We live in a very interesting time where we
have, I think, a combination of what’s called
expressive individualism, which is about the
importance of me, my experience, what makes
me happy.
What we now have is something additional and
that is identity and tribal identifications
where we have—and I want to say there’s
a good part of this, for one thing—that
we have historically marginalized groups,
women certainly in the workforce, in the public
sphere, gay people, African-Americans, other
minorities, we’ve had a lot of folks who
have been in the margins of power in our society
who have said uh-uh this isn’t working anymore.
So these movements towards individual and
group liberation have, in net, been very positive
for our country.
But we always tend to turn things towards
a kind of individualistic focus.
Now we have a culture in which there is competition
for victimhood and white men now, many white
men are calling themselves victims; victims
of affirmative action, victims of the liberal
left.
And you have religious groups that have tens
of millions of people in this country who
are victims of outsiders who want to destroy
them.
So what’s happened then is, I think, this
expressive individualism has been combined
with sort of the benefits of being in an oppressed
group, you know, the moral high ground that
comes with that and the strong identification
that comes with being in a victimized group.
And now, everybody is in a victimized group.
After the great recession in 2007/2008, bankers
were the new victimized group.
And so there’s an unhealthy trend towards
tribal competition for victim status in our
country and I want to go back and again say,
there is something to the victim, there is
something to it.
This is hard to talk about without saying:
okay everybody should just get along and stop
complaining.
I'm not saying that at all.
But there is something unhealthy, and what
it keeps us from doing—this is my main problem
with it —it keeps us from working across
identity groups to solve the problems that
we have together.
Because all of our major problems related
to poverty, to education, to healthcare, to
the environment—just take any of our problems—they
require cross-identity group coalitions to
work on together.
And when we divide into identity groups we
can’t work across coalitions.
Martin Luther King, just before he died, was
working on poverty on a cross-racial coalition.
He knew that the civil rights laws needed
to be changed and it had to be a black leadership
to change those Jim Crow laws.
The next step was poverty and poverty is not
just racial.
And he knew that you needed to have a broad
coalition.
That’s going to be hard nowadays.
Some are trying it, but that is much harder
to do in an identity-based society.
