When Elie and I were hashing out the problem of whites not showing sufficient concern for black problems, I made a point about the numbers. He was outraged at the fact that white voters didn’t care about black voters.

You have the privilege of disliking “political correctness” because the politically incorrect statements are never directed at you. You can be selfish because your human rights don’t rest on the whims of your former oppressors.

It must be nice. It must be nice to care only about what a candidate will do for you, and not have to worry about what he’ll do to you.

His complaint was about white selfishness, that it was wrong for white voters to not put the interest of black voters before their own, or any other interests. It was a curious view, “you’re so selfish for not making my concerns the center of your universe.” In the coming apocalypse of November 8, one reaction dealt with the failure of identity politics, the division of America into discrete interest groups, their capture of the Democratic party, and the zero-sum-game outcome.

Of course, it lost, though the message that identity politics failed was rejected. The loss, blamed on Comey, the Russians, space aliens, Donna Brazile’s not giving Hillary enough advance notice of the debate questions in time for her to polish up her responses, was due to anything but the possibility that calling everyone who didn’t put your concerns before their concerns racist, sexist, deplorable, was not an effective method of persuasion.

It took some time, but eventually the progressive perspective happened upon a new argument to shame a nation into forsaking their concerns, eradicating all tradition grounded in old evil ways, and recreating a new world that was all about race and gender. White identity politics.

Mr. Trump is not alone in this deliberate ignorance, as postelection calls on the left to forget about identity politics have shown. If there is a dirty secret in American life, it is this: The real unifying force in our national cultural and political life, beyond skirmishes over ideology, is white identity masked as universal, neutral and, therefore, quintessentially American. The greatest purveyors of identity politics today, and for the bulk of our country’s history, have been white citizens.

There are some people, characterized as white nationalists, who are affirmatively focused on white race. Their numbers are miniscule, and their ideology is offensive and ignorant. They say some ridiculously outrageous things, and make the news, providing an easy foil. But they aren’t the millions of ordinary people that comprise this nation. They make for good fodder to ridicule, but they’re of no consequence beyond that.

In the aftermath of LBJ signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the accepted liberal notion was of a post-discrimination (on immutable characteristics) society. No longer would skin color or genitalia control our futures. It worked remarkably well, in that it gave rise to the ability to make demands for change that would have been laughable beforehand.

The road ahead is not easy, primarily because Mr. Trump’s ignorance about race, his critical lack of nuance and learning about it, exists among liberals and the white left, too.

While you were busy blaming Trump for the end of the world, just to get a jump on its occurrence, Georgetown sociology prof Michael Eric Dyson explains that it’s you, us, the “white left” and liberals, who are at fault.  He doubles down on identity politics to argue that what America perceives as neutral merely masks hegemonic whiteness.

Proof? The socialist Bernie Sanders.

Since the election, Mr. Sanders has sounded an increasingly familiar theme among liberals that they should “go beyond identity politics.” He warned that “to think of diversity purely in racial and gender terms is not sufficient,” and that we need candidates “to be fighters for the working class and stand up to the corporate powers who have so much power over our economic lives.”

…

This is a nifty bit of historical revisionism. For the longest time there was little consideration for diversity, even among liberal elites, much less the white middle and working classes. It seems more than a little reactionary to blame the loss of the election on a brand of identity politics that even liberals were slow to embrace.

By “more than a little reactionary,” he means racist. By focusing on white middle and working classes, we refused to focus on blacks. But there is a logical disconnect in noting, on the one hand, that liberals were “slow to embrace” the undoing of America and its recreation based on the desires of blacks.

That was the problem, not the explanation. Liberals were the new racists and sexists because they were still in favor of a colorblind society, but not in favor of a new society that put race and gender ahead of everything else. Liberals were, indeed, slow to embrace identity politics. Clinton lost. While the election dynamics are far more complex than can be captured in a twit or a blog post, few give any thought to the millions of liberal voters who wouldn’t vote for Trump, but couldn’t vote for Clinton because of this.

Dyson contends that there is no such thing as a neutral force in society, characterizing the majority as an identity group standing for the proposition of maintaining its control and oppressing the minority. It’s interesting that he uses the word “neutral,” as it fits within my bastardization theory of Herzberg’s motivator-hygiene factors.

A bastardization of Herzberg’s theory is that there are deprivations that take a person below the standard to which everyone is entitled. An example (and just an example, nothing more) would be a law that denied a black person the right to vote based on race, whether directly or through proxies. That would be an unconstitutional deprivation. But once that deprivation is removed, it becomes a neutral factor. The black person gets to vote like everybody else, but he’s not assured his candidate will win. He’s just one of the many people who vote.

The next step, that a black person’s vote counts more than another person’s, would go past neutrality into the realm of benefit. It’s no longer about suffering an unconstitutional detriment, but enjoying greater rights than others.

As I noted during my tete-a-tete with Elie, there is a numbers game to be considered, that blacks comprise 13% of America, and to the extent their concerns aren’t recognized or shared by the other 87%, it would be more effective to compromise on core issues,* create consensus than to scream racist and demand they acquiesce to a paradigm shift of society that is all about the minority at the expense of the majority.

There is a neutral, even if you don’t like it. The majority decides society’s norms. While the Constitution precludes the majority from depriving the minority of its rights, known as the “tyranny of the majority,” the minority cannot expect the majority to abandon its society and replace it with the one the minority prefers.

The irony of all of this is that a post like this will be perceived by some as racist and sexist, because it fails to embrace the ideology promoted by Dyson, or even encourages the racist whites who failed to do enough to rid America of the evils of white identity politics. It’s not good enough to try to achieve equality anymore.

But “neutral” exists whether you want to admit it or not, and calling it white identity politics won’t change the dynamics of the majority. White liberals aren’t your enemy, even if they’re not willing to let you be in charge. You’re entitled to equality, not control.

*When Black Lives Matter was born, the focus was cops killing innocent, unarmed black males, a problem that no reasonable, well-intended person could ignore. When BLM morphed into complaints that the word “master” hurt black Yale students’ feelings as it reminded them of slave masters, or that Princeton students demanded the removal of the name Woodrow Wilson, a United States and university president, from a wall, they lost it.