into their or their children’s body. Whether its concerns about ‘toxins’ in food, anti-GMO hysteria,  helicopter parenting, or a desire to consume only free-range eggs, some progressive stereotypes do in fact seem highly concerned with body sanctity. So what causes this? Is it yet more evidence for the so-called ‘quadratic hypothesis’, the mistaken theory that the far-left and far-right are fundamentally similar?

There was an interesting piece in the Atlantic in February which examined the issue. Concern about food sanctity, dietician Michelle Allison argues, is a manifestation of the existential fear of death (which also strongly motivates much political behaviour). Biologically, we are torn between “our desire to try new foods (neophilia) paired with our inherited fear of unknown foods (neophobia) that could turn out to be toxic.” Allison roots this in the so-called ‘Omnivore’s Dilemma’: as generalists, humans are presented with a potentially overwhelming variety of potential behaviours (Haidt uses the same metaphor).This contradiction between novelty-seeking and safety-seeking has obvious political parallels: some of us find freedom exciting, others find psychological comfort in traditional social and cultural rules that limit those choices, providing a sense of order and control. 

The 'Omnivore's dilemma' is thus functionally identical to the political divide between progressives (who believe that novelty makes society better off) and conservatives (who believe that novelty makes society worse off). My own hypothesis is that sanctity comprises both an 'internal' and 'external' vectors. The internal vector concerns the way in which the sanctity trigger motivates individual action; the external vector concerns the projection of those behaviours and standards on to others through the use of enforcement mechanisms such as punishment, gossip and shaming. Externally, the psychological links between sanctity, the desire to enforce order and conscientiousness seem rather obvious.

Therefore, the external, enforcement component of Haidt’s sanctity mechanism forms a part of the set of authoritarian personal and political behaviour traits – which, as you’ll know from Chapter I of Politics for the New Dark Age can manifest on both right and left. The political consequences of authoritarian sanctity are also common to both left and right: proponents of clean-living and clean-eating establish their superiority over those (economically less-advantaged) who cannot afford to do so, creating taboo words, behaviours and beliefs that become markers of social status. 

What I’d be interested in finding out is why the authoritarian left (with some notable exceptions) seems less interested in the sexual purity aspect of Haidt’s sanctity trigger. While the Soviet Union and communist China were/are far from embracing LGBT rights and sexual liberation, concerns about sexual behaviour have never formed a core proselytizing component of their political systems in the same way it has for right-wing regimes. Personally, I know plenty of sexually puritanical progressives, but they tend to keep it to themselves. The obvious exception to this are sex-negative and sex worker-exclusionary 'radical' feminists. What seems to be crucial is that they combine more conservative personal beliefs with strong authoritarian tendencies. Some have tried to claim Chomsky for this view, on the basis of this interview; although to me that doesn’t look like a well-formed intellectual position.

It would also be interesting to find out how those on the left with particular anxieties about body sanctity (i.e. anti-vaxxers, anti-GMO types) scored on other metrics of political authoritarianism. Does sanctity correlate with other metrics of conservativism and authoritarism as I posit, or is is independent? Research for another day!

On "Globalists" and Nationalists

One result of the New Political "Dark Age" is that globalisation is once again much in the news. Yes, we are once again re-living the 30-year old, asinine debate over whether trade, openness and integration are good for us or not. My own answer to this is “yes, obviously”. The more important political question is how globalisation occurs, who manages it and who benefits from it. I think it would be hardly surprising for a progressive to answer that the answer to those questions are “undemocratically, by existing elites and largely for their own private benefit”. Both sides of the globalisation debate mistake a desirable end state [globalisation] with a particular set of policies [i.e. the neoliberal, free market consensus]. It suits globalisation's advocates on the right to argue that their policy prescriptions are the only way to reach that end goal [it isn't]. Equally, opponents of the neoliberal consensus often mistakenly make the argument that it is globalisation per se that is bad [it isn't].

In this context, a number of commentators, including reputable press outlets, have begun talking about political divides in contemporary democracy as a fight between “globalists” on one side and “nationalists” on the other. The former are characterised by a default pro-globalisation stance, the latter by the opposite. Let us put aside, for now, the fact that this language is often used as an anti-semitic dog-whistle by the alt-right and enthusiastically exploited by the Trump campaign. Is is a valid way of constructing a political spectrum?

On the intellectual front, my friend @AriSharp wrote a prescient piece on this in November of last year. Ari’s basic case is that the globalist/nationalist divide does away with the traditional differences between left and right, and creates a new alliance between the nationalist left and nationalist right opposed to globalisation. Ari argues that political parties must pick a side, since an internally-consistent policy platform cannot include both positions. Ari's position strikes me as a form of 'radical centrism': the type of politics that argues that cosmopolitan leaders like Turnbull, Clinton and Macron are always preferable to Sanders, Corbyn or Melenchon, regardless of their other policy positions or merits, merely because of their relative cosmopolitanism. 

A similar piece of work is currently being promoted by the Australian National University and the Fairfax papers in Australia: the Political Persona Project. Arguing that old political labels are rapidly changing, the researchers divide Australians into seven ‘new political tribes’ which they argue better model political preferences (complete with cutesy, Facebook-shareable cartoons). For example, my left-wing friends on Facebook generally fall into either the ‘activist egalitarian’ or ‘progressive cosmopolitan’ ‘tribes’. Let’s give the researchers the benefit of the doubt, and presume that these tribes are based on relevant research and describe real clusters of political personality in Australia. Is this a useful typology? Is it more salient than my own libertarian/authoritarian and progressive/conservative framework (See Chapter I of "Politics for the New Dark Age")?

First of all, let’s dispense with the trope of a left-right nationalist coalition as yet another instance of the tired political caricature that left and right are somehow similar and that the political spectrum ‘curves around’ at its extremes. I address the so-called ‘quadratic hypothesis’ or ‘horseshoe hypothesis’ and debunk it in Chapter I of my book.

Secondly, let’s also note that trying to split your political adversary’s coalition is a political strategy with a tried and true pedigree. Certainly, if I were running a left-wing political party at the moment I would be exploiting the divide between more neoliberal conservatives and anti-establishment nationalists for all it's worth. And let’s not forget that conservatives have been trying, often successfully, to wedge the left on trade for longer than I’ve been alive. This is old news.

Thirdly, it should also be acknowledged that the labels of globalist and nationalist are not, as far as I’m aware, seen perjoratively by the people to whom it is applied. Advocates for globalisation are proud of their elite status and the self-evident benefits that they are able to access as connected global citizens.  Indeed, being pro-globalisation is a mark of a tribal identity. Likewise, the new nationalists see their retreat intro "blood and soil" tribalisms denoted by narrow markers of race and religion as both rational and moral. The globalist-nationalist dichotomy is a useful tool for both sides to distinguish themselves from their opponents and shape the boundaries and content of their own political tribe.

Yet despite the conceptual flaws, there may be real ideological differences here, and the question we have to answer is whether these are ideological differences, or something else pretending to be ideology. There are valid reasons one might hypothesise a motivational basis to these tribes. Cosmopolitan elites are much more likely to be satisfied with the current status quo in highly developed nations, and thus resistant to impulses towards either progressive or conservative change. And cosmopolitans may be more open to new experiences and more comfortable with uncertainty than either right-conservatives or left-centrists. 

Looking again at the Political Persona Project, the obvious non-ideological difference between "activist egalitarians" and "progressive cosmopolitans" is class. Progressive cosmopolitans are far more likely to have a tertiary income and live in the cities; a person earning more than AU$90,000 is twice as likely to identify as part of this tribe than someone earning $50,000 (which is still well above the median wage). Ari similarly argues that nationalists are more likely to be manufacturing workers, those on low-incomes and self-funded retirees. A developmental and contextual understanding of political personality could certainly suppose that environmental differences between social-economic classes have an influence on political preferences. The process of globalisation has created winners and losers, and the latter have greater claims to be frustrated by the status quo. 

So I would argue that we’re actually seeing a frame being placed around class differences in political outlook, and calling that an ideological divide. In other words, an argument that class preferences trump a more comprehensive ideology - an argument from identity.  But the divergence in political behaviour between elites and non-elites is not a novel observation. Class membership is only one factor shaping political alignment, which otherwise shows significant individual and cultural variation. Thus, it's not clear to me that the globalist/nationalist divide really is highly salient to understanding modern politics, as Ari suggests. Rather, it seems that those issues 'explained' by the divide are the ones that tribalist elite political commentators (on both the 'globalist' and 'nationalist' sides) are most preoccupied by (such as trade, migration and climate change), but which affect the daily lived experience of relatively few people in the short-term.  

In the end, I don't think the globalist/nationalist divide is a framing with any utility. It goes without saying that political strategies, for either side of politics, that are not predicated first and foremost on the construction of broad ideological coalitions across class identity lines are doomed to failure. For their part, the peddlers of the globalists/nationalist framing have no interest in or capability to get us out of the New Political Dark Age: rather they appear intent, either by accident or design, on keeping us there.