Political life is a mess – but the problems pre-date social media
Timandra Harkness, whose latest book, Technology is Not the Problem, is published this week, explains the roots and dangers of identity politics.
Political debate seems as polarised as ever in recent years, with fierce debates raging about Gaza, trans rights, Brexit, Black Lives Matter and much more. For many observers, the root cause of all this is social media, with users leaving their echo chambers just long enough to sling mud at those they disagree with.
But as Timandra Harkness explains, the roots of today’s divisions can be found long before Facebook, Twitter and TikTok, in the radical discussion of the Sixties.
One phrase seems to capture the shift in politics from the early twentieth to early twenty-first centuries: ‘The Personal Is Political.’
Today, we tend to read that phrase as meaning that no action, decision, even word or thought, can escape political scrutiny. That a feeling, thought, or habit is part of one’s personal life is no defence against submitting it to tests of political righteousness. What you eat, who you find attractive, which words you use: everything is political.
But the phrase originated in the New Left movements of mid-century America, as the title of a 1969 article by Carol Hanisch. Active in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement, Hanisch founded New York Radical Women, with other women who were increasingly dissatisfied with their experiences in other political movements.
Hanisch wrote her seminal article (if I may be permitted such a spermocentric term) as a riposte to those who thought women-only political discussions were a form of therapy. ‘Therapy assumes that someone is sick and that there is a cure’, she wrote. ‘I am greatly offended that I or any other woman is thought to need therapy in the first place. Women are messed over, not messed up! We need to change the objective conditions, not adjust to them.’
In other words, the common experiences the women identified in their caucus meetings – and afterwards, over apple pie à la mode – could only be solved by political movements and social change. ‘There are no personal solutions at this time’, wrote Hanisch. ‘There is only collective action for a collective solution.’
Seven years earlier, however, young Tom Hayden drafted a declaration for the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) that did sound like a call for politics as therapy. ‘The goal of man and society should be human independence’, the 1962 Port Huron Statement proclaimed, ‘a concern not with image or popularity but with finding meaning in life that is personally authentic’. Politics, in Hayden’s words, should be a ‘means of finding meaning in personal life’.
We can see in these two pieces of writing the seeds of several things that characterise political movements today: groups who feel they share common experiences, organising themselves separately to seek political solutions for their problems; a refusal to regard any aspect of private life as immune from political analysis or action; and the idea that participation in politics should itself have a therapeutic effect on the participants. All three are integral to what today we call identity politics.
Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah has thought a lot about identity. In his book, The Ethics of Identity, he says the community in which he grew up ‘was Asante, was Ghana, was Africa, but it was also (in no particular order) England, the Methodist Church, the Third World: and, in his final words of love and guidance, my father insisted that it was also all humanity.’ He now lives with his husband in New York.
Looking particularly at America’s mid-century gay rights and black power movements, Appiah describes ‘historical moments where we see groups contesting and transforming the meaning of their identity with seismic vigour’. Rejecting the negative script about who they are, imposed from outside, these groups write themselves a new script, call themselves by new names, and demand respect from the rest of society. More than insisting on equal treatment with everyone else, they began to demand respect by virtue of belonging to the previously despised group. ‘Gay Pride’ was a direct response to the shame and stigma imposed on same-sex attracted people.
However, as Appiah points out, these shared identities, forged in defiance of society’s disdain, can become a trap. ‘Demanding respect for people as blacks and as gays can go along with notably rigid strictures as to how one is to be an African American or a person with same-sex desires. In a particularly fraught and emphatic way, there will be demands that are made; expectations to be met; battle lines to be drawn. It is at this point that somebody who takes autonomy seriously may worry whether we have replaced one kind of tyranny with another. We know that acts of recognition can sometimes ossify the identities that are their object.’
Appiah calls this Medusa Syndrome, after the Gorgon who turned to stone whoever met her gaze. An identity that began as a collective project of liberation can become a prison.
This, too, should look familiar today. Instead of a forum in which ideas can be challenged and tested, where competing visions of society try to build democratic support, too much of politics today is a cacophony of competing identities. To disagree with somebody is too often felt as an attack on who they are, and on the entire group with which they identify.
The particular form that technology gives to online interactions is not the problem with political movements today. True, social media is the ideal arena for projecting and defending an identity, rather than for reasonable exchanges of ideas, but the nature of politics as ossified identities precedes the twenty-first-century rise of social-media platforms, or even the internet.
I asked Carol Hanisch how she thought politics has changed since 1969. She said that a more apt description now would be ‘the political is personal’. She is sceptical of the shift to identity politics. ‘I don’t think we gain anything by it’, she told me. ‘We lose all sense of a need for unity to take on the source(s) of our oppression. Instead, it invites us to escape the real world by “living in our heads”. It allows us to believe that if we can change ourselves and/or just a few people, everything will be fine, which is, of course, nonsense. …You can’t “identify” yourself out of oppression, though over the centuries people sure have tried!’
The ‘rigid demands’ Appiah describes in his Medusa Syndrome also lead to de-platforming, Hanisch told me, ‘a less political term for censorship, both of ourselves and others. It’s ironic in the sense that a silencing fear of expressing oneself on political issues has been created in the name of protecting someone else’s “self-expression”. Nothing is so threatening to progress as fear to critique what is.’
The problem with politics today is not social media, personalised digital campaigning, or anonymous internet trolls. The problem is our obsession with our own identities, which silences debate and turns our aspirations for liberation into stone.
Timandra Harkness is a writer and presenter. Her new book, Technology is Not the Problem, is published by Harper Collins on Thursday 23 May.
Timandra will be speaking in the discussion ‘Deepfakes to smartphones: arguing for freedom in a digital age’ at Living Freedom Summer School 2024, which runs from 11-13 July in central London. Applications are open for anyone aged 18 to 30. Find out more here.
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