The Patriot Post® · Stacey Abrams Promotes the Fallacy of Identity Politics

Stacey Abrams, the loser of Georgia’s gubernatorial election and the Democrat pick to give the rebuttal to President Donald Trump’s State of the Union Address last week, recently wrote an article for Foreign Affairs entitled “Identity Politics Strengthens Democracy.” Some may ask why a long-respected policy magazine such as Foreign Affairs would provide a platform for a political loser with little academic acumen in the field of foreign policy — she earned a Bachelor’s degree in Interdisciplinary Studies before a career as a pseudonymous romance novelist.

But to ask the question reveals that one has missed the argument entirely. It reveals one to be stuck in that “old liberal” ethic that believes respect is earned rather than demanded, and that sees victims as those to be pitied and protected, not praised and emulated.

The times, they have changed. With the rise of the Left’s “intersectionality” ethos, individuals don’t merit respect with accomplishments gained through hard work, discipline, and personal sacrifice; rather, respected status is determined via an entirely new paradigm based upon where one’s communal identity falls in the hierarchical scale of “victimization.” In other words, a person’s “real” value is not found in individual accomplishments but in identity classification.

You see, Abrams provides the perfect example of how the new “accomplishment” paradigm works. She’s a black woman, which ticks off two of the largest categories on the intersectionality checklist.

Arguing in favor of identity politics, Abrams, because of her leftist equity ethos, must construct a false historical narrative replete with straw men and non-sequiturs to make the argument for the demonstrably false notion that identity politics is a good thing. She then concludes that, “By embracing identity … Americans will become more likely to grow as one.”

The truth is unity only comes when individuals who come from a myriad of different backgrounds, experiences, and challenges can all identify with a common universal set of core values and beliefs. What makes Americans be and become Americans is not our DNA, nor the color of our skin, nor our ethnic heritage, nor our gender, nor our “victim” status; it’s found in our having a shared status of equality under Rule of Law and individual Liberty and rights espoused and protected by the Constitution. That’s why Abrams’s argument is entirely flawed. She attacks the God-given core value that makes the uniquely American experiment even a possibility.

(Edited.)