The Heritage Foundation is holding an event next week to discuss “identity politics,” and specifically why identity politics is bad. Here’s how they describe the premise of the discussion:
Identity politics directly threatens the achievements of the Enlightenment, the Founding and the Civil Rights Movement, from freedom of speech to freedom of association and conscience. By partitioning America into ethnic, racial and sexual groups with antagonistic demands and grievances, Identity Politics returns us to the Plessy decision legalizing separate but supposedly equal treatment and it recalls the Dred Scott era of some Americans being less than citizens.
Speaking of ethnic partition, here’s the roster of participants:
One of the participants, to be fair, comes from Cuba. And Andrew Sullivan is an immigrant. He went back to England for a visit earlier this year, and that trip home inspired some thoughts on identity and politics:
For those whose self-understanding is wrapped up in bluebells and tea, in English accents divided solely by class and region, in a nearly all-white and all-English country for centuries, these times are culturally terrifying….
Home is indeed where one starts from. Change it too rapidly and it will disintegrate. We have been fools on mass immigration, we have been fools for preventing an honest debate about the benefits and drawbacks of diversity, and we have been contemptible in our contempt for so many of our fellow citizens
Heather Mac Donald, meanwhile, was lately seen arguing that the solution to urban crime is to eliminate black majorities via gentrification and to let the cops have their way with the black people who remain. Was someone just saying something about “antagonistic demands”?
But these people aren’t being brought in to debate or defend their positions on inter-ethnic relations:
The only question that remains is: Is there anything that can be done at this point? An ideologically diverse panel of intellectuals from across the country will help us sort out solutions.
“Ideological diversity” is a heck of a description of a panel whose membership, end to end, agrees that there is only one question left to be asked about the topic at hand. Imagine, the chance to hear from the writer of “Dubious Diversity” and the author of The Diversity Delusion, in the same place!
