Women As Microtrends?

Over at Obsidian Wings, Hilzoy puts up a very well-written piece examining the question of whether a woman who votes for Obama over Clinton in the primary is abandoning the cause of feminism, or even the cause of women everywhere.

Probably needless to say, I don't buy this idea. I hate identity politics. I understand their necessity, in some contexts. I am, at heart, the living, beating heart of the patriarchy. I'm a professional, overeducated upper-middle class white dude. That means that, at best, I can only achieve a rational-level understanding of the difficulties that people who don't have all the head starts I had will suffer. Minorities, women, the handicapped. I can try to understand where people are coming from when they complain of discrimination, but I will never feel it in the same way that they do, the people who are actually experiencing it.

So, I know that sometimes you can only have your deepest interests represented by someone who really, truly, deeply feels them.

But, at the same time, identity politics are self-limiting. If, for instance, blacks think that only a black can represent them and their interests, then aren't I, a white guy, stuck feeling that there's no way a black could ever represent me or mine? And now we're heading down the road of tyranny of the majority, which is entirely antithetical to the entire American project.

And all of this is ignoring the fact that, in general, there is much more variety inside any given group than there is between the average of two different groups. For instance, although it is generally accepted that men, on average, have superior spatial reasoning skills to women, it's completely foolish to lock all men into a spatial reasoning-depended career track, while locking out women, since the range between the best and worst man is so much more than that between the average man and the average woman. So, in general, assuming that someone is similar to you just because they hail from your group (race, gender, hobby, whatever) is simply foolish.

So, I guess, I think that identity politics have a place, but you can't get locked into them, or else you will never overcome your demographics.

So, like Hilzoy, I hope that people aren't voting the way they are voting simply because of basic facts of personal identity. I can accept that some people are going to vote for a particular candidate because they think that candidate best represents their particular interests. Ideally, they would understand that knowing who that candidate is isn't quite as simple as knowing who looks the most like them.

Unfortunately for Clinton's campaign, their head strategist is Mark Penn, the author of last year's Microtrends. (Read man-crush Ezra's take here.) I'm not going to get too deep into the weeds of the book; if you want to know about that read Ezra's piece. But the short version is that Penn thinks that Americans can be grouped into tiny little groups, who have common interests based on common characteristics (Archery Dads! Wannabe Snipers!) and appeal to them based on those characteristics.

But, the problem is that there's no reason to expect that Archery Dads, whatever the hell they are, have anything at all in common beyond being dads and having interest in archery. So, policies about kids and tax breaks for arrows might help with this group. Otherwise, what are you supposed to do with this arbitrary group-making?

But Penn is stuck in this mindset. If we find a policy that appeals to some women, then by extrapolation it must appeal to all women! And so, if women aren't voting en masse for Hilary, that means they are abandoning their group, and can be blamed for her loss.

In short, (I know, I know - too late!) I don't buy it.