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The Plot to Change America: How Identity Politics is Dividing the Land of the Free
The Plot to Change America exposes the myths that help identity politics perpetuate itself. This book will reveal what really has happened, explain why it is urgent to change course, and offer a strategy to do so. Though we should not fool ourselves into thinking it will be easy to eliminate identity politics, we should not overthink it, either. Identity politics relies on the creation of groups, and then on giving people incentives to adhere to them. If we eliminate group-making and the enticements, we can get rid of identity politics.
The first myth that this book will expose is that identity politics is a grassroots movement, when from the beginning it has been, and continues to be, an elite project. For too long, we have lived with the fairytale that America has organically grown into a nation gripped by victimhood and identitarian division; that it is all the result of legitimate demands by minorities for recognition or restitutions for past wrongs. The second myth is that identity politics is a response to the demographic change this country has undergone since immigration laws were radically changed in 1965. Another myth that we are told is that to fight these changes is as depraved as it is futile, since by 2040, America will be a minority-majority country anyway. This book will help to explain that none of these things are true.
The first myth that this book will expose is that identity politics is a grassroots movement, when from the beginning it has been, and continues to be, an elite project. For too long, we have lived with the fairytale that America has organically grown into a nation gripped by victimhood and identitarian division; that it is all the result of legitimate demands by minorities for recognition or restitutions for past wrongs. The second myth is that identity politics is a response to the demographic change this country has undergone since immigration laws were radically changed in 1965. Another myth that we are told is that to fight these changes is as depraved as it is futile, since by 2040, America will be a minority-majority country anyway. This book will help to explain that none of these things are true.
274 pages, Kindle Edition
First published July 28, 2020
83 people are currently reading
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June 27, 2021
I had so many notes for this book, which is why the review took so long in coming. It’s an excellent book and truly a must-read.
The book covers the history of identity politics (which has become so pernicious lately), why it came about, and why it’s harmful. Identity politics seeks to divide people in groups based on superficial physical characteristics. It tells them they are victims who have no control over their lives. Then its purveyors get rich off of it all, and everybody is worse off because they stop trying to achieve and lose the self-satisfaction of personal reliance and personal success.
Identity politics activists (“community organizers”) turned American values into “white” values to discourage their oppressed groups from valuing hard work, family life, and a sense of community. If any minority succeeds on their own, they’re accused of being traitors or of having a “false consciousness.” How is that not more sinister and oppressive than letting people choose their own way in life?
The roots are in Marxism, which at its core is a strategy of divide and conquer: Divide people, make them resent each other, and then I can rule them. Identity politics forces stereotypes on people (something my generation always found highly offensive). It rejects everything about the Enlightenment, and I don’t get why it isn’t so blindingly obviously false.
It’s well-written in an easy, engaging style. It was hard to put down—not an easy feat for this genre. (There are some typos.)
===============================
Although the white male, especially the white male Christian, is constantly said to be privileged, he is in fact habitually ridiculed in entertainment, the news, and academia, and is at a disadvantage when it comes to the division of spoils. Any narrative that purportedly advances white males’ well-being—what professors of grievance studies call “the hegemonic narrative”—must be crushed and replaced with the counternarrative. The speed with which it has become acceptable to demand that all members of a supposed group—never mind that it’s ridiculous to lump all white men into a single, homogeneous group—permanently don sackcloth and ashes is bewildering. Identity as a member of any other group, however, confers a claim to victimhood, which has been elevated above individual accomplishment as the wellspring of self-worth and recognition. ... It never dawns on the purveyors of these notions that their efforts could have the opposite effect of what they say they intend. By ascribing all these supposed privileges to the white, Christian, heterosexual male, the purveyors of identity politics are endowing him with almost superhuman qualities. To insist that all others are disfavored victims is to mentally subjugate them.
Steven Pinker:
Identity politics is the syndrome in which people’s beliefs and interests are assumed to be determined by their membership in groups, particularly their sex, race, sexual orientation, and disability status. Its signature is the tic of preceding a statement with “As a,” as if that bore on the cogency of what was to follow. Identity politics originated with the fact that members of certain groups really were disadvantaged by their group membership , which forged them into a coalition with common interests: Jews really have a reason to form the Anti-Defamation League. But when it spreads beyond the target of combating discrimination and oppression, it is an enemy of reason and Enlightenment values, including, ironically, the pursuit of justice for oppressed groups. For one thing, reason depends on there being an objective reality and universal standards of logic.
Our leaders undertake this societal structuring through a carrot-and-stick approach. First we force Americans to divide themselves into ethnic groups through the decennial census and other such means; then we imbue them with grievances about what white, heterosexual, Christian men have done to their particular group; and then we tempt them into identifying with such groups in perpetuity through a system of entitlements like affirmative action, set-asides in contracts, racial gerrymandering, and so on. This prevents the nation from following the more normal approach, the one that has always obtained, which has been the process of ethnic attrition. It also prevents the gathering of tribes into a nation, the progression that the Israeli philosopher Yoram Hazony describes as the precondition for nation building.
Both [Edward R.] Roybal and [Henry] Wallace attracted strong support from radical elements, including communists and community organizers who saw the Mexican American as a potential source of political power, if only he could be organized around feelings of racial grievances.
Prejudice has been a loaded topic of conversation in any Mexican-American community. Indeed, merely calling Mexican-Americans a “minority” and implying that the population is the victim of prejudice and discrimination has caused irritation among many who prefer to believe themselves indistinguishable white Americans. ... There are light-skinned Mexican-Americans who have never experienced the faintest discrimination in public facilities, and many with ambiguous surnames have also escaped the experiences of the more conspicuous members of the group. Finally, there is the inescapable face that … even comparatively dark-skinned Mexicans … could get service even in the most discriminatory parts of Texas a generation or two ago. ([Leo] Grebler, [Joan] Moore, and [Ralph] Guzman)
It is incumbent on us at this point to pause to take in what exactly the Ford Foundation-funded UCLA researchers are lamenting. Their own survey had discovered that Mexican Americans’ lived experiences showed them that they weren’t passive victims of invidious, structural discrimination, much less racial animus. They felt they had agency, and they owned their failures, which—their experience told them—were remediable through individual actions (such as dressing and speaking well), not group mobilization. Their traits were “achieved,” or acquired through their individual actions, not “ascribed,” or permanent and set at birth.
Gonzalez observed that, “not long after the Southwest Council of La Raza opened for business, it gave $110,000 to the Mexican-American Unity Council of San Antonio; this group was apparently invented for the purpose of receiving the grant,” which “has not given any assistance that I know of to bring anybody together” and existed only to “promote the rather odd and I might say generally unaccepted and unpopular views of its directors.” On another occasion, speaking generally on ethnic solidarity, Gonzalez rejected it as a “new racism [that] demands an allegiance to race above all else.” In an early instance of “cancel culture,” Gonzalez was pilloried for saying these things. The Texas organizer Jose Angel Gutierrez accused Gonzalez of the worst of all crimes, holding “gringo tendencies,” what later critical theorists would call “false consciousness.” Gutierrez argued that Chicanos should become “a culturally separate people from the gringo.”
According to a 2012 Pew Research study, “the Asian-American label itself doesn’t hold much sway with Asian Americans”: 62 percent describe themselves by their country of origin, just 19 percent describe themselves as Asian American, and 14 percent just call themselves American. Whey they marry, Asian Americans tend to do so within their national-origin group, and when they marry out, they tend to marry whites, not other Asians. As Wesley Yang observes, “All races are, to varying degrees, artificial constructs. The ‘Asian-American’ identity is an artificial construct that scarcely anyone claims. ... Such a confected identity, imposed from above by political entrepreneurs and the government, does not mean anything coherent to the vast majority of those to whom it ostensibly applies.”
The very same elite schools that would indoctrinate these young people into the view that America is a racist society are now acting in a racist manner to these same Asian Americans. Research that has come to light since a group of Asian American students, Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), sued Harvard University in 2017, demonstrates that these applicants are discriminated against when they apply to Harvard and other elite universities, entry to which is an important rung on the ladder of success in this country. The data, moreover, is strong that this discrimination against Asian American applicants is due to the very diversity goals and group rights that moved such organizations as the AIA to petition for inclusion into the Asian collective in the first place. Elite colleges are limiting the number of Asian American applicants granted admission—who, if objective criteria such as academic achievements, test scores, and extracurricular activities were to be considered alone, would be deserving of acceptance letters—because they are Asian. Admissions boards have noticed the success of these students, but they’re looking for other minority students in the name of diversity.
(Despite) brutal oppression, racial hatred, and open discrimination over the years … today, Asian Americans are among the most prosperous, well-educated, and successful ethnic groups in America. What gives? It couldn’t possibly be that they maintained solid two-parent family structures, had social networks that looked after one another, placed enormous emphasis on education and hard work, positive ones, could it? It couldn’t be that all whites are not racists or that the American dream still lives?” (Andrew Sullivan)
Asian Americans have succeeded in precisely the way that Gramsci, Marcuse, and [Yuiji] Ichioka despised, through individual action, striving, and aspirational effort. They have succeeded not by copying the Red Guard radicals of the 1960s. Their success gives the lie to all the leftist theories about how supposedly “subordinate” people succeed in America. More than any other group, they shred the notion that it was the immigrants who came in after 1965 who demanded the categorizing of races and ethnicity. With them, it was exactly the opposite.
There is one principle which pervades all the institutions of this country, and which must always operate as an obstacle to the granting of favors to new comers. This is a land, not of privileges, but of equal rights. ... Emigrants from Germany, therefore, or from elsewhere, coming here, are not to expect favors from the governments. They are to expect, if they choose to become citizens, equal rights with those of the natives of the country. (John Quincy Adams)
The first wave [of feminism], at the turn of the century, had sought to obtain rights that women had been denied, such as voting, divorce, and owning property. The second wave, in the 1950s and especially the 1960s, was a reaction to the first. To the members of the second wave, women hadn’t made the right choices after being given the right to divorce and vote—the overwhelming majority still married and stayed home to raise children! The reason women were making these bad choices, they held, was that they were psychologically trapped in the patriarchal culture—whether they realized it or not—and had to be “liberated”—whether they wanted it or not.
Women were at least 50 percent of the labor force in any area, and many women either chose to stay home or would decline to do certain jobs—say, roof repair; to officials in Nixon’s Labor Department, the inclusion of women in an order that intrusively required companies to demonstrate their efforts to hire members of protected minority groups made no sense. In 1970, Secretary of Labor James Hodgson wrote, “The work force pattern of women and racial minorities differs in significant respects. Many women do not seek employment. Practically all adult males do.” This sensible acknowledgment of reality enraged NOW.
The impact of NOW on the American family was direct. While policy thinkers from Oren Cass to Elizabeth Warren have blamed the steady demise of family formation in America on the fact that a typical man with a high school degree can no longer keep a family of four above the poverty line, not enough attention has been paid to the ideological attack that has been perpetrated on the family since the 1960s. ... A glance at any graph on the decline of marriage will reveal that the delta sharpens in 1970. ... Let’s not pretend that [Kate] Millett and other ideologues with a political agenda did not have the huge impact on society that they openly sought. The leftist elites have always understood the economic impact of marriage, the stability it offers to the spouses and their children. While they may agree with Engels, [Simone de] Beauvoir, Millett, and others that this stability must be smashed, they still want their children to go [to] Cornelle, get married, succeed, and product grandchildren. But these elites have been adept at using the popular culture to spread a different message among the less-well-off.
When gender is thought of as just a “social construct,” the idea that women are equal to men suddenly becomes shaky. The hard-won victories of the second wave, such as Title IX protections of women’s equal access to sports at schools and universities, increasingly have been turned on their head, as men saying they are women are claiming those protections. Women are now forced to compete against biological males, obviously putting them at a disadvantage. “After all,” Yenor writes, “women’s sports are based on the seemingly benighted assumption that there are women.” The idea that women have an identity as a class took a knock as well: in the twisted logic of identity politics, the notion that sex and gender are constructs undermines women’s very claim to an identity. ... States and localities try to outdo each other in establishing set-aside programs in contracting and hiring for people who identify as one of the categories in LGBT. Never mind that, on average, gay men earn more than straight men, and lesbians earn more than straight women, according to one study. “Disparity studies” are used to reveal instances of oppression for members of a certain category. ... Government contracts and employment opportunities being finite, this clearly sets up a competition in which groups previously considered as needing set-asides—racial or ethnic minorities and women—will lose out.
The College Fix reported on one such case of a doctoral student in the department of feminist studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Laura Tanner, a self-styled radical feminist and expert on “intersectionality,” found herself in the crosshairs of transgender students and “allies.” What were her sins? Her Twitter header image says it all: “A woman is someone with a female body and any personality … not a ‘female personality’ and any body. Any other definition is sexism.” Social media exploded as student after student denounced Tanner for her “transphobia.”
The ultimate goal of identity politics is not to protect gay families or little girls who want to grow up to [be] powerful, but to turn society upside down. As postmodernism has percolated out of the universities and into everyday life, this has finally become clear, and it irritates those who actually did believe that the goal of transforming American society through collectivist effort was to protect victims of oppression.
As it should be clear by now, the identity battles that have torn up society—from the early ones that NOW waged to the recent ones over unisex bathrooms, women’s sports, and pronouns, have not been about protecting women, gays, or anyone else, but about tearing society apart in order to install another system. The creation of identity groups … was all about destabilizing, or “problematizing” in the language of its entrepreneurs, all social norms.
To these two schools [Frankfurt School, postmodernism] we owe the view, so ubiquitous in our society today, that certain groups—workers, minorities, women, and others—are “marginalized,” and that these groups participate in their own oppression when they perpetuate the hegemonic metanarrative of the privileged. This is why students in American universities, and increasingly in secondary and even primary education as well, are taught the assimilation of immigrants is a capitulation to the oppressors. Both the Frankfurt School thinkers and the postmodernists believed that members of subordinate groups lack unity and foolishly put their faith in success through individual effort; instead, they need to be organized into a collective.
An anonymous “Woman Resident in Russia” wrote in the Atlantic in 1927 that, in one of the Soviet government’s first decrees, it “abolished the term ‘illegitimate children.’ This was done simply by equalizing the legal status of all children, whether born in wedlock or out of it,” so that the Soviet Union could “[boast] that Russia is the only country where there are no illegitimate children”; divorce was made to be “a matter of a few minutes, to be obtained at the request of either partner in a marriage.” The result was “chaos,” added the anonymous writer. She recounts men with multiple wives, uncared-for children forced onto the streets, rampant promiscuity, and other ills, to the point that the Soviets were induced to unto their changes and return to the status quo ante. Even Soviet commissars had a modicum of wisdom lacking today among American academics, activists, and political operatives.
Gramsci was not the first communist to understand that Marx had erred in thinking that the working class would spontaneously rise up and overthrow capitalism. Lenin, too, had come to believe that a revolutionary vanguard made up of intellectuals would have to instruct the proletariat on their oppression and guide them into toppling the bourgeoisie. Gramsci’s notion of cultural hegemonic oppression was an innovation without which the advances of the Left in America would not have been possible. One of his main targets was Christianity. ... Christianity offers hope, and therefore prevents a feeling a of desolation; one who has religious faith need not transfer his faith to an ideological vanguard indispensable for bringing about revolution.
===================
QUOTES CONTINUED IN COMMENTS
The book covers the history of identity politics (which has become so pernicious lately), why it came about, and why it’s harmful. Identity politics seeks to divide people in groups based on superficial physical characteristics. It tells them they are victims who have no control over their lives. Then its purveyors get rich off of it all, and everybody is worse off because they stop trying to achieve and lose the self-satisfaction of personal reliance and personal success.
Identity politics activists (“community organizers”) turned American values into “white” values to discourage their oppressed groups from valuing hard work, family life, and a sense of community. If any minority succeeds on their own, they’re accused of being traitors or of having a “false consciousness.” How is that not more sinister and oppressive than letting people choose their own way in life?
The roots are in Marxism, which at its core is a strategy of divide and conquer: Divide people, make them resent each other, and then I can rule them. Identity politics forces stereotypes on people (something my generation always found highly offensive). It rejects everything about the Enlightenment, and I don’t get why it isn’t so blindingly obviously false.
It’s well-written in an easy, engaging style. It was hard to put down—not an easy feat for this genre. (There are some typos.)
===============================
Although the white male, especially the white male Christian, is constantly said to be privileged, he is in fact habitually ridiculed in entertainment, the news, and academia, and is at a disadvantage when it comes to the division of spoils. Any narrative that purportedly advances white males’ well-being—what professors of grievance studies call “the hegemonic narrative”—must be crushed and replaced with the counternarrative. The speed with which it has become acceptable to demand that all members of a supposed group—never mind that it’s ridiculous to lump all white men into a single, homogeneous group—permanently don sackcloth and ashes is bewildering. Identity as a member of any other group, however, confers a claim to victimhood, which has been elevated above individual accomplishment as the wellspring of self-worth and recognition. ... It never dawns on the purveyors of these notions that their efforts could have the opposite effect of what they say they intend. By ascribing all these supposed privileges to the white, Christian, heterosexual male, the purveyors of identity politics are endowing him with almost superhuman qualities. To insist that all others are disfavored victims is to mentally subjugate them.
Steven Pinker:
Identity politics is the syndrome in which people’s beliefs and interests are assumed to be determined by their membership in groups, particularly their sex, race, sexual orientation, and disability status. Its signature is the tic of preceding a statement with “As a,” as if that bore on the cogency of what was to follow. Identity politics originated with the fact that members of certain groups really were disadvantaged by their group membership , which forged them into a coalition with common interests: Jews really have a reason to form the Anti-Defamation League. But when it spreads beyond the target of combating discrimination and oppression, it is an enemy of reason and Enlightenment values, including, ironically, the pursuit of justice for oppressed groups. For one thing, reason depends on there being an objective reality and universal standards of logic.
Our leaders undertake this societal structuring through a carrot-and-stick approach. First we force Americans to divide themselves into ethnic groups through the decennial census and other such means; then we imbue them with grievances about what white, heterosexual, Christian men have done to their particular group; and then we tempt them into identifying with such groups in perpetuity through a system of entitlements like affirmative action, set-asides in contracts, racial gerrymandering, and so on. This prevents the nation from following the more normal approach, the one that has always obtained, which has been the process of ethnic attrition. It also prevents the gathering of tribes into a nation, the progression that the Israeli philosopher Yoram Hazony describes as the precondition for nation building.
Both [Edward R.] Roybal and [Henry] Wallace attracted strong support from radical elements, including communists and community organizers who saw the Mexican American as a potential source of political power, if only he could be organized around feelings of racial grievances.
Prejudice has been a loaded topic of conversation in any Mexican-American community. Indeed, merely calling Mexican-Americans a “minority” and implying that the population is the victim of prejudice and discrimination has caused irritation among many who prefer to believe themselves indistinguishable white Americans. ... There are light-skinned Mexican-Americans who have never experienced the faintest discrimination in public facilities, and many with ambiguous surnames have also escaped the experiences of the more conspicuous members of the group. Finally, there is the inescapable face that … even comparatively dark-skinned Mexicans … could get service even in the most discriminatory parts of Texas a generation or two ago. ([Leo] Grebler, [Joan] Moore, and [Ralph] Guzman)
It is incumbent on us at this point to pause to take in what exactly the Ford Foundation-funded UCLA researchers are lamenting. Their own survey had discovered that Mexican Americans’ lived experiences showed them that they weren’t passive victims of invidious, structural discrimination, much less racial animus. They felt they had agency, and they owned their failures, which—their experience told them—were remediable through individual actions (such as dressing and speaking well), not group mobilization. Their traits were “achieved,” or acquired through their individual actions, not “ascribed,” or permanent and set at birth.
Gonzalez observed that, “not long after the Southwest Council of La Raza opened for business, it gave $110,000 to the Mexican-American Unity Council of San Antonio; this group was apparently invented for the purpose of receiving the grant,” which “has not given any assistance that I know of to bring anybody together” and existed only to “promote the rather odd and I might say generally unaccepted and unpopular views of its directors.” On another occasion, speaking generally on ethnic solidarity, Gonzalez rejected it as a “new racism [that] demands an allegiance to race above all else.” In an early instance of “cancel culture,” Gonzalez was pilloried for saying these things. The Texas organizer Jose Angel Gutierrez accused Gonzalez of the worst of all crimes, holding “gringo tendencies,” what later critical theorists would call “false consciousness.” Gutierrez argued that Chicanos should become “a culturally separate people from the gringo.”
According to a 2012 Pew Research study, “the Asian-American label itself doesn’t hold much sway with Asian Americans”: 62 percent describe themselves by their country of origin, just 19 percent describe themselves as Asian American, and 14 percent just call themselves American. Whey they marry, Asian Americans tend to do so within their national-origin group, and when they marry out, they tend to marry whites, not other Asians. As Wesley Yang observes, “All races are, to varying degrees, artificial constructs. The ‘Asian-American’ identity is an artificial construct that scarcely anyone claims. ... Such a confected identity, imposed from above by political entrepreneurs and the government, does not mean anything coherent to the vast majority of those to whom it ostensibly applies.”
The very same elite schools that would indoctrinate these young people into the view that America is a racist society are now acting in a racist manner to these same Asian Americans. Research that has come to light since a group of Asian American students, Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), sued Harvard University in 2017, demonstrates that these applicants are discriminated against when they apply to Harvard and other elite universities, entry to which is an important rung on the ladder of success in this country. The data, moreover, is strong that this discrimination against Asian American applicants is due to the very diversity goals and group rights that moved such organizations as the AIA to petition for inclusion into the Asian collective in the first place. Elite colleges are limiting the number of Asian American applicants granted admission—who, if objective criteria such as academic achievements, test scores, and extracurricular activities were to be considered alone, would be deserving of acceptance letters—because they are Asian. Admissions boards have noticed the success of these students, but they’re looking for other minority students in the name of diversity.
(Despite) brutal oppression, racial hatred, and open discrimination over the years … today, Asian Americans are among the most prosperous, well-educated, and successful ethnic groups in America. What gives? It couldn’t possibly be that they maintained solid two-parent family structures, had social networks that looked after one another, placed enormous emphasis on education and hard work, positive ones, could it? It couldn’t be that all whites are not racists or that the American dream still lives?” (Andrew Sullivan)
Asian Americans have succeeded in precisely the way that Gramsci, Marcuse, and [Yuiji] Ichioka despised, through individual action, striving, and aspirational effort. They have succeeded not by copying the Red Guard radicals of the 1960s. Their success gives the lie to all the leftist theories about how supposedly “subordinate” people succeed in America. More than any other group, they shred the notion that it was the immigrants who came in after 1965 who demanded the categorizing of races and ethnicity. With them, it was exactly the opposite.
There is one principle which pervades all the institutions of this country, and which must always operate as an obstacle to the granting of favors to new comers. This is a land, not of privileges, but of equal rights. ... Emigrants from Germany, therefore, or from elsewhere, coming here, are not to expect favors from the governments. They are to expect, if they choose to become citizens, equal rights with those of the natives of the country. (John Quincy Adams)
The first wave [of feminism], at the turn of the century, had sought to obtain rights that women had been denied, such as voting, divorce, and owning property. The second wave, in the 1950s and especially the 1960s, was a reaction to the first. To the members of the second wave, women hadn’t made the right choices after being given the right to divorce and vote—the overwhelming majority still married and stayed home to raise children! The reason women were making these bad choices, they held, was that they were psychologically trapped in the patriarchal culture—whether they realized it or not—and had to be “liberated”—whether they wanted it or not.
Women were at least 50 percent of the labor force in any area, and many women either chose to stay home or would decline to do certain jobs—say, roof repair; to officials in Nixon’s Labor Department, the inclusion of women in an order that intrusively required companies to demonstrate their efforts to hire members of protected minority groups made no sense. In 1970, Secretary of Labor James Hodgson wrote, “The work force pattern of women and racial minorities differs in significant respects. Many women do not seek employment. Practically all adult males do.” This sensible acknowledgment of reality enraged NOW.
The impact of NOW on the American family was direct. While policy thinkers from Oren Cass to Elizabeth Warren have blamed the steady demise of family formation in America on the fact that a typical man with a high school degree can no longer keep a family of four above the poverty line, not enough attention has been paid to the ideological attack that has been perpetrated on the family since the 1960s. ... A glance at any graph on the decline of marriage will reveal that the delta sharpens in 1970. ... Let’s not pretend that [Kate] Millett and other ideologues with a political agenda did not have the huge impact on society that they openly sought. The leftist elites have always understood the economic impact of marriage, the stability it offers to the spouses and their children. While they may agree with Engels, [Simone de] Beauvoir, Millett, and others that this stability must be smashed, they still want their children to go [to] Cornelle, get married, succeed, and product grandchildren. But these elites have been adept at using the popular culture to spread a different message among the less-well-off.
When gender is thought of as just a “social construct,” the idea that women are equal to men suddenly becomes shaky. The hard-won victories of the second wave, such as Title IX protections of women’s equal access to sports at schools and universities, increasingly have been turned on their head, as men saying they are women are claiming those protections. Women are now forced to compete against biological males, obviously putting them at a disadvantage. “After all,” Yenor writes, “women’s sports are based on the seemingly benighted assumption that there are women.” The idea that women have an identity as a class took a knock as well: in the twisted logic of identity politics, the notion that sex and gender are constructs undermines women’s very claim to an identity. ... States and localities try to outdo each other in establishing set-aside programs in contracting and hiring for people who identify as one of the categories in LGBT. Never mind that, on average, gay men earn more than straight men, and lesbians earn more than straight women, according to one study. “Disparity studies” are used to reveal instances of oppression for members of a certain category. ... Government contracts and employment opportunities being finite, this clearly sets up a competition in which groups previously considered as needing set-asides—racial or ethnic minorities and women—will lose out.
The College Fix reported on one such case of a doctoral student in the department of feminist studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Laura Tanner, a self-styled radical feminist and expert on “intersectionality,” found herself in the crosshairs of transgender students and “allies.” What were her sins? Her Twitter header image says it all: “A woman is someone with a female body and any personality … not a ‘female personality’ and any body. Any other definition is sexism.” Social media exploded as student after student denounced Tanner for her “transphobia.”
The ultimate goal of identity politics is not to protect gay families or little girls who want to grow up to [be] powerful, but to turn society upside down. As postmodernism has percolated out of the universities and into everyday life, this has finally become clear, and it irritates those who actually did believe that the goal of transforming American society through collectivist effort was to protect victims of oppression.
As it should be clear by now, the identity battles that have torn up society—from the early ones that NOW waged to the recent ones over unisex bathrooms, women’s sports, and pronouns, have not been about protecting women, gays, or anyone else, but about tearing society apart in order to install another system. The creation of identity groups … was all about destabilizing, or “problematizing” in the language of its entrepreneurs, all social norms.
To these two schools [Frankfurt School, postmodernism] we owe the view, so ubiquitous in our society today, that certain groups—workers, minorities, women, and others—are “marginalized,” and that these groups participate in their own oppression when they perpetuate the hegemonic metanarrative of the privileged. This is why students in American universities, and increasingly in secondary and even primary education as well, are taught the assimilation of immigrants is a capitulation to the oppressors. Both the Frankfurt School thinkers and the postmodernists believed that members of subordinate groups lack unity and foolishly put their faith in success through individual effort; instead, they need to be organized into a collective.
An anonymous “Woman Resident in Russia” wrote in the Atlantic in 1927 that, in one of the Soviet government’s first decrees, it “abolished the term ‘illegitimate children.’ This was done simply by equalizing the legal status of all children, whether born in wedlock or out of it,” so that the Soviet Union could “[boast] that Russia is the only country where there are no illegitimate children”; divorce was made to be “a matter of a few minutes, to be obtained at the request of either partner in a marriage.” The result was “chaos,” added the anonymous writer. She recounts men with multiple wives, uncared-for children forced onto the streets, rampant promiscuity, and other ills, to the point that the Soviets were induced to unto their changes and return to the status quo ante. Even Soviet commissars had a modicum of wisdom lacking today among American academics, activists, and political operatives.
Gramsci was not the first communist to understand that Marx had erred in thinking that the working class would spontaneously rise up and overthrow capitalism. Lenin, too, had come to believe that a revolutionary vanguard made up of intellectuals would have to instruct the proletariat on their oppression and guide them into toppling the bourgeoisie. Gramsci’s notion of cultural hegemonic oppression was an innovation without which the advances of the Left in America would not have been possible. One of his main targets was Christianity. ... Christianity offers hope, and therefore prevents a feeling a of desolation; one who has religious faith need not transfer his faith to an ideological vanguard indispensable for bringing about revolution.
===================
QUOTES CONTINUED IN COMMENTS
October 26, 2020
Identity politics is racist, meant to divide Americans. Mike Gonzalez reveals the history of identity politics, current state of identity politics, the need to dismantle identity politics, and how we must fight all of it in this book. I highly recommend this well researched, well written, informative book that calls all Americans to action.
December 14, 2020
Gonzalez makes a great case for why America is coming apart, not coming together. The new norm is "victim hood". You can always find a reason why you're being discriminated against. If it's not your race, maybe it's your religion, or gender, or any number of things that set you apart. He shows how identity politics is destroying this country. It is better to find what makes us the same instead of different.
August 9, 2022
It didn't really say anything new. If you like conservative pundits like the Daily Wire guys or Stephen Crowder then you've already heard everything this book has to say.
Also, like the Daily Wire guys, Gonzalez gets all up in arms over EVERYTHING diversity-related, even if there isn't anything wrong with it. Like what in the world is wrong with the phrase "diversity is our strength"? Yes, I think there are a lot of problems with Affirmative Action and I think victimhood-as-currency has become absolutely ridiculous. But like...you can't possibly have a problem with diversity itself...right? Why wouldn't diversity be our strength? See, when people start criticizing slogans like that, I get a little nervous. Anybody remember that awful debate between Jon Tron and Destiny? And Jon Tron had obviously consumed some alt-right content without realizing it and was parroting white supremicist talking points? So, sometimes conservatives start sliding further and further right, and they start really sly like "Look at all the problems other countries have with immigration!" and before you know it they're like "The Nordic countries are in great shape, because they're so ethnically homogoneous and Caucasain" and then you're sitting there like....fuck. They alt-righted me again.
I say this as someone who, I guarantee, is one of the most right-leaning people in the book community. I'm pro-life and I voted for your favorite bad Orange man. So, I'm definitely not writing any of this to suck-up to woke-ists. They can think I'm evil incarnate and I do not care.
I'm saying this because it is what I believe to be right and true. I think many conservatives form their opinions based on whatever THE OPPOSITE of progressive's opinion is. This means they often slide right away from classic conservative into icky icky shit.
I have a low tolerance for icky icky shit. Probably because I was dumb enough to get sucked into Milo Yianoupolis for a bit. Yes, I stopped following him when I realized the dude was racist and shit-talked Muslims constantly. I'm just saying, I'm kind of that flavor of gullible that I gotta be careful who I allow space in my brain.
When conservatives start complaining about diversity itself, I have to become very suspicious of them. I'm not letting another Milo take up space in my brain again.
Don't form your views without any thought. Don't form your views like "Well if progressives think X, then I must think the opposite of X!"
Just be a human and say what you believe to be right and true.
I believe "diversity is our strength" to be right and true.
B-But TEAL! The evil lefties will see they won a point!
This isn't a soccer match and you're already losing. There is no culture war. There's a culture massacre and progressives are the conquistadors.
Now that you understand you've been massacred, maybe you see why there's no darn point in arguing JUST to argue.
And you especially shouldn't do that when bad actors on the right-leaning side of things will use those arguments to feed people actual racism.
It's like this: anti-racism is stupid. That doesn't mean racism isn't also stupid.
If this is being a fence-sitter, I'll sit on this fence all damn day long. I can see everybody's stupid from up here.
It's like how Michael Knowles is constantly bitching about Juneteenth.
Why in the hell would anyone have an issue with Juneteenth?
What have you got to hate about the end of slavery and another Monday off?
If conservatives don't want to all get labeled alt-right, then maybe they should be the reasonable, center-right individuals they so desperately want to be seen as.
And that might just mean admitting when progressives are right.
It shouldn't be about "winning." It should be about having some moral principals and being intellectually genuine.
Also, like the Daily Wire guys, Gonzalez gets all up in arms over EVERYTHING diversity-related, even if there isn't anything wrong with it. Like what in the world is wrong with the phrase "diversity is our strength"? Yes, I think there are a lot of problems with Affirmative Action and I think victimhood-as-currency has become absolutely ridiculous. But like...you can't possibly have a problem with diversity itself...right? Why wouldn't diversity be our strength? See, when people start criticizing slogans like that, I get a little nervous. Anybody remember that awful debate between Jon Tron and Destiny? And Jon Tron had obviously consumed some alt-right content without realizing it and was parroting white supremicist talking points? So, sometimes conservatives start sliding further and further right, and they start really sly like "Look at all the problems other countries have with immigration!" and before you know it they're like "The Nordic countries are in great shape, because they're so ethnically homogoneous and Caucasain" and then you're sitting there like....fuck. They alt-righted me again.
I say this as someone who, I guarantee, is one of the most right-leaning people in the book community. I'm pro-life and I voted for your favorite bad Orange man. So, I'm definitely not writing any of this to suck-up to woke-ists. They can think I'm evil incarnate and I do not care.
I'm saying this because it is what I believe to be right and true. I think many conservatives form their opinions based on whatever THE OPPOSITE of progressive's opinion is. This means they often slide right away from classic conservative into icky icky shit.
I have a low tolerance for icky icky shit. Probably because I was dumb enough to get sucked into Milo Yianoupolis for a bit. Yes, I stopped following him when I realized the dude was racist and shit-talked Muslims constantly. I'm just saying, I'm kind of that flavor of gullible that I gotta be careful who I allow space in my brain.
When conservatives start complaining about diversity itself, I have to become very suspicious of them. I'm not letting another Milo take up space in my brain again.
Don't form your views without any thought. Don't form your views like "Well if progressives think X, then I must think the opposite of X!"
Just be a human and say what you believe to be right and true.
I believe "diversity is our strength" to be right and true.
B-But TEAL! The evil lefties will see they won a point!
This isn't a soccer match and you're already losing. There is no culture war. There's a culture massacre and progressives are the conquistadors.
Now that you understand you've been massacred, maybe you see why there's no darn point in arguing JUST to argue.
And you especially shouldn't do that when bad actors on the right-leaning side of things will use those arguments to feed people actual racism.
It's like this: anti-racism is stupid. That doesn't mean racism isn't also stupid.
If this is being a fence-sitter, I'll sit on this fence all damn day long. I can see everybody's stupid from up here.
It's like how Michael Knowles is constantly bitching about Juneteenth.
Why in the hell would anyone have an issue with Juneteenth?
What have you got to hate about the end of slavery and another Monday off?
If conservatives don't want to all get labeled alt-right, then maybe they should be the reasonable, center-right individuals they so desperately want to be seen as.
And that might just mean admitting when progressives are right.
It shouldn't be about "winning." It should be about having some moral principals and being intellectually genuine.
January 3, 2022
Gonzalez describes how the Left is using invented racial categories to splinter the American people and form factions that work for their destructive agenda. Gonzalez calls for a new civil rights movement that neglects the skin color of individuals. Right now people fight to be categorized as part of a minority group in order to receive benefits. I enjoy the parts in which Gonzalez discusses Gramsci and critical theory. The academic Left is trying to undermine the "hegemonic narrative" using cultural and media dominance in order to eviscerate American culture.
December 13, 2021
Gonzalez attempts to make a mountain of a molehill but only succeeds in creating a wet fart on paper.
March 8, 2022
Did you know that the only group actually being discriminated against today are white, Christian men?
I'm of the opinion that you should try to see things from the other side. Give the other opinions a fair hearing. But this...
I almost gave up during the introduction, but I figured I should hear his arguments before writing it off.
While I'm not saying I'll never read anything like this again to try to understand, I am saying that this book is utter rubbish. Starting with the "won't somebody think of the children"-shit where he talks about the evil headmaster forcing your poor daughter to learn about "critical theory", a much repeated "argument". Don't worry, your little angel is not being forced to listen to this actual American history. She's safe.
Then moving on to trying to convince the reader that everyone who's fought for civil rights are communists.
And on to how Hispanic and Asian people are not calling themselves this, but rather "Cuban" or "Chinese" or any other country, and how for example Indian people are high earners so no Asian people can be a part of a marginalised group. While saying that Indians are mostly first or second generation, he omits that these are often highly educated in their home country with skills and experience needed in the States, which gives them a higher income which gives the second generation a much better start in life.
And always with the whataboutisms. Other POC (again a term he doesn't like or see the point of, of course) don't have it as bad as black people, so they're not actually marginalised.
Oh, but he won't talk about black people and racism, because that actually happens and are therefore somehow not relevant for his book he says.
In conclusion: Twisting statistics, factually wrong, and illogical arguments made me give up after chapter one.
I'm of the opinion that you should try to see things from the other side. Give the other opinions a fair hearing. But this...
I almost gave up during the introduction, but I figured I should hear his arguments before writing it off.
While I'm not saying I'll never read anything like this again to try to understand, I am saying that this book is utter rubbish. Starting with the "won't somebody think of the children"-shit where he talks about the evil headmaster forcing your poor daughter to learn about "critical theory", a much repeated "argument". Don't worry, your little angel is not being forced to listen to this actual American history. She's safe.
Then moving on to trying to convince the reader that everyone who's fought for civil rights are communists.
And on to how Hispanic and Asian people are not calling themselves this, but rather "Cuban" or "Chinese" or any other country, and how for example Indian people are high earners so no Asian people can be a part of a marginalised group. While saying that Indians are mostly first or second generation, he omits that these are often highly educated in their home country with skills and experience needed in the States, which gives them a higher income which gives the second generation a much better start in life.
And always with the whataboutisms. Other POC (again a term he doesn't like or see the point of, of course) don't have it as bad as black people, so they're not actually marginalised.
Oh, but he won't talk about black people and racism, because that actually happens and are therefore somehow not relevant for his book he says.
In conclusion: Twisting statistics, factually wrong, and illogical arguments made me give up after chapter one.
August 15, 2020
And like any Totalitarian country, the US should go united blindly towards the enemies named by Big Brother.
October 13, 2021
I only read part 1 of the book because that was the only section that I got the book for and it gave me the necessary information to do further research. Based on what I have read, It should be titled "Identity Theft: How yesterday's White people steal from Black descendants of American chattel slavery via bogus grievances". These non Black groups show that collectively they are thieves and just want to keep oppression of American Black people. How can one try to use the American Black struggle as a way to gain a foothold into the government pocket is beyond. The more telling part of it shows that both conservative and liberal factions of this country supports the theft being that neither group collectively has called any of these peoples out on their nonsense. These groups are able to get SPECIFIC set asides from the government that Black descendants of American slavery still have not received. Black people's support get lumped in VAGUE minority programs with everyone who can claim minority status. These people and their issues should never be compared to American Black people because all of these groups were LEGALLY White before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and NEVER faced any government sanctioned discrimination on a state or federal level in this country. Anyone that even supports their claims of should be ashamed of themselves.
July 6, 2021
This is a must read. The author describes the beginning of this movement as the farm workers in California beginning to organize. He writes about how the identity politics has morphed from organizing around ideals to a business that fails its members while lining the pockets of the elite leaders. Can you say BLM. The book goes on to develop the feeling of victim hood that is preach constantly to its members; to the media; and government officials. He shows how they must grow their organizations but not get too large to become a majority thus losing their status of victims. We see that today as the LBGQ etc keeps adding letters to represent another group of “victims “. He shows how the country is reverting back to becoming tribes. One against another as they each jockey for more funding or special treatment from the majority. You will read how that majority changes depending on the “tribe”; the circumstances; or their goals. Of course their goals are never specific or measurable. Yet he leaves the reader with the ways to change this destructive force.
November 23, 2021
Very little hyperbole and very much packed with real facts. If you want to know what has been going on in our country over the last 70+ years that brought us to this point, this is a must-read. If you wonder just how organized the "progressive" movement is, this is a must-read. No matter which side you are on, this is valuable information.
January 9, 2021
Well worth slogging through. Gonzalez weaves a coherent thread of intellectual history from Marx/Engles through to Marcuse and Angela Davis. I found it an eye opener and very helpful to my thinking.
September 13, 2021
And I’m done!!! Everyone is allowed to be oppressed apart from me: wah wah
December 13, 2021
Useful history of how a lot of the ethnic categories are made up.
May 18, 2023
It's shocking, and heartbreaking, to know there is such a discerning effort to destroy everything good about America.
May 7, 2024
A must read for current western societal analysis
May 9, 2022
Have not finished yet
December 29, 2022
Excellent and very well articulated account of the rise of identity politics in the United States over the past 50-100 years. It focuses a lot on the way the government organizes its people into different demographics for political gain.
May 24, 2021
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The Plot to Change America:
How Identity Politics is Dividing the Land of the Free
by Mike Gonzalez,
published in 2020.
OVERVIEW:
...exposes the myths that help identity politics perpetuate itself.
This book reveals what has really happened, explains why it is urgent to change course, and offers a strategy to do so. Though we should not fool ourselves into thinking that it will be easy to eliminate identity politics, we should not overthink it, either. Identity politics relies on the creation of groups and then on giving people incentives to adhere to them. If we eliminate group making and the enticements, we can get rid of identity politics.
The first myth
...identity politics is a grassroots movement, when from the beginning it has been, and continues to be, an elite project. For too long, we have lived with the fairy tale that America has organically grown into a nation gripped by victimhood and identitarian division; that it is all the result of legitimate demands by minorities for recognition or restitutions for past wrongs.
The second myth
is that identity politics is a response to the demographic change this country has undergone since immigration laws were radically changed in 1965.
Another myth
...is that to fight these changes is as depraved as it is futile, since by 2040, America will be a minority-majority country, anyway. This book helps to explain that none of these things are necessarily true.
Also covers a variety of ideas that have led the country & morality astray: promoting certain groups as marginalized (excluding the success of Chinese and Indian immigrants); identity politics and creating a culture of perpetual victims; the history of cultural Marxism & its influence today; the undermining of the family & of capitalism; changing from a labor orientated mindset to a pleasure-seeking mindset, etc.
..
About the author:
Mike Gonzalez is a British historian & former professor at the University of Glasgow. He's a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation, is a widely experienced international correspondent, commentator, and editor who has reported from Asia, Europe, and Latin America. He served in the George W. Bush administration, first at the Securities and Exchange Commission and then at the State Department.
He wrote The Plot to Change America to equip and incentivize us to defeat that plot. "...the most urgent tasks are to expose myths, reveal what really happened, explain why it is urgent to change course, and offer a strategy to do so...
Identity politics relies on the creation of groups, and then on giving people incentives to adhere to them. If we eliminate group making and the entitlements, we can get rid of identity politics. Explaining all this is this book’s main goal."
.
.
The Plot to Change America:
How Identity Politics is Dividing the Land of the Free
by Mike Gonzalez,
published in 2020.
OVERVIEW:
...exposes the myths that help identity politics perpetuate itself.
This book reveals what has really happened, explains why it is urgent to change course, and offers a strategy to do so. Though we should not fool ourselves into thinking that it will be easy to eliminate identity politics, we should not overthink it, either. Identity politics relies on the creation of groups and then on giving people incentives to adhere to them. If we eliminate group making and the enticements, we can get rid of identity politics.
The first myth
...identity politics is a grassroots movement, when from the beginning it has been, and continues to be, an elite project. For too long, we have lived with the fairy tale that America has organically grown into a nation gripped by victimhood and identitarian division; that it is all the result of legitimate demands by minorities for recognition or restitutions for past wrongs.
The second myth
is that identity politics is a response to the demographic change this country has undergone since immigration laws were radically changed in 1965.
Another myth
...is that to fight these changes is as depraved as it is futile, since by 2040, America will be a minority-majority country, anyway. This book helps to explain that none of these things are necessarily true.
Also covers a variety of ideas that have led the country & morality astray: promoting certain groups as marginalized (excluding the success of Chinese and Indian immigrants); identity politics and creating a culture of perpetual victims; the history of cultural Marxism & its influence today; the undermining of the family & of capitalism; changing from a labor orientated mindset to a pleasure-seeking mindset, etc.
..
About the author:
Mike Gonzalez is a British historian & former professor at the University of Glasgow. He's a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation, is a widely experienced international correspondent, commentator, and editor who has reported from Asia, Europe, and Latin America. He served in the George W. Bush administration, first at the Securities and Exchange Commission and then at the State Department.
He wrote The Plot to Change America to equip and incentivize us to defeat that plot. "...the most urgent tasks are to expose myths, reveal what really happened, explain why it is urgent to change course, and offer a strategy to do so...
Identity politics relies on the creation of groups, and then on giving people incentives to adhere to them. If we eliminate group making and the entitlements, we can get rid of identity politics. Explaining all this is this book’s main goal."
.
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews