Washington Monthly - September/October 2012 - 101

on political books

Identity Politics Revisited
By most accounts, economic issues are the real core of politics, and social issues are a distraction. A historian begs to differ.
By Mark Schmitt

ost of the stories we have told about American politics in recent decades have tended to divide the world between social issues and economic issues, and to focus on the interaction between them. A familiar story about liberalism, for example, holds that it was distracted by “identity politics”—the demands of minorities, women, and gay men and lesbians for rights and equality—and lost sight of the broad New Deal coalition of workingclass white voters (particularly men) and the common ground of economic issues. This was explored most fully in Eric Alterman and Kevin Mattson’s recent history, The Cause, but was expressed most crudely in 1972 by George Meany, then president of the AFL-CIO, at the Democratic convention: “We listened to the Gay Lib people. We heard from the abortionists. But there were no steelworkers, no pipefitters ... no plumbers.” Four decades later, Thomas Frank, in What’s the Matter With Kansas, argued that the political right succeeded by distracting low-income white voters with social issues, such as opposition to same-sex marriage, in order to co-opt their votes for reactionary economic policies. More recently, the tide has turned, and many social or culture war issues (with the exception of abortion rights) now seem like winners for liberals. In 2009, Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin of the Center for American Progress foresaw “a likely diminution in the culture wars that have bedeviled American politics for so long.” In place of social issues, “we are likely to see more attention paid to health care, energy, and education”—that is, the core economic agenda. Republican nominee Mitt Romney has attempted to maneuver around staggeringly unpopular GOP positions, such as opposition to contraception. Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels’s call for a “truce” in the culture wars doomed his own political future, but only because he said out loud what Romney, and what’s left of the Republican establishment, plainly think. All of these accounts of recent politics, different as they are, share a common perspective: implicitly or explicitly, they treat economic issues as the real core of politics, while the claims of women, ethnic and racial minorities, and gay men and lesbians are peripheral. Whether issues of social and cultural identity are manipulated by the right or pulling on the left, they are seen as diversions from the real “who gets what” of politics. In his new book, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s, Robert O. Self, an associate professor of history at Brown, rewrites this story from its most basic assumptions. For Self, the author of an acclaimed account of integration and backlash in Oakland, California, the nature of the family, the role of women, the status of gay men and lesbians, and other subjects dismissed as “identity politics” or “social issues” are not peripheral at all, but unavoidably central to recent American politics. As Self puts it in his conclusion, “the politics of gender, sexuality, and the family since the 1960s have not been issues inserted into the public life of the nation. Rather, they have been one of the central grounds on which this public life itself has been constituted.” Self sees recent politics as a choice between a conception of the family as “adaptive and sociological,” including one-parent, unmarried two-parent, same-sex-parent families, and nonmarital sexual relationships in all their variety, and one that is “archetypal,” what former Senator Rick Santorum calls “Mom and Dad families,” with deep assumptions about gender roles and responsibilities at work and home.

All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s
by Robert O. Self Hill and Wang, 528 pp.

Washington Monthly

101

Washington Monthly - September/October 2012

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