Identity politics, lo llaman. O, también, aquello que ha conseguido que la izquierda vaya por la vida como la derecha: todo el día encabronada con la lista de agravios en el bolsillo. Tengo desde hace tiempo ideas a medio cocer sobre el asunto, pero nunca me he puesto a terminar de articularlas de forma coherente. Hoy, sin buscarlo, he llegado a dos artículos que desarrollan de forma bastante aproximada el batiburrillo que tenía en la cabeza.
El primero es de Adam Gopnick, publicado hoy en el New Yorker, The Democrats and the Seesaw of Identity Politics. No voy a citar fragmentos porque la idea del texto está esparcida por distintos párrafos y o lo pego entero o va a quedar una amalgama inconexa. Vayan y léanlo.
Pero en él se cita a este otro, publicado en el New York Times hace unos días, que tiene joyas:
One of the many lessons of the recent presidential election campaign and its repugnant outcome is that the age of identity liberalism must be brought to an end. Hillary Clinton was at her best and most uplifting when she spoke about American interests in world affairs and how they relate to our understanding of democracy. But when it came to life at home, she tended on the campaign trail to lose that large vision and slip into the rhetoric of diversity, calling out explicitly to African-American, Latino, L.G.B.T. and women voters at every stop. This was a strategic mistake. If you are going to mention groups in America, you had better mention all of them. If you don't, those left out will notice and feel excluded. Which, as the data show, was exactly what happened with the white working class and those with strong religious convictions. Fully two-thirds of white voters without college degrees voted for Donald Trump, as did over 80 percent of white evangelicals.
[...] The moral energy surrounding identity has, of course, had many good effects. Affirmative action has reshaped and improved corporate life. Black Lives Matter has delivered a wake-up call to every American with a conscience.
[...] By the time they reach college many assume that diversity discourse exhausts political discourse, and have shockingly little to say about such perennial questions as class, war, the economy and the common good.
[...] Finally, the whitelash thesis is convenient because it absolves liberals of not recognizing how their own obsession with diversity has encouraged white, rural, religious Americans to think of themselves as a disadvantaged group whose identity is being threatened or ignored. Such people are not actually reacting against the reality of our diverse America (they tend, after all, to live in homogeneous areas of the country). But they are reacting against the omnipresent rhetoric of identity, which is what they mean by "political correctness."
Primera frase del primer comentario del artículo dentro de los seleccionados por el periódico (ya sé, ya sé):
This article is insulting to people who are not cisgendered, heterosexual white men.