The Compound Fractures of Identity Politics

City Journal ^ | Winter 2021 | Karl Zinsmeister

[karpov]

Every citizen fatality in the custody of a government official—like George Floyd’s excruciating death in Minneapolis—deserves a solemn response and ultimate accounting, including both criminal investigation and broader assessment. The fear and fury flowing from recent law-enforcement casualties, however, have been inflamed and manipulated by opportunists to produce something much more sweeping.

Hard facts and data about our systems of law and policing are being ignored. Emotional hysteria is increasingly substituted for reasoned problem-solving. There is enormous pressure to conform to approved ideological assertions, and people expressing alternate views are often railroaded. Broad attacks on social order, widespread destruction of public and private property, and new waves of street crime have unfolded. There is open hostility toward the fundamentals of American justice and governance. It is now routinely claimed that “the United States government was founded on racist intellectual premises and economic practices that institutionalized oppression of people of color that continues to the present day” (to quote the Seattle Public Schools). U.S. society as a whole is characterized as a “system of oppression.”

In consequence, our classical liberal traditions of fierce competition of ideas, mutual tolerance, political compromise, and individual freedom are visibly withering. Yet there is scant resistance to any of this among elites. Journalists, social leaders, academics, clergy, businesspeople, and many politicians show little awareness that essential American principles are being washed away. Liberal leaders and liberalism itself are being superseded by forces much more inflexible and despotic.

At the root of our current crisis lies the dogma of identity politics. Created on university campuses and incubated among the young for more than a generation, this ideology now surges through the media, commerce, the nonprofit sector, and government.

[beancounter13]

like George Floyd’s excruciating death in Minneapolis

Sorry. Lost me right there. George Floyd committed suicide. Excruciating? Maybe, but it was by his own hand.

What part of “Lethal dosage of Fetanyl” can people not understand?

[ClearCase_guy]

George Floyd is the new Emmett Till. Just a tool to exploit so that they can push their agenda. The Nazis did it with Horst Wessel. The Left does it with people too. They love their martyrs. I don’t read past the reference to Floyd. The guy was a loser who killed himself with a drug overdose.

[Liz]

At the root of our current crisis lies the dogma of "identity politics." Created on university campuses and incubated among
the young for more than a generation, this ideology now surges through the media, commerce, the nonprofit sector, and government.

U.S. society as a whole is characterized as a “system of oppression.”

It is now routinely claimed that “the US government was founded on racist intellectual premises and economic practices
that institutionalized oppression of people of color that continues to the present day” (Seattle Public Schools teaching).

[Thommas]

like George Floyd’s excruciating death in Minneapolis.

I fully agree with your observation, Beanounter13. All evidence in the County Coroner's report be damned.
(I especially found the finding of St. Floyd's lungs weighing 1.5 times normal particularly revealing,
indicating dry land drowning.)

Little mention is made these days of how the murder trial is progressing.