NATIONALISM IS JUST IDENTITARIANISM FOR THE RIGHT:

 Far from being the spawn of postmodernism, identity politics dates back over a century and half earlier, to the cultural shifts that created the modern world. As the philosopher Charles Taylor has shown in a wide range of books and essays, identity politics is rooted in a fusion of Romanticism's ethic of authenticity and the Enlightenment notion of popular sovereignty. The goal of identity politics is what Taylor famously dubbed "recognition." Although it is not popular to say it, the oldest form of such politics is not based in race, gender, or sexual orientation, but rather in nationalism.

It is a truism that, going back to prehistory, humans form cultural identities. But as Taylor has observed, something importantly novel happens in the 18th and 19th centuries that helps define the modern age. Identity becomes the site of a unique form of ideological rallying.

Whereas premodern people interpreted their identities as grafted onto the cosmos, emerging from a mythic past and secured by spiritual entities, modern people do not. Rather, part of the pathos of modern identity is that even religious people must self-consciously mobilize their identities within secular historical time -- what Taylor famously calls in A Secular Age the "immanent frame." No earthquakes or ghosts or other such signs and wonders will manifest to secure an identity's place in the political order. One must do it oneself.

Modern people, according to Taylor, feel their identities to be fragile. They must either secure recognition or face possible eradication or repression into an ethnic, religious, gender, or other such ghetto. Recognition, according to Taylor, means not merely tolerating but positively affirming a group's value to a community, its right to a certain standing. For this reason, Taylor warns that the modern turn to identity is "felt existentially." The need for "recognition" in the "face of nonrecognition" stimulates an effort to confirm one's place. To survive, modern identities seek protection from the modern administrative state.

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