Note on American left-liberal identity politics and its background

The militancy of American liberals with regard to the equality of peoples is a correct but much less revolutionary idea than is generally believed. The roots of this are in the fact that the United States, particularly after WW1, developed a global economic hegemony consistent with its own republicanism and legacy of openness to immigrants from numerous countries, beginning with different parts of mostly Northwest Europe. American global hegemony depends ideologically on the absence of the legal subordination of foreign peoples through colonialism, and its replacement by a modern modern system that is more purely economic, though it also has had military as well as ideological (and sometimes humanitarian) ones. World War I ended with the end of two continental European and Euro-Asian empires and the transformation of another (the Russian) into a republican system. Wilson's government backed the new nationalisms in Central and Eastern Europe. Globally, the American model eventually succeeded as the British, French, and other remaining European colonial powers were subjected to decolonization. A republican capitalist system of domination will hold in true "bourgeois" form that the seemingly subordinated peoples and groups are of equal status. This equality of status is militantly supported or at least affirmed by a large part of the American populace and elite. How does this manage to escape the attention of so many left-liberals who think every form and instance of this logic is revolutionary? It only is in the same sense that the American Civil War was revolutionary: it is fully bourgeois revolution, which makes people formally equal and subjects them to capitalism and, incidentally, a much stronger form of governance. Indeed, the American government has repeatedly made the claim in various spheres and ways - including our own domestic surveillance of the whole population - to wielding a power that is essentially total. It extends everywhere and includes everything.

In this context, bids for the important or equal status of some people, nation, culture, language, etc. should be seen as what it is. It is a good thing in itself, but does not bring about either true equality, and arguably does not advance it, though there have been and are advances in this, and it certainly does not bring about that kind of increase of liberty which would require an absence or lessening of oppression.

There is a place among republicans of equality for the radical left, which can very well affirm these things, but wants something more.