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.