False Equivalencies and Liberalism
There was a lot of talk during the general election cycle about false equivalencies in the coverage of the two major party candidates. The concern was that vastly different actions were treated as similar under the guise of journalistic balance or objectivity: Clinton’s emails treated with the same degree of coverage as Trump’s recorded statement about how he grabs women. But these false equivalencies have moved beyond election coverage. Identity politics, a term that refers to political efforts by groups who are marginalized on the basis of some aspect of their identity, has been taken up by those who occupy the position of the norm–Christians, white people, men–and made equivalent to the political efforts of those whose identities make them the systemic targets of injustice. An opinion piece in The Washington Post argued that Democrats lost this election because of SCOTUS decisions against Christians’ rights to refuse to bake cakes for gay weddings. Jeremy Carl argued last August for the legitimacy of white interests in National Review. New York Magazine reports on the revitalization and politicization of the men’s rights movement in the era of Trump. The idea in each of these cases is that the identities of those who because of their identity are structurally situated as having power occupies an equivalent political position to those who because of their identity are structurally situated as lacking power.
There has been a lot of wringing of hands over the move toward false equivalencies of this kind. I submit that this situation in which every identity is treated as equal to every other one is what is on offer from liberalism, and here I mean liberalism in the sense of the political theory that both parties in the United States affirm. Read more
The Trott Line 