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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   35825 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 9, 2025

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The bigger difference between their era and ours is that we’re much more narcissistic and see political opinions as parts of our identity. In 1824, you wouldn’t have made an identity of your policy positions. A person’s lifestyle and hobbies were not affected by their politics. People might have interests, but being in favor of the fugitive slave law had nothing to do with how you saw yourself as a person. You didn’t pick up or drop interests because they were coded “other team”. Nobody stopped drinking tea because it was marketed to the Southern people. We dropped Bud Light because it was marketed to trans people.

I must dissent. Of all the years to pick to claim identity didn't shape politics, picking a period right in the midst of the rise of nationalism as a mass movement (1789 French Revolution, fundamentally changing the relation between the people and the state based on identity) and the publication of the communist manifest (1848, formalizing an economic-class based approach to politics in addition to already existing national/religious identities) is certainly a place to start claiming that people weren't identifying or acting according to their identified category interest.

Even in the American system, identity-driven interest politics is not exactly hard to find. The dominance of state-identity interests (what is good for my state, the team I identify with) forged fundamental characteristics of the US political system (Senate versus House), major landmark legislations (the various new-state compromises over slavery balance), regional interest economic policies (north-east favored protectionism vis-a-vis the south-favored freer trade), and was regular motivation for which side of the civil war various people aligned with (check the generals).

There was never a halcyon period where people didn't have their politics shaped by their affiliation, and each individual made their judgements out of sincerity unbothered by allegiance. The affiliations that mattered most change by time and context- religious identitarianism, dynastic alliance structures, employment contexts- but they certainly existed, whether it's remembered or not.

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