Group Interests as Regime Technology

How Managerial Elites Use and Abuse Identity

The Puppet Show, by Victor Gabriel Gilbert

As a coda to yesterday’s post, I wanted to address a potential counter-argument.

This model involves the concepts of ethnic blocs and group interests. While many people will accept that common sense teaches ethnic groups do have group interests - pertaining to genetic reproduction, cultural reproduction, or both - some, including many liberals, might demur. They might sagely point out that groups are messy, unstable, and hard to define scientifically. Further, they might claim that if we are unable to point conclusively to the existence of objective group interests, the entire model falls apart.

That might sound clever. But it would be wrong.

This model does not require ethnic group interests to be metaphysically real in order to be explanatory. It only requires:

• That key actors behave as if such interests exist (especially regime client-groups), and

• That incentive structures reward such behaviour, thereby reinforcing group coherence over time.

Both criteria are demonstrably, obviously true. And this actually makes the theory more robust, not less: because it functions regardless of whether one holds a sociobiological, culturalist, or purely instrumentalist view of group identity.

As a rhetorical tactic, it’s common for liberal intellectuals to deny that ethnic or racial groups have objective collective interests. (This is associated with the adage that ‘race is socially constructed.’) However, in practice, liberals still behave as if groups do have such interests. This is obvious whenever they propose or enforce group-based quotas, advocate for group-based redress, celebrate ‘representation’ of group identities as a good in itself, or involve group identity in hiring and political narratives. In other words - it is obvious in almost everything they do and say.

What’s more, these practices create incentives for people to identify, organise, and mobilise on a group basis. This develops its own logic, regardless of whether it began from essentialist premises.

Political reality is defined by how people act, not by what metaphysics they profess. When managerial systems establish benefits for client groups - such as quotas, diversity funding, moral primacy, or legal protections - they are effectively constructing group interests, above and beyond what might have existed organically. As such, even if people didn’t previously think of themselves as part of a group, they quickly learn to act as one if they will benefit from doing so.

Over time, this leads to the reification of group identity, which quickly becomes sticky, institutionalised, and defended. For example, Thomas Sowell has pointed out that ‘Hispanics’ do not exist anywhere outside the USA, because only there do government programs recognize such a category, leading to ethnic political coalitions seeking grants and appropriations.

In short, political favors are not simply responses to existing groups. The groups themselves may be artifacts created by political favors – and, even when not created by these favors, their degree of self-consciousness, politicization, or polarization may be functions of the availability of government largesse.

Thomas Sowell, Race and Culture (p. 144)

Ethnic groups do not always form around deep-seated tribal memory. They are often the product of regime policy and economic structure.

Liberal denial of group interests is exposed as a sham whenever they advocate the distribution of resources, recognition, or justice based on group categories. You can’t say ‘there’s no such thing as group interest’ and then organize your entire legitimacy structure around redressing historic or structural group disadvantages.

The model I have proposed is agnostic about the ontological reality of group interests:

• If they do exist (and whether they are biological, cultural, or historical), then the theory describes how a managerial regime suppresses or empowers them strategically.

• If they don’t exist, the managerial regime still acts as if they do, and uses constructed identities as an instrument of power.

The second situation would actually be more damning for the managerial regime. It reinforces that the inter-group conflict they engineer and administer isn’t tragic or organic, but strategic. And the group interests that result from their machinations - even if they didn’t arise naturally - are real in their effects and perpetuated through dependency, grievance, and symbolic reward.

This, then, is the cynical calculus of the managerial elite. Their suppression of majority identity isn’t intended to create harmony. It is part of a wider strategy of manipulating group identity to prevent coherence. And so they perform ‘anti-racism’ while creating a viciously racialized order.

In short, whether or not group interests are objectively real, the managerial regime exploits, creates, and manipulates them for their own purposes.

One might say: if a tool so useful didn’t already exist, they would have had to invent it.