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Thanks Arnd – you raise some important points. A few words in reply to each:

1. You say that identity politics is ‘racist in an affirmative way’ out of respect for the individual integrity and sovereignty of members in different communities. On the contrary, it denies sovereignty and agency to members of the communities it claims to champion, as the Sarah Haider case that I discuss in the article exemplifies. Rather than being respected as a free agent, with the right to critically examine the culture she was born into, she is vilified as a ‘house Arab’ and ‘native informant’ for doing just that.

2. Identity politics certainly acts to curtail free speech, but why is this necessary to ensure a voice for ‘previously silenced minorities’? I agree with John Stuart Mill’s point that stifling debate harms all sides in an argument – as he famously said ‘he who knows only his own side of the case has a poor grasp of that’.

3. I think identity politics is generally counter-productive for the oppressed. This is a large topic that I will address in a future article, but I give as one example the Black Lives Matter movement in the US. This group came to prominence after the shooting by police of a black man, Michael Brown, in 2014, which was characterized as a police murder, a claim subsequently shown definitively to be false. The impact of BLM was an upsurge in street activism directed at police, which stymied the kind of pro-active policing that had been so successful in reducing crime in impoverished inner-city areas. A direct consequence of this was a surge in homicides in these areas the following year, the overwhelming majority of the victims being black.

4. I essentially agree with your point here. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of communism and the discrediting of socialism, left a void at the heart of leftist politics that needed to be filled with something, and unfortunately that something is identity politics.

5. You ask how identity politics can be a threat to something (i.e. Western civilization) that doesn’t even exist yet. What doesn’t exist? We live in a society governed by institutions and norms that provide a combination of freedom, security and material prosperity unparalleled in human history. That, I contend, is worth defending, not deprecating as the identity politics brigade do.

I will be taking up some of these issues in subsequent articles, so let’s continue the discussion.