In her 1989 landmark decision in City of Richmond v. Croson, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor criticized identity politics by pointing out the behavior of black politicians who had become a majority of that city’s council seats. Richmond certainly had an ugly history of discrimination against blacks, but now had created 30 percent contracting quotas for minority businesses. O’Connor declared that strict judicial scrutiny was required whenever a political majority used race to disadvantage a political minority.
If that were not the law, she concluded: “The dream of a Nation of equal citizens where race is irrelevant to personal opportunity and achievement would be lost in a mosaic of shifting preferences based on inherently immeasurable claims of past wrongs.” Although there were ongoing disputes about specific contracting policies, there were few public disagreements in that era about the fundamental principle that Americans of every race should have equal rights. After all, that is how the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment is written and that principle is the framework of all subsequent civil rights law.
Mike Gonzalez’s timely new book, “The Plot to Change America,” describes how our aspiration of granting all persons equal rights has been submerged by a form of identity politics that transforms some citizens into political, legal, racial, and ethnic categories demanding proportional representation and sometimes reparations.
The Return of Tribalism
According to Gonzalez, the Angeles T. Arredondo senior fellow on E Pluribus Unum at The Heritage Foundation, the emergence of the current form of identity politics has emerged from two different elite initiatives.
The first influence he traces to the crisis among cultural Marxist philosophers. Their fundamental thesis was to see the world as the conflict between oppressors and the oppressed. Marx’s traditional theory of conflict between capitalists and proletarians, however, fizzled out after it led to tyranny and did not produce the desired overthrow of the existing world order.
So theorists such as Antonio Gramsci and later members of the Institute for Social Research at Frankfurt began to emphasize the oppression of members of certain groups (racial minorities, women, and later persons who determined their own gender) and to advocate post–modernism’s denial of objectivity. After many of the Frankfurt School leaders escaped Nazi Germany to the United States, they began the critical theory movement. To end oppression, patriarchy, monogamy, capitalism, and even the concept of finding truth and practicing individual virtues became the enemy.
These ideas became very fashionable on many campuses and are now mainstays of leftist politics. It was Herbert Marcuse, in his 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance,” who argued that free speech should be denied to those who did not actively support political platforms of peace, justice, and freedom for all accompanied by government benefits for the poor, weak, and disabled. Essentially, “Repressive Tolerance” is the oxymoron that governs who can speak and what can be debated on many American campuses today.
The second influence comes from federal bureaucratic changes supported by foundation and academic elites, emerging from tough behind the scenes political bargaining almost invisible to the general public. His research on this problem is extensive and original. In chapter 6, Gonzalez focuses on Census Bureau and Office of Management and Budget decisions, which he argues use an anachronistic one-drop blood rule to classify people, reducing the non-Hispanic white population in the county.
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