joel wrote:
> I found American identity politics as intolerable as I find racism in
> Europe.
Sure, and I think that's the rational core of what Walter Benn Michaels says when he points out how the blather about "diversity" has been harnessed to an essentially neoliberal agenda.
However, I don't think all socially constructed identities exist in some neutral field. I think "whiteness", or the various "white" ethnic-American identities, are the original identity politics.
I think theorists like Noel Ignatiev and Ted Allen were on to something when they described "whiteness" as the peculiar form that Social Democracy assumes in America (Social Democracy here meaning a form of working-class indentity politics that reconciles a certain layer of the proletariat to capitalism).
There was a great episode of The Sopranos, in the 4th Season, "Columbus Day", that brilliant satirizes how the narrative of ethnic-American immigrant achievement is basically an essential component in the construction of whiteness.
As such, I don't think one can say that "identities" are some conspiracy of the ruling class (not that I'm attributing this to you); a section of the working class in America itself plays a role in the bargain.
But Capital itself has decided that this bargain is no longer to its benefit, so we have seen an erosion of "whiteness" in the United States, just as we have seen the dismantling of Social Democracy in its other manifestations elsewhere. And as a result of this revocation by Capital of the privileges previously accorded through "whiteness", some of the former beneficiaries of this pact have chosen to pursue a militant defense of it (The Tea Party in America, far-right and neo-Nazi parties in Europe).
That's also why the classical Marxist explanations of fascism, whether "Stalinist" (as the "direct rule of finance capital") or "Trotskyist" (as a movement of the radicalized petit-bourgeoisie) are way off the mark. Contemporary fascism is essentially a proletarian phenomenon.