I suppose you can identify some things on the left and make your point on about an explosion of “everyone is the same” thinking. But truth be told, I generally see the exact opposite phenomena. Identity politics is deeply, deeply reactionary and illiberal. It is on the left where were hear the most about the iron cage of identity. Many strands of feminism espouse female essentialism. It is on the left, not the right, where we hear the most about the “permanence of race.” Quotas aren’t premised on the idea that everyone is the same, they’re premised on the idea that we are all different and that we need exposure to the “black perspective,” “the Hispanic perspective,” the “female perspective” etc. The rage against dead white males is an identity politics argument, and a deeply illiberal one. It is on the left that we hear about “white logic” — as if such a thing exists. De Maistre would have aligned himself with this view (as I wrote
here and elsewhere).

I think conservatives get into a lot of trouble when they over-read the significance — real or potential — of group differences. Even if such differences are profound, a decent conservative in the American tradition should still advance a colorblind state, colorblind laws, and colorblind standards. That’s why I’ve never found the science about group differences to be as relevant as some do. I think it’s interesting, but I can’t imagine a scenario that would cause me to change my mind about the proper orientation of the state. We should take people as individuals, not representatives of groups. Period. That’s what it means to be equal in the eyes of the law. ~Jonah “Lie For a Just Cause” Goldberg, The Corner

Let’s suppose for a moment that “identity politics” is “deeply, deeply reactionary and illiberal.” No explanation is given, of course, because here ‘reactionary’ and ‘illiberal’ function as “fascist” does in foreign policy debates at NR: it identifies and vilifies the thing being described, regardless of content. If there is some substance and meaning to the differences among groups of people, that is part of our reality and not something that we can blithely ignore because some other people have abused some inkling of that same knowledge.

All of this is what we would expect from Goldberg, but the cheap shot against Joseph de Maistre simply can’t go unanswered. Maistre would endorse “white logic”? What? Goldberg will enlighten us:

For de Maistre, you couldn’t be just a “man.” You had to be a man of Italy, a man of France, a man of Persia, etc. The new American republic was so much folly, in de Maistre’s eyes, because its Constitution was blind to this unchanging fact of life. The Declaration’s bold proposition, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…” ran completely counter to everything de Maistre believed.

Besides apparently being too dense to understand that Maistre objected to a universalist, abstracted category of man precisely because it was theoretical and did not exist in the real world, Goldberg provides no demonstration that you can just be “a man,” as if any of us could exist outside of the contingency and particularity of our lives that are defined by language, custom, descent, community and, in most cases, religion. Maistre was making an observation of fact. Whether one attaches moral significance to that undeniable fact, as Maistre did and I do, or not, simply making the observation does not irrevocably link you to “identity politics” or its zanier branches of speculation. But the bigger problem is that “identity politics” of all kinds is ruled out not because it makes no sense, but because it is all together too appealing and threatens to overthrow the myth of equality.

As for equality, the burden of proof has always rested with the egalitarian to demonstrate that this is true. But the egalitarian does not even make the attempt all that often. Like Jefferson’s phrase, before which we are supposed to bow reverently because it is in the Declaration, regardless of whether it is true or not, it is simply an assertion of something they take to be “self-evident,” when it is anything but self-evident. What this has to do with “white logic” (which is, I suppose, logic that only white people possess?) does escape me. That’s all right, though, since I’m pretty sure that Goldberg has no idea what he’s talking about.

Incidentally, if there are feminists who argue for “female essentialism” there are far more postmodernist feminists who regard, like Goldberg, all forms of essentialism or anything that remotely resembles it as a socially constructed category imposed by various and sundry power structures. Female essentialism would mean, I guess, that women are irreducibly, naturally…women–a shockingly original idea, that!

For the postmodernist feminist and most “gender theorists,” being masculine and feminine ultimately has nothing or next to nothing important to do with the biological sex of the person–no essentialism here!–as they hold that gender is a mutable, shifting category that is “negotiated” and “redefined” according to various cultural norms. If essentialism and its like are objectionable on some grounds, the persistent denial of potentially substantial differences between groups of people or indeed the outright denial of the importance of any permanent, unchanging conditions strikes me as a more intellectually dishonest enterprise that encourages the very trends in modern or postmodern thought that deny the existence and significance of permanent verities. The disinterest Goldberg shows in what science might or might not have to say about this is typical. The ideologue would rather not know what the real state of affairs is. It might severely inconvenience his program or, worst of all, cause him to have to think hard about something.