After decades of brutal race and gender politics from the left, conservatives began treating identity itself as toxic. That reaction is understandable after fighting a sinister ideology for years, but ignoring identity is not an option. Human beings need a firm sense of who they are and where they belong. Progressives exploited that impulse in twisted, artificial ways, but the impulse remains natural and healthy.
As the United States confronts mass immigration, the question “What is an American?” has become unavoidable on the right once again. It is a question about identity. For the first time in decades, conservatives must navigate one of the most important parts of human life.
Identity feels dangerous because it is dangerous. From the beginning of time, identity has been something men kill and die for. People can fight over voluntary commitments, but identity largely consists of things we did not choose. We do not choose where we are born or to whom. We do not choose to be a brother, sister, son, or daughter. Even religion, though it requires voluntary practice, is usually inherited before it is chosen.
Identity is what you cannot leave behind, often because you never chose it in the first place.
That is why identity produces existential conflict. Its involuntary nature means people cannot simply opt out when the pressure rises. If someone wants to kill everyone who likes the movie “Jaws,” you can stop being a fan. If someone wants to kill everyone born English, you cannot stop being English. You have no option but to fight.
This explains why the post-World War II consensus tried to suppress as many thick identities as possible. If people lack strong attachments to heritage, tradition, nation, or religion, they are less likely to treat those attachments as matters of life and death. The impulse is understandable. No sane person wants another war of religion or world war fought over nationalism.
But the shift carries a cost. Without the boundaries of nation and religion, we drift toward open-borders globalism, which is deeply unhealthy.
A nation without identity has no coherent sense of the public good. The man whose family has lived in America since the founding has different priorities from a newly arrived immigrant hoping to move his extended family here. The Christian who wants his faith reflected in his ancestral nation has conflicting interests with the Muslim who wants his new home to implement Sharia law.
The state cannot remain neutral between these visions. It must decide which identity takes priority and which public good it will pursue. Neutrality is a lie. Identity is inescapable.
As America tries to unwind the open-borders disaster liberalism produced, the need for concrete identity becomes obvious. Illegal immigration is a massive problem, but legal immigration has also been destructive. If being American means more than obtaining paperwork, uncomfortable lines must be drawn. Identities are inherently exclusive. Some people are in, and some people are out.
That feels dangerous because it is. But we no longer have the luxury of avoidance. Turning a blind eye to these questions created the mess. We will not escape it by doing the same thing again.
Modern people like rigid categories, but identity has always had strong centers with some flexibility at the margins. A traditional biological family is the best outcome and should be preferred above alternatives, but an adopted child can still become part of a family. People know what a woman is, but progressives exploit overly rigid definitions to destroy the category. If you say a woman is someone who can bear children, they immediately point to a sterile female and ask whether she is still a woman.
The rigid category becomes the tool of deconstruction.
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