Link back to comment

Thanks, Peter, for articulating your objections to identity politics in such a concise, yet systematic manner. By first approximation, I agree with what you say! (But note: by first approximation, all animals can fly - because, by first approximation, all animals are insects...). So let me try to address some of the elephants and rhinos in the room - those that are not insects, and cannot fly.

In broadest terms, I consider identity politics the outcome of would-be revolutionaries getting terribly lost and side-tracked on their Long March Through The Institutions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_long_march_through_the_institutions).

More specifically, I have this to say in response:

1. Identity politics is (or at least tries to be) racist in an affirmative way. Partly out of respect for individual integrity and sovereignty for members of divergent demographies, and partly because it is one of the most obvious starting points we currently have available for the formulation of a coherent alternative to the neo-liberal agenda that threatens to subsume all human difference to its object of profit maximisation.

2. Identity politics curtails free speech to the extent necessary to provide a platform for previously silenced minorities. Sure, there's overreach - but it is not like identarians burn people at the stake, or send them off to Gulags - in the main, they just exercise their right not to provide platforms for male WEIRD (white, educated, industrialised, rich, democratic) people.

3. Identity politics is NOT counter-productive for the oppressed, once you try to get your head around how much there still is power and safety in numbers. It is all good and well to sing the praises of individualism, but where that demand for individualism splinters the cohesion of the identity group that is trying to secure basic rights for itself, it becomes "economically rational" for individuals to limit dissent.

4. Identity politics has developed inherently reactionary tendencies because inherently revolutionary outlooks, and especially those referencing the class conflicts of bourgeois society and economics, are utterly discredited in polite discussion.

5. Can identity politics be a threat to something that arguably doesn't even exist yet in any substantial manifestation? I'm very much with Ghandi, who, when asked what he thought of Western Civilisation, answered that it "would be a good idea". We have a long way to go yet before we can claim to have developed the present thin veneer of civility into something truly solid and a strong enough basis to support our collective endeavours to deal with the coming challenges of the anthropocene. Try to co-opt identitarians, rather than fight them head on, I say.