identity/politics

Love and marriage, love and marriage
Go together like a horse and carriage,
Dad was told by mother
You can't have one without the other.

Help me work out this nascent idea before it self-destructs. People decry the evils of so-called identity politics, but doesn't it go on all the time? And probably always has, on all segments of the ideological spectrum. But we're supposed to be arguing "the issues" instead of playing the race card or the gender card or some other card. [Cue pleasurable rush of righteous indignation.]

What's wrong with those other people? You know who I'm talking about, the people I hate because they disagree with me. They keep diverting attention away from pressing questions of public policy and toward emotionally charged questions of race, gender, religion, age, ethnicity, nationalism, regionalism, or culture. You know, be very very afraid of X because X is black/female/Muslim/old/Hispanic/French/cosmopolitan/urban. Or be arrogantly dismissive of Y because Y is white/male/Protestant/young/Anglo/Redneck/provincial/country.

The assumption, of course, is that you should support the candidate who is like you. Hence the Palin phenomenon. Nominate the homecoming queen and use her as an attack dog (with lipstick). To echo the unfortunate comment by Nebraska Senator Roman Hruska, when out of party loyalty he voiced his support for Nixon's nomination of Judge Carswell for the Supreme Court because "The mediocre people of America deserve to be represented too." It's a way of making explicit the old axiom that we get the president we deserve. In this case, as in the last two elections, we're being asked to vote for people because they're not too smart.

But at least they're "like me" - or how I see myself. Unexceptional. Joe Six-pack. Main Street. Next-to-last in his class, but really likeable. Why not Sally Field? And there is nothing in this cycle that hasn't been done before, including the fact that these people will do anything to win, including lies, more lies, and damn lies. Lies about their own identity and policies, lies about their opponent's identity and policies, lies about the lies they told us yesterday or last year. But dontchaknow, at least they're against "greed and corruption on Wall Street."

The dilemma for voters becomes: who am us anyway? Given that identity and politics are inextricably intertwined, I still face the existential decision of whether to cast my puny, irrelevant, electronically mutable ballot on the basis of my race, my gender, my religion, my age, my ethnicity, my nationalism, my regionalism, or my culture. Which of my identities will pull the lever November 4? Or maybe I'll shape-shift into a completely rational life form who makes decisions for the benefit of all sentient beings who, by the way, all want the same things.

It would simplify matters is there was a 50-something white guy from the suburbs running for president, preferably a tree-hugging quasi-intellectual midwestern Scandinavian with an idiosyncratic brand of pragmatic mysticism. Is that too much to ask?

But I'm a realist. (That's a lie.) I'll just have to settle for the candidate who comes closest to representing me and my values. The maverick.