The Ottoman Inspiration of Identity Politics
The Retrogressive Left Replicates A Historical Horror for Criminal Justice
With identity politics, the American Left has resurrected from Leon Trotsky’s Ash Heap of History one of the oddest and most tragic forms of governance—Ottoman millets. In the Ottoman empire millets were conquered, non-Muslim confessional communities—Catholics, orthodox Christians, Druze, Alawites, Jews and so forth. Each millet had its own courts, laws, and taxes. All were separate from but inferior to the Sharia law of the imperial power.
The Ottomans originally were herders on the trans-Caucasian steppe. Treating subject peoples as flocks of useful animals came naturally. As the millets jostled for favors and protection, the Ottomans played each against the others to prevent those subjugated from forming alliances and toppling their overseers.
Instead of religion, The Left separates its herds based on race, ethnicity and gender. The dynamics; however, are the same. People are told their identities and legal rights derive not as free citizens of the United States, equal under the laws, but as members of a group, each of which has special laws, privileges, and disadvantages.
The Ottomans further partitioned their millets into ethno-linguistic sub-groups. For example, Orthodox Christians were subdivided into Serbs, Armenians and Vlachs. Jews were sub-categorized as Talmudic or Karaite.
The Left does likewise, but with an ingenious innovation. They sub-categorize those of mixed identities—for example, black, Hispanic transsexuals—by overlaying group identities to create innumerable subgroups. These are usually represented by the overlapping diagrams of mathematical set theory, which lends a pseudo-scientific patina to the sophistry beneath.
This is “intersectionality” which is anathema to much of America but gospel to the social justice Janissaries in colleges and universities. With identity politics, at least in the minds of its proponents, fractalized into near infinite sub-sets, it is foreseeable that expert, criminal justice computants will be required to calculate intersecting identities and genders to descry, and no doubt certify, sub-sub-sub-sub-groups and their attendant privileges, disabilities, and benefits.
For criminal justice, this will, I believe, soon add an Intersectional Algorhythm to already prolix sentencing schedules. Thus, if you are a cis-het (birth gender heterosexual), gender-questioning, Chinese Hispanic charged with second-degree murder, your sentence might be 10-20 years + 40% cis-het surcharge – 25% Hispanic bonus + 10% East Asian DNA upcharge –5% gender confusion +/– whatever your Legislature enthuses about in the next session.
The Left manage their groups as did the Ottomans—not to allocate power to them but to aggregate power from them. Groups are to The Left what millets were to the Ottomans—useful animals. If this sounds strange, it is. Group rights, guilt for ancestral wrongs, and identity based on race and ethnicity are not new ideas but old.
The Left are not progressives evolving new forms of social organization, but retrogressives devolving representative democracy and individual citizenship into more primitive forms of governance whose only virtue is to monopolize power in the hands of an elite.
Ottoman-like rule is not stable. The groups are forever aggrieved by the struggle for privileges and preferment and impoverished by ever-higher taxes while the oligarchs scheme endlessly to topple one another. When an imperium of millets becomes too expensive, too abusive, too weak or too corrupt, the human herds become unmanageable.
The end comes quickly. The Ottoman Empire collapsed after World War I unloved and unremembered by its subject populations. These have balkanized themselves into rump states based on their religions, languages and ethnicities throughout the Middle East, northern Africa, and south-eastern Europe. They have been fighting against each other, and occasionally against the United States, for a hundred years.
To deride The Left as socialists is to misunderstand them entirely. Unlike traditional socialists, they do not want government to own factories, farms and enterprises; they want government to own people.
That’s worse.
Wes Denham spent years as a criminal defense investigator and Spanish translator in Florida and Georgia jails and prisons. He is the author of Arrested, a consumer guide to criminal defense, and Arrest-Proof Yourself, a guide to avoiding unnecessary arrest. He is a graduate of Princeton University.