Todd Leventhal

I was thinking about the election of Abdul El-Sayed, the Michigan Democrat who just became the first Muslim elected to the United States Senate. What struck me was how his Islamic faith was not only a nonissue for Democrats but was widely celebrated as a positive. This, despite a party that prides itself on being the champion of women's rights and female liberation. El-Sayed is a practicing Muslim who has spoken openly about the importance of his faith. And that brings me to something particularly interesting about the treatment of his religion. For those unfamiliar with Islam, the hadiths are recorded accounts of the words, actions, and teachings attributed to Muhammad, the founder and prophet of Islam. Alongside the Quran, they serve as an important source of Islamic religious doctrine, law, and moral instruction. Among the most authoritative collections in Sunni Islam is Sahih al-Bukhari, whose narrations have profoundly influenced Islamic religious teaching for centuries. One such narration, Sahih al-Bukhari 304, describes Muhammad addressing a group of women during Eid, one of Islam's principal religious holidays. He tells them that women constitute the majority of the inhabitants of Hell and characterizes them as deficient in intelligence and religion. When the women ask him to explain, he points to the testimony of two women being equivalent to that of one man and to women's inability to pray or fast during menstruation. This is not some obscure writing from a fringe Islamic extremist. It is a narration found in one of Sunni Islam's most revered religious collections, part of a body of literature that has shaped Islamic religious practice and jurisprudence for centuries. Yet the same Democrats who routinely scrutinize the religious beliefs of Christian politicians for the slightest suggestion of misogyny seem remarkably uninterested in examining the religious traditions of their newly elected Muslim senator. The questions that would ordinarily be raised about a conservative Christian's understanding of women, religious authority, or the separation of church and state seem to disappear when the religious identity in question satisfies the party's diversity preferences. Compare this to Mitt Romney's presidential campaign in 2012 and the scrutiny his Mormon faith received. Romney's religion became a legitimate subject of public examination, while Democrats were eager to identify any hint of misogyny, real or imagined, that might be reflected in his beliefs or behavior. He even found himself defending his treatment of women during a nationally televised presidential debate. When asked about pay equity, Romney explained how his administration in Massachusetts had worked with women's organizations to identify qualified female candidates for senior government positions. Referring to the collections of resumes they provided, he used the phrase "binders full of women." Democrats promptly turned the remark into a national spectacle, mocking him for an awkward expression made while describing an effort to recruit more women into positions of power. The contrast between the treatment of Romney and El-Sayed is remarkable, and the hypocrisy is astounding. But I think it reveals something more fundamental about the modern Democratic worldview: its hostility toward Christianity, whiteness, and maleness. The only reason white Christian men within the Democratic Party escape condemnation for these supposed "original sins" is that they voluntarily subordinate themselves to the party's conception of "diversity." It does for them what Lourdes does for the disabled. It cleanses them, washes away the stain of their identity, and grants them absolution. Democrats have constructed a bizarre, almost idolatrous hierarchy of identities in which a person's position within the hierarchy determines the degree of moral scrutiny he receives. Race, religion, and sex have become the principal considerations in deciding whose beliefs deserve suspicion and whose deserve deference. Within this worldview, a man like El-Sayed can practice a religion whose authoritative traditions contain teachings that progressives would otherwise condemn as misogynistic and intolerant, yet his Islamic identity itself becomes an object of celebration. The same religious traditionalism that would be treated as evidence of backwardness in a white Christian Republican can become an expression of cultural diversity when associated with a nonwhite Muslim Democrat. Apparently, the acceptability of religious conservatism has less to do with the actual religious teachings than with the identity of the person professing them. I think this helps explain why so many Americans have come to loathe and fear the Democratic Party, or at least what it has become today. If it were genuinely a party of tolerance and progress, we could disagree bitterly with its policies without feeling so fundamentally threatened by its ideology. But it isn't, and it hasn't been for a long time. This is no longer the party of FDR or JFK. It is a party increasingly defined by an ideology that treats the immutable characteristics and religious faith of white, male, Christian Americans as moral liabilities while elevating other ethnicities and religions, even when those groups hold views for which white Christians would be politically crucified. What makes this particularly destructive is that it has introduced an entirely different conception of equality into American political life. Rather than applying a common moral standard to everyone, the progressive worldview increasingly demands that people be judged according to their position within an elaborate hierarchy of historical grievances, inherited guilt, and perceived oppression. Under such a system, the same behavior can be condemned or excused depending on who engages in it. Religious convictions that are intolerable in one person become expressions of cultural authenticity in another. Pride in one's ancestry is celebrated among some groups and regarded with suspicion among others. Even the language of prejudice and discrimination is applied selectively, as though the moral character of an action depends on the racial or religious identity of the person committing it. The consequences of this worldview have been disastrous for our country, and I think they help explain much of the growing hostility between Americans of different backgrounds. For generations, the aspiration of American liberalism, and indeed the broader civil rights movement, was to move our country toward a society in which our common citizenship transcended our racial, ethnic, and religious differences. The modern progressive movement has increasingly inverted that ideal, placing those very differences at the center of political and social life. The result has been to intensify racial consciousness, breed resentment among white Americans, and contribute to the resurgence of the very white identity politics that progressives claim to despise. I find this development troubling. I have long believed that the success of the American experiment depends on our ability to build a common national identity among people of vastly different backgrounds. That requires a willingness to persuade, compromise, and form coalitions with people who do not necessarily look, worship, or think like us. But when an entire political movement insists that race, ethnicity, religion, and sex are the defining characteristics of political life, it inevitably encourages everyone else to begin thinking in those same terms. White Americans who are repeatedly told that their ancestry carries an inherited moral burden, that their religious beliefs are uniquely suspect, and that their sex is an instrument of oppression will eventually begin to understand politics through the very racial and identity-based framework being imposed upon them. And some will conclude that if every other group is entitled to organize politically around its collective identity and interests, they ought to do the same. This is where I think the modern Democratic Party has been extraordinarily shortsighted. It has spent years promoting a political worldview that emphasizes racial differences, assigns moral significance to ancestry, and encourages people to understand themselves primarily as members of competing identity groups. Yet it responds with astonishment and moral outrage when white Americans begin embracing the same logic. I don't welcome the rise of white identity politics. I regard it as a deeply troubling development for a country whose success depends on transcending precisely these divisions. But I also recognize that it is, at least in part, a reaction to a political culture that has spent years making whiteness a source of collective guilt while celebrating nearly every other form of racial and ethnic consciousness. The great irony of the modern progressive movement is that, in its obsession with correcting historical prejudice, it has helped revive the very tribal instincts that previous generations of Americans worked so hard to overcome. And I fear that the longer this continues, the more Americans will abandon the ideal of a common national identity in favor of competing racial, religious, and ethnic loyalties. That is an extraordinarily dangerous direction for a diverse, pluralistic republic. Once Americans begin to understand political life primarily as a struggle between racial and religious groups, persuasion and coalition-building become increasingly irrelevant. Politics ceases to be about winning people over through ideas and becomes a contest over which demographic groups can accumulate enough power to prevail over the others. This is ultimately what troubles me most about the Democratic Party's embrace of identity politics. Its consequences extend well beyond the electoral fortunes of either party. It threatens the civic foundation upon which a multiethnic republic like ours depends. Americans of different races, religions, and backgrounds will always disagree about politics, morality, and the proper role of government. The American experiment was never predicated on eliminating those differences. Its genius was in the belief that we could nevertheless belong to one nation, governed by common principles and equal standards of citizenship. The more we abandon that ideal in favor of competing racial and religious hierarchies, the harder it becomes to sustain the bonds of mutual respect and national solidarity that make our republic possible. And I fear we are already beginning to see what happens when those bonds break down.