Identity Politics Runs Much Deeper than Politics

Conservatives and other nonprogressives have missed something major about identity politics: its authenticity. But the liberal-progressive side has missed something bigger. Identity politics is not so much politics as a primal scream. It’s the result of the Great Scattering—our species’ unprecedented collective retreat from our very selves.”

Mary Eberstadt writes this in her new book, Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics. The book includes responses by Rod Dreher, Mark Lilla, and Peter Thiel. She talks about Primal Screams in this interview.

Kathryn Jean Lopez: At one point in the book, you write: “The crisis over identity is part and parcel of a larger unraveling. . . . Foreboding saturates the politics and societies of the West today. . . . It is not impossible to hear in today’s secular jeremiads a displaced panic for a pandemic no one saw coming: the diminution of the human story itself.” How is that not overly dramatic, and if it’s not overly dramatic, well, shouldn’t we panic?

Mary Eberstadt: Sometimes the truth is dramatic. Ours is one of those times.

As chapter two of Primal Screams spells out, we’re now surrounded by evidence that something about the way we live has run amok. Psychiatric problems are rising, life expectancy is falling, and many people in public life are at each other’s throats. So-called “loneliness studies” have become a fixture of sociology not only in the United States, but across all of the materially advanced nations. There’s also new evidence that loneliness has exploded at the other end of time’s telescope — among the young. And of course there is multiplying confusion of all sorts related to gender identity, ethnic identity, and much more.