One of the many debates that has intensified after the 2016 election concerns “identity politics.” Some liberals blame it for the Democrats’ loss. Mark Lilla writes, “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.” Others, like German Lopez, reply that politics is always about identity, that racial and sexual oppression are inescapable issues requiring explicit attention, and that the alternative to progressive identity politics is simply white nationalist identity politics.

The syllabus of my current philosophy class–planned months ago–concludes with a unit about identity and justice that we are entering right now. It follows a set of readings from political philosophy that are all egalitarian–in their various ways–and against discrimination, but that don’t delve deeply into questions of identity. And most (not all) of those writers have been White men. Now we turn to:

• Steve Biko, “Black Consciousness and the Quest for True Humanity” (1971?)
• Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House ” (1984)
• Todd Gitlin, “The Left, Lost in the Politics of Identity,” Harper’s Magazine, 1993
• Susan Bickford, “Anti-Anti-Identity Politics: Feminism, Democracy, and the Complexities of Citizenship,” Hypatia, vol. 12, no. 4 (1997).

Some arguments from these readings in favor of identity politics:

People from oppressed groups must speak for themselves, not be the subjects of research or help from advantaged groups. Meanwhile, more differences need to be recognized. In current terms, justice requires acknowledging the “intersectionality” of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, etc., and hearing directly from people at each intersection. These two themes come together in a sentence by Lorde: “It is a particular academic arrogance to assume any discussion of feminist theory without examining our many differences, and without a significant input from poor women, Black and Third World women, and lesbians.”

People from oppressed groups need their “own strong solidarity,” built in somewhat separate spaces that are free from domination, so that they can “respond as a cohesive group” (Biko). Note that Biko uses “the black man” as a category that explicitly encompasses Zulus, Xhosas, Vendas, and South Africans of Indian origin, and implicitly includes black women. The logic of identity politics would suggest that he acknowledge more differences.

It’s not the job of oppressed peoples to educate their oppressors. “This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master’s concerns.” For instance, to say that women of color must educate white women “is a diversion and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought” (Lorde). White women must educate themselves. This point seems somewhat in tension with Biko’s argument that “no group, however benevolent, can ever hand power to the vanquished on a plate. … No amount of moral lecturing will persuade the white man to ‘correct’ the situation.” Biko implies that oppressors will never educate themselves about oppression. But the two authors may agree that White people can and will change in the interests of their own liberation.

Oppressed peoples demonstrate better values than their oppressors. Biko celebrates traditional African religion (in the singular–presuming a unity across ethnic/national lines), in contrast to the “irresponsible people from Coca-cola and hamburger cultural background” who dominate South Africa. Identity politics of this type is not a form of cultural relativism but rather a call for better values.

Oppression is internal, psychological, implicit, and internalized by the oppressed. It’s not mainly about explicit power and rights. Therefore, changing explicit power and rights won’t solve matters. Biko depicts Black Consciousness as “the realisation by blacks that the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”

Identity politics is a path to deep transformation and revolutionary change for all. It is not a matter of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” to use the current terminology popular in corporations and universities–i.e., accommodating or serving more people more fairly. Lorde might call that approach “the grossest reformism.” True identity politics is about liberation from current institutional arrangements. It is creative and innovative, “seek[ing] new ways of being” (Lorde).

What critics of identity politics hear as resentful complaints is often actually the sound of human beings flourishing. “Far from being constituted solely by their oppression and exclusion, group identities may be cherished as a source of strength and purpose [that] sustains us in struggle and makes political action possible” (Bickford.

Identity claims challenge supposedly universalist understandings of justice and the common good, since those were always “particular, biased, and selfish” (Bickford).

Oppressed peoples must devote attention to their own communities rather than mainly studying and seeking to change the dominant group. “Let us talk more about ourselves and our struggles and less about whites” (Biko). One reason is that there is simply much to learn and celebrate when one begins to look more closely at the marginalized group, its history and values.

Some arguments from these readings against identity politics:

Emphasizing differences divides people politically and prevents the construction of large coalitions. For that reason, it is simply a losing political strategy (unless, like Biko, one happens to live in a country where one oppressed group constitutes the majority). Further, no one will join a coalition for change as a result of being told that he or she is an oppressor. Being reminded of one’s privilege usually reinforces a desire to protect it. A winning strategy is to offer explicit benefits to all members of a large majority. That is the main argument of both Gitlin (1993) and Lilla (2016); and cf. Bayard Rustin, “From Protest to Politics: Future of the Civil Rights Movement,” Commentary (February, 1965).

The left is the heir to a tradition of explicitly universalistic values, whether those are liberal, Marxist, or Christian-inflected (e.g., in the Civil Rights Movement). “Universal human emancipation” (Gitlin) is the core of all authentically revolutionary and reformist politics. Its enemy is the kind of conservatism that prizes traditions, indigenous values, and social differences. Identity politics is a version of that kind of conservatism. Yes, progressive movements must address injustices related to sexuality, gender and color–not merely economics–but always in the explicit pursuit of a common good.

Identity politics has become apolitical because its practitioners are disconnected from elections, parties, unions, and reform movements and focus more on “symbolic representation” in places like universities and Hollywood (Gitlin). Also, they tend to depict “the oppressed [as] innocent selves defined by the wrongs done to them” and therefore demand protection from the government or institutions like universities and companies. That stance overlooks their own potential power and encourages them to ask others to manage and administer fairness, understood as a set of rules and regulations. Instead, they should be building power (Bickford, summarizing a view that she doesn’t hold).

Identity politics treats a short list of socially constructed labels as fixed, and thereby (ironically) reinforces the power of these labels. Identity is a “term thick with meanings” whose definition is rarely clarified (Bickford). It’s very unlikely that any particular identity is stable, uniform, or exclusive. Yet one sees in works like Biko’s a tendency to treat a given identity as essential. (However, as Bickford notes, wrestling with this problem has been a central focus for feminism for half a century now.)

I’d add some thoughts of my own:

First, we must consider the ways that identities, interests, and opinions can diverge. A person may have the identity of a woman, an objective interest in equal pay for equal work, and the opinion that this would make a just policy. These three things may be related in various ways, but they are also separable. Likewise, groups can be defined by identities, interests, or positions on issues.

Interests are valid and important. In fact, whose interests are served in a policy domain like health care can determine who lives and who dies. Nevertheless, we recognize that interests will conflict, that they require negotiation and compromise, and that, even in a reasonably just society, everyone’s interests will sometimes be outweighed.

In contrast, to assert an identity is to imply a right to be recognized and treated accordingly. After all, you can’t change your identity, yet you have a place in the society. No one should ask you to compromise your identity, only the interests that you assert. Finally, you are supposed to take other people’s interests and identities in mind as you critically reflect on your opinions. Most people should probably adopt opinions that are less predictably related to their identities and interests.

Interests, identities, and opinions are all “constructed” and malleable, but we are supposed to be maximally open to revising our opinions, yet protected against having to change our identities. The hard part is deciding whether a given claim is an expression of identity, interest, and/or opinion. The lines are very unclear, even to the person who makes a claim.

To make matters even more complicated, an identity can be something mostly embraced or mostly imposed. And it can be a name for a group that gives you strength or for a group to which your fate is tied, or both (Bickford, p. 120).

Second, practitioners of identity politics can miss the chance to be citizens in a particular sense. In this fascinating dialogue between Black Lives Matter leader Julius Jones and Hillary Clinton, Jones echoes Lorde’s argument that African Americans shouldn’t have to tell White people how to change. Complaining that the oppressed haven’t proposed specific solutions–as Clinton does–is “blaming the victim.”

The difference that is salient in Jones’ mind (understandably) is race: he is Black and Clinton is White; and she is asking him to solve the problems that White people have caused. But I think Clinton has a different difference in mind when she asks Jones to state his policy demands. She sees him as a citizen, and herself as a would-be leader. Citizens petition government for the redress of grievances–it even says so in the First Amendment.

To be sure, Jones is both a Black man and a citizen, so both perspectives are valid. But a danger inherent in identity politics is the suppression of one’s identity as a citizen. It is both a responsibility and a power of every citizen to advocate solutions to problems that others have created. As Biko argues, creators of injustice are unlikely to invent solutions themselves. It’s a political act to say what must be done.

Third, “intersectionality” can take forms that are hyper-individualistic. If many different factors constitute one’s identity–not just a short list like race, gender, and class, but also occupation, denomination, country of origin, region, linguistic dialect, birth order, party identification, age, generation, body type, and more–then each person has the grounds to assert a unique intersectionality. Perhaps nobody’s array of characteristics is actually unique in a nation of 323 million people, but within a given small group, everyone can claim her own niche.

In a culture that is generally individualistic, this potential is both attractive and a pitfall. As the concept of identity broadens beyond characteristics that have been used for brutal oppression, intersectionality offers an excuse to focus on everyone’s uniqueness at the expense of political solidarity and the distribution of basic rights. However, it’s hard to limit the characteristics that constitute identity when a huge range of factors do cause implicit bias. For instance, the same methods that demonstrate the pervasiveness of racial bias also show that we’re biased by partisanship, body type, age, etc. So why stop with race–or anywhere else? (This isn’t a rhetorical question. I’m inclined to think that we should stop with race, gender, and sexual orientation, and treat other differences as ones of opinion and interest, not of identity. But I would owe a defense of that view.)

Finally, we may need to think about new constructed identities. When historically marginalized people achieve hard-won and deeply valuable recognition, the traditionally dominant group is often left with an identity crisis. To take a foreign example: as Scots, Welsh people, Irish people, British West Indians, British Asians, and others assert–appropriately–their separate identities within Great Britain, Englishness is left to mean being a person whose ancestors lived in England. Since that group was exclusively White and traditionally dominant, it’s hard to celebrate one’s Englishness without being racist and xenophobic.

My point is not that we should sympathize with older White men who are struggling with their identities for the first time. Rather, we are all at risk unless they find identities that they can celebrate inclusively. A common response is to retell our national narrative so that everyone can feel inspired. This seems to me Barack Obama’s strategy and one of his great gifts as a national leader. But nations are awfully large and abstract. A different possibility that intrigues me is a city or metro area, because many people already feel loyal to their own cities, which are internally diverse. In the US, states with smaller populations may have the same value for rural people. So maybe we can reinforce identities as New Yorkers or Montanans, not to the exclusion of other identities, but as the basis of broader political coalitions.

The appointment of Stephen Bannon poses the question of evil–certainly not for the first time in recent memory, but forcefully. This is a tricky topic because calling any idea or person “evil” implies a refusal to compromise, to consider agreeing, or to ameliorate the situation by ordinary means. The word “evil” can be a prelude to banning ideas outright or even lining people up to be shot. Perhaps you refuse to employ violence under any circumstances; still, naming something as evil means refusing to tolerate it to any degree.

Manichean politics (depicting the world as divided between good and evil) can be self-defeating. Right now, it’s crucial to form a large majority in favor of basic political decency, and if some people who could belong to that majority feel that they or their ideas have just been called evil, why would they join?

Finally, Manichean thinking blocks learning. I, for instance, was an undecided voter on this year’s Massachusetts ballot initiative to expand charter schools. I voted “no” at the last minute, but I thought it was a close call. I did not benefit from depictions of the proponents as hedge fund managers who wanted to privatize our schools, nor from depictions of the opponents as unionized teachers who wanted to retain their monopoly. I wanted to learn what would be best for kids, and Manichean rhetoric made that harder for me rather than easier.

All that having been said, there is evil in the world–a lot of it. Although neither side in the Massachusetts charter debate was remotely evil, human beings commonly and deliberately harm each other in many ways, extending to mass murder. The theories that most appeal to secular activists for democracy and civil society are often strikingly silent on the issue of evil.

For instance, many democratic educators and builders of local community organizations find John Dewey a congenial theorist. Writing during the decades when hundreds of millions of human beings were intentionally slaughtered in wars, genocides, imperialist adventures, and insane social experiments, Dewey insisted that the “current has set steadily in one direction: toward democratic forms.” This was his rationale for resisting rigid constraints on democracy and encouraging constant experimentation.

Hannah Arendt predicted in 1945 that “the problem of evil will be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life in Europe.”* In the decades since then, evil has not dropped out of consideration in European thought. But the most pro-democratic, pro-Enlightenment thinkers, people–like Jürgen Habermas–who have devoted their lives to building decent alternatives to Nazi evil, hardly ever use the word or the concept explicitly.

Considering what they have faced, it is not surprising that African American theorists are more likely to use such language. In Black Reconstruction (p. 722), W.E.B. DuBois writes, “One is astonished in the study of history at the recurrence of the idea that evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over.” Martin Luther King Jr. addressed evil not only as a political leader but also as a theologian. In a philosophy of religion course, he began a paper: “The problem of evil has always been the most baffling problem facing the theist. … Why do the innocent suffer? How account for the endless chain of moral and physical evils? These are questions which no serious minded religionist can overlook. Evil is a reality.”

Last year, I interviewed a European-American left-radical leader with evangelical roots who used the word “satanic” to describe our times. It struck me that most secular people who had exactly the same policy agenda would shun that word.

No one doubts that some people believe and do very bad things. One view is that bad and good lie on a continuum, and we must always strive to move up that scale. “Evil” is just a word for the worst region of the continuum. A different view is that some actions and ideas belong in a whole category of their own. They require extirpation, not amelioration. That’s a theory that takes evil seriously as such.

There’s also a debate about whether evil has depth. Is it the mere negation of altruism and a failure to think carefully–for instance, a failure to see things from a different perspective? This was Arendt’s conclusion in Eichmann in Jerusalem. Or is evil an active malevolence, compatible with high degrees of empathy, self-sacrifice and imagination? Can an evil person or idea be impressive?

I wrote “evil person or idea,” but it’s attractive to say only actions are evil; people are not, and perhaps ideas aren’t either. But I’m not sure about that. Some people and some ideas smoke of evil.

Then there’s a debate about its prevalence. In Calvinism and some kinds of Gnosticism, evil is omnipresent. In more optimistic theologies and philosophies, it is exceptional. One might hold that evil is common in some societies but rare in others.

Finally, to what extent should our political systems aim to prevent and extirpate evil? The obvious answer seems to be “to the greatest extent possible!” But then we’d need strong safeguards on evil behavior that can also frustrate positive change. Judith Shklar wrote, “somewhere someone is being tortured right now.” Her “liberalism of fear” was “a response to these undeniable actualities, and it therefore concentrate[d] on damage control.” Her liberalism was “entirely nonutopian,” informed by memory and not hope.  In practical terms, it was mostly about limiting governmental power.

One could argue that the main sources of evil lie in culture and the market; then an expansive government could be a necessary counterweight to evil. However, you won’t find much discussion of evil in the standard justifications of extensive government, such as Rawls’ Theory of Justice. Except in the anodyne phrase “lesser of two evils,” the word “evil” appears only in the context of conscientious refusal to serve in the military. Rawls notes that a soldier may face “hazards” (perhaps moral hazards as well as literal ones); “but in a well ordered society anyway, these evils arise externally, that is, from unjustified attacks from the outside.” Rawls is confident that a well-ordered society can be evil-free. We may have to fight Nazis, but we won’t harbor any. That’s a pretty strong assumption.

*Quoted in Peter Dews, “Disenchantment and the Persistence of Evil: Habermas, Jonas, Badiou,” in Alan D. Schrift, ed., Modernity and the Problem of Evil, Indiana University Press, 2005, p. 51.

In phrases like “civic education,” “civic engagement,” “civic technology,” or (as in the name of our college) “civic life,” what does the word “civic” mean?  In conversations and writing about the topic, I detect several definitions. Each definition can be introduced with a different keyword:

1. Power. Perhaps politics means influencing decisions and institutions to get the outcomes you want–or at least to move them closer to your preferences. In democracies, citizens have tools for increasing their influence, e.g., popular votes, petitions, strikes, and protests. “Civic” activities may mean tools for power and influence that are relatively democratic. That category would include popular votes but not presidential decrees; grassroots petitions but not professional lobbying efforts. Acts like voting and contacting government are often included in official surveys of civic engagement. Note that in this conception, politics is zero-sum (every decision has winners and losers), but what makes a form of politics “civic” is its accessibility to ordinary citizens.
2. Virtue. The adjective “civic” is often paired with nouns like “virtue,” “character,” or “values.” In this conception, the civic is a subset of the political. It’s the best part, the part that exemplifies classical republic virtues, such as concern for the common good, patriotism or cosmopolitanism, commitment to law and to equity, and perhaps even self-sacrifice.
3. The commons. Every society needs common resources as well as privately owned ones. Common goods may include natural resources (such as air), institutions (such as law), knowledge (such as general principles of science), and norms (such as trust). The whole commons is the “commonwealth,” a direct translation of the Latin res publica (public thing), from which we derive the word “republic.” The commonwealth can be created, expanded and protected, or exploited and degraded. According to some theorists, the civic is work that contributes to the commons. That would include paid work in for-profit enterprises if it produces public goods directly or as externalities. (Note the direct contrast with #1. There, civic engagement was generally zero-sum. Here, it is defined as win/win.)
4.  Discourse. In some ancient and still-influential conceptions, the core function of a citizen is to deliberate about what is right and good. Public deliberation creates public opinion, which should influence institutions, such as states, courts, and perhaps firms and markets. Civic discourse is defined by deliberative values, such as genuine openness to what others are saying, commitment to truth, and pursuit of consensus. Classical civic institutions are spaces for discourse: newspapers, coffee shops, legislatures, and (now) the Internet.
5. Community. People need social bonds: to be cared for and to care for others. Most human beings–and especially vulnerable people like children–thrive much better when they are embedded in an affective community. The norms and habits that form among people in such communities (“social capital”) are also resources that can be used for power, discourse, etc.  To  measure social capital, one typically aggregates behaviors like volunteer service and membership in groups, plus attitudes like trust and care. “The civic” is whatever contributes to such community bonds.
6. Performance. Some would say that civic life offers spaces for people to perform and to be recognized by others. Life is richer and more satisfying when we can create personas and display them for others, and when others can acknowledge and appreciate who we are. The main purpose of a public debate is not to identify the best policy but to display characters. For instance, in the cabinet battles imagined by Lin-Manuel Miranda, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson get to show off who they are, and that’s why it’s so great to be in “the room where it happens.” Debate is only one form of performance; activities like theater, spoken word, gaming, and design also count. On this conception, Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed might be the pinnacle of the civic.

I value all these things. It’s tempting to say, then, that the right definition of “the civic” is the union of all of them. But that seems a bit ad hoc, a miscellaneous assemblage of desirable behaviors and values. It would be better to have an organized account of how they all fit together. For instance, perhaps we need community to provide people with enough support that they can exercise relatively equal power, but power is best when informed by deliberative discourse. In turn, deliberation encourages attention to the commons, allows performance, and both requires and develops republican virtues.

That is a rather discourse-centered theory; one could instead make the various ideas center on the commonwealth, or on democratic exercises of power. It’s also reasonable to weigh some of these ideas much more heavily than others.

See also: what is the definition of civic engagement? and defining civic engagement, democracy, civic renewal, and related terms