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THE HEAT OF IDENTITY

Introduction

While the Earth's temperature increases inexorably, a different heat fuels the Western 'culture wars'. Identity politics - often called 'wokeness' and 'cancel culture' - has caused intense political battles across Europe and North America. In the face of global emergencies caused by the climate crisis, extreme poverty, and the rise across the world of authoritarian states and movements, much of the Western political left is mired in identity politics and a post-truth universe of its own making. While the left lurches from one 'culture war' disaster to another, authoritarian and far-right forces, laser-focused on 'wokeness', are gaining political ground across the world.

This book is a critique of left-wing identity politics from the political left. It joins other left-wing reviews1 and extends these in a broad analysis of the social, institutional, and corporate forces that have generated left identitarianism. Critiques from the left are necessary because identity politics has seriously damaged numerous left campaigns, organizations, NGOs, political parties, and social movements. What has been called the 'cancel culture' of the left is quite real and has materially harmed many strong activists and organizations.

Identity politics has caused intractable conflicts within many left campaigns and movements, and locked many organizations in irresolvable disputes, including several historic anti-racist, socialist, feminist, and lesbian and gay organizations. It has consumed the energies of many left organizations and derailed them from their political missions in the world and into an inward focus on disagreeable individuals and 'harmful' words. It has turned some of the left into zealots who want to curtail the rights of speech and assembly of others on the left. There have been ferocious disputes on the left about basic women's rights, fights about correct words and speech that have paralysed organizations, campaigns to 'cancel' unwanted liberal views, destructive arguments about who is most privileged or oppressed, the debasing of anti-racism into personal feelings, and the degrading of anti-fascism into misogyny (chapter 4).

Identity politics has infantilized left-wing political discourse. It offers a space of limited thought that has often displaced concerted political thinking on the Western left. It converts deep histories, complex social forces, and geopolitical structures into simple moral groups (chapter 2). Vast political and economic forces and institutions reduce to questions of individual harm and interpersonal relations. Complex histories compress to a word or symbol (chapter 6). Social and economic lives in their fullest sense are displaced in favour of cultural rituals, performances, and artefacts; societies, economies, and politics shrink to questions of culture, identity, and social 'norms'.

Morally excellent groups, the discursive 'structures' that oppress them, and the 'intersections' between the structures are the primary, often sole, 'units' of political analysis that identity politics offers. Social forces, institutions, states, classes, and economies that are central to left-wing political analysis often recede or disappear. Identity politics similarly degrades moral judgements to questions about who someone is rather than what they do or how they make political judgements. It distorts political questions by reducing them to personal, proximate interactions, and social 'norms'. Political ethics and moral judgement on the left have often been diminished to simplicities about 'good' and 'bad' groups and vigilant, reproachful censoriousness towards disliked ideas, people, or political complexity.

Consequently, left-wing identity politics has embraced several modern political lies2 that provide numerous opportunities for the political right to destabilize the left further. For example, no major left-wing political party in the West is willing to state unambiguously to potential supporters what a woman is. For queer theorists, this may be a grand victory for their ruminations about the undecidability of gender (chapter 4). But it is a disaster for left politics in the world that lies beyond liberal NGOs, student societies, and the academic seminar. If sections of the left promote political lies that are apparent lies to anyone - for example, about 'all white people', human biology, or the 'privilege' that poor white people have - this undermines the entire political left. Why should people trust anything the left says?

This book provides explanations for Western LGBTQ+, queer, 'racial', cultural, and ethnic identity politics. These are outcomes of several social and institutional forces, including changes in technofinancial capitalism and their impact on public institutions, transformations in middle-class corporate work, and the rise of political ideologies that are simultaneously hyper-individual and focused on morally excellent groups. Identity politics reflects the ideology, priorities, and sensibilities of a new liberal corporate class working within a 'moral corporation'. I consider the impact of technofinancial capitalism on Western corporations, universities, NGOs, and the middle class (of which I am now a member), and how it elicits spaces among them for identitarian thinking (chapter 3). I argue that the institutional, corporate power of identity politics is fundamental to understanding its impact, including how it has distorted and deflected independent social movements that arise from ordinary, often poor, communities.

A key contrast that underlies many arguments in the book is between the power of liberal corporations and the nature and independence of left social movements. The contrast is, therefore, between identitarian corporate spaces created by liberal multinational corporations, public bodies, universities, and NGOs, and the politics arising from ordinary, predominantly lower-middle- and working-class communities. Identitarianism represents a retreat from anti-poverty politics by the Western left from the early 1990s. It is also emblematic of 'the death of the millennial left'3 and the failure of a politics primarily concerned with the purity of social 'norms' and a strategy of pure opposition rather than meaningful universal visions for the future. The book, however, does not argue for 'class reductionism' or 'economic determinism': the 'culture wars' are not epiphenomenal to the 'real' issues of class and economy but are sites of political antagonism that have institutional and economic consequences. But the 'culture wars' are subject to underlying social and historical forces, institutional interests, and economic and class transformations that are as important to understand as their outward manifestations.

Identitarianism

The origin of contemporary identity politics is often identified with an April 1977 statement by the Combahee River Collective, an African American women's collective (Lilla, 2016).4 However, I consider a broader approach to identity politics. Its protean form is nineteenth-century ethnonationalism, when nations came into being with their nation states, and 'the people' emerged when elites asked them a singular question: 'Who are we?' Today's left-wing identity movements are obsessed with flags, self-determination and autonomy, declarations about 'who we are', personal 'sovereignty', and even 'manifest destiny' in the belief that 'we' will change the world.

'Identitarianism' represents an expansive field of modern thought within which contemporary identity politics is one manifestation. It is a mode of being in the world and is ubiquitous, normative, and invisible, somewhat like the 'banal nationalism'5 that is everywhere and unseen. Ethnicity and religion, for example, are identitarian forms that are naturalized as the mode for how we think about people (chapter 6). This is not to say that people don't 'have' ethnicities or religions, but to point to an instinctive mode of orientation to the world that is unquestioned but worth questioning. In these ways, identitarianism is ingrained and appears natural, such that it is commonly assumed to be the way to be human. But it isn't, and there are always counter-identitarian alternatives.

'Identity politics', as a manifestation of identitarianism, refers to political projects that apprehend the structure of a social formation and its political life, including its geopolitics, through innate or quasi-innate personal and group identities. Those identities acquire moral character solely because of their group affiliation. Identity politics focuses on the meaning of who one is rather than what one does or how one justifies political convictions. Being a member of a favoured identity group provides a moral valency that isn't available to someone supporting a political ideology such as conservatism or socialism (chapter 2). Personal and group identity are the primary foundations for social and political mobilization. They are often associated with the social meanings of the body - as a sex or gender, for example. Their...