Instead, the left in recent years has had trouble going beyond what has come to be called “identity politics”–a politics that is rooted more in group self-assertion than in attempts to create broad alliances. Of course, oppressed groups must always struggle to overcome their second-class status; equality demands no less. But what began in the late 1960s as an assertion of dignity by various groups, a remedy for exclusion and denigration and a demand by the voiceless for representation, has developed its own habits and methods of silencing. At the extreme, in the academy but also outside it, standards and traditions are now viewed as nothing more than camouflage for particular interests. Many a dispute is premised on the idea that there is a fundamental difference between X (women, say, or people of color) and Y (white males); that X has been oppressed or silenced by Y and should therefore be hired, promoted, and specially represented on reading lists and at conferences.
