Joshua Mitchell, a Tocquevillean political philosopher with an impressive grounding in theology, has written a penetrating analysis of identity politics in the modern age. Like John McWhorter and Andrew Sullivan, he correctly views today’s dominant ideology of left-modernism—what Wesley Yang terms the “successor ideology”—to be a form of political religion.
He uses the biblical categories of innocence and transgression to powerful effect to dissect the crusading left-liberal ideology that underpins America’s current malaise. In the left-modernist belief system, the innocent victims—members of historically-disadvantaged groups—are hallowed. On the other side of the sacred-profane divide are straight white men, the transgressors. The responsibility of transgressors is to serve as allies to the innocents, helping tear down “the civilizational temple they say the transgressors have built over the centuries… with the unearned suffering of the innocents.” Whites who scapegoat other whites prove their moral worth as “good” whites who have forsaken their bad old ways. Indeed, as Mitchell observes, what we often call virtue signaling is actually innocence signaling that never quite succeeds.
No wonder some white left-modernist fundamentalists have engaged in the public ritual of bending the knee and bowing before People of Color while wearing symbolic shackles. Unfortunately they will never receive absolution, but must exist in a state of permanent penance. Meanwhile historically disadvantaged groups—the innocents—can never move on, but are supposed to exist in a state of permanent rage over past wrongs.
The Bible teaches that there are innocents and sinners, but that the fallen can achieve redemption. The settling of accounts takes place in the cosmic realm, rather than through a quest for retribution and reparations in the present. By contrast, the religion of social justice posits fixed, group-based, categories of sinners and saints, with no possible route to salvation for the fallen white man, and a demand for scores be settled in the here and now. It is, as Mitchell writes, a “ghastly and unworkable manifestation of Christianity.”
The result is that many among the white and/or male scapegoats rebel, driving polarization. Resentment at the unequal treatment of their group identity in culture and politics is tinder for the flame of populists like Trump willing to transgress left-modernist “PC” speech restrictions which prevent mainstream politicians from articulating these sentiments. Meanwhile minorities’ agency and achievement, such as black Americans’ history of mutual aid, social respectability and entrepreneurship between Emancipation and the mid twentieth century, is airbrushed from memory. There is an analogous attempt to rip American slavery out of context, ignoring the ubiquity of slavery in world history, where black people were also perpetrators and whites victims. The result is a highly skewed totalizing narrative which pits the omnipotent white man against hapless black victims. This strips away black pride and disempowers contemporary African-Americans, priming them for a grievance-based story of failure that harms their ability to acquire the self-help mindset required to achieve economic equality.
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