The Origins and Evolution of Our Divisive Politics
David Peritz
The Long History of the Age of Fracture: On the Origins and Evolution of Our Divisive Politics
This is the first of two closely related but independent workshops focused on issues of identity, difference and commonality in current American civic and political culture. In this session the focus will be on the history of identity politics in the US over the last half century. Over that time, America has become a truly multi -racial and -cultural society, as a result of immigration and demographic shifts, as well as normative change, with diverse citizens less willing to ‘forget’ their many differences to melt into a dominant national culture.
At the same time, norms surrounding gender and sexuality have become less rigid and more contested and fluid. Perhaps at the start of this ‘age of fracture’, it seemed credible to believe that the “moral arc of the universe bends toward justice,” i.e. that the long-term trend of modern democratic political life moved in the direction of treating all members with equal concern and respect while repairing historical injustices like those rooted in race, gender, sexuality and class. Since the beginning of the current century, however, this claim has appeared far less credible, and instead politics has become increasingly less equal, inclusive, just and democratic, while culture has fractured along lines of identity and difference.
In this workshop, we take a mainly historical perspective, tracing the trajectory of a variety of movements for greater diversity, recognition and inclusion over their contentious, messy and transformative paths, including developments among dominant groups that vary from reparation through reconciliation to backlash.
David Peritz has a Doctor of Philosophy in Politics from Oxford University, where his studies were supported by a Marshall Scholarship. He is Co-Chair of the Politics Department at Sarah Lawrence College, and a regular visiting faculty member in the Master of Arts of Liberal Studies program at Dartmouth. He has also taught at UC Berkeley, Harvard, Cornell and Deep Springs, and was a visiting scholar at Erasmus University in Rotterdam and the London School of Economics. His research specialization is modern and contemporary political philosophy, especially contemporary theories of democracy and justice and their relations to issues of diversity and inequality.
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