Towards a politics of the "what," not the "who": Note on the campus sex assault policy debate

Comment published in New York Times online blog, in response to Anna Dubenko, “Right and left react to Betsy de Vos’s changes to campus sex assault rules,” September 12, 2017,

The Talmud says do not favor a rich man because he is rich, but also not a poor man because he is poor. "Liberals" do the latter; a Stalinism of identity politics and unlimited government. 

This brouhaha shows again how "left-liberals" promote the authoritarianism they loathe when it is against their "oppressed" constituencies. Their politics so reduced itself to a grand comic theater of Affirmative Action that they lost an election they should have won. 

Identity politics, which lies at the basis of this, says that you are right or wrong not in what you think or do, but in what you are. Not who you are, what you are, because for identity politics it is demographical categories that define people, not their personalities, ideas, or achievements.

The questions facing liberals now must include that of a politics of the "what" vs. the "who." Oppression is not something one type of person "enjoys" while their opposite number suffers. It is more a set of practices, and of institutions built around them. But our democracy is highly personal; we even elect candidates for their personalities more than ideology. Yet the question of practices and institutions is the question of what kind of society we want to have. 

Politics and crime both are about what is done, not "cui bono?," who benefits. Even a feminist politics is not the promotion of women so much as the transformation of a society and culture away from gender inequality and normativity.