There is a lot of identity politics out there. It comes in
various forms, and the liberal-tarians are all united on the fact that it is
good to be an “ally” to victims of certain difficult lived experiences. But
just as I have resisted the inclination to call myself a “feminist” despite
believing in equal rights for women, I’m not ready to sign-on to the pleas of
the likes of (most recently) Jacob
T. Levy. The natural question is, “Why the heck not, Ryan?” and the answer
is because the evidence and the philosophy just aren’t there to support the
notion of identity politics.
But does it matter? The toothpaste is already out of the
tube, as the saying goes. It’s only a matter of time before everyone in the
LGBTQ community gets to enjoy the same kind of social respect that we pay to
everyone else, and racism and sexism is always and everywhere deplored by
everyone who counts for anything. No one takes a bigot seriously anymore, not
in today’s world. Despite the lamentations over Trump’s allegedly
white-supremacist agenda, society as a whole wants to move on from all this
bigotry. In that environment, why shouldn’t I just be simpatico? I mean, why can’t I just be a nice guy and declare
myself an ally of women, of LGBTQs, of racial minorities, of religious
minorities, etc.? Why hold out? Do I want to make myself look like an asshole?
In other words, why don’t I just follow where the group
leads me? What’s the harm in that?
Libertarianism – the belief that people by and large ought
to be left alone to pursue their own slice of happiness – deserves a unified
theory. It’s almost inevitable. Despite the attempts of many to divorce
libertarianism from hardcore individualism, Aristotelianism, first principles,
and unfettered market capitalism, libertarianism only makes sense as the fusion
of those ideas. If you remove one of those things, then you are no longer left
with a consistent, coherent political philosophy. Instead, what we end up with
is a contradictory mess of personal whims and wishes; but you don’t need
philosophy to just believe whatever the
heck you feel like. Philosophy without consistent self-reconciliation is
just word salad.
Thus, to wit, I don’t want to just go along with the crowd
on identity politics because, doggone it, I’m an individualist. I’m not going
to just accept any hackneyed idea just because a bunch of really nice people
really really want me to go with it. That kind of blind susceptibility to
situational influence is what produces the Lucifer Effect, and I’m not into
that. While we’re busy pitting our various political identities against each
other, we’re causing a real rift between and among groups. It’s not very hard
to imagine the different ways the Lucifer Effect would take hold. It ought to
be resisted.
I bring this up because it highlights the importance of
individualism as an idea in general, but specifically with respect to
libertarianism. Without the general
principle that individuals ought to be left alone, we become a teeming mass
of identity-factions, each more justifiably angry than the next. The function
of individualism is to diffuse the claims of specific factions and to apply
broad principles of freedom to all kinds of people, no matter what their
demographics happen to be. In other words, the purpose of individualism is to
prevent us from getting caught up in bigotry. Inventing a complex
“intersectionality” of factious identities will only serve to pit factions
against each other.
What we want is to treat
all people equally. So long as we’re pounding pulpits over identity
politics, we’ll never get there. Separate is inherently unequal. "All collectivist doctrines are harbingers of irreconcilable hatred and war to the death."