Identitarian Politics: A Guide for the Confused

The roots of wokeness

The latest Lowdown podcast features political theorist Yascha Mounk discussing the grim consequences of identitarian politics.

You can listen here:

• On Apple

• On Spotify

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• And on all other available hosts here

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I don’t think there’s any point in solely blaming the extreme form of wokeism for Trump’s victory – inflation, Joe Biden’s Lear-like vanity in clinging to power, and mass immigration played their part as well.

Beyond that, if you vote for a man like Donald Trump, that’s your decision and your fault. If you back an unhinged, vicious, and vindictive demagogue, whining that those nasty lefties made you do it is an abdication of personal responsibility.

But that is easy for me to say as a writer. For politicians, the first rule of their trade is that the voters are never wrong. If they want to win – and when they are up against dangerous authoritarians, they must win – they have to know when it is time to change.

The doctrines of the “woke left” – and I will come to the meaning of “woke” in a moment – assured leftish politicians that society was run by white supremacists. And yet ethnic minority voters contradicted them by voting for Trump.

A report by New York Magazine talked of Hispanic and Asian voters deserting the Democrats because they did not agree with the new gender orthodoxies, were horrified by calls to defund the police, or found the fantastically naïve assertion that fears about crime were a “moral panic” absurd.

A point Yascha emphasises in his interview with me and his groundbreaking book The Identity Trap is that there is an unbridgeable gulf between the assumptions of the university-educated left and traditional liberal-left ideas.

The socialist tradition was materialist. Under the influence of postmodernism, the new left holds the material reality of biological sex to be an oppressive construct, which we are free to reject if we wish. (Incidentally, I suspect one reason why trans ideology has received a far rougher ride from left-wing feminists in the UK than in the US is that socialism was a far stronger force here.)

The traditional liberal-left believed in abolishing racism by treating people equally without regard for colour or creed. However, critical race theory condemns colour-blindness as a swindle that hides white supremacy.

To use a comparison neither side will appreciate, critical theorists are like the Zionists who looked at early 20th-century Europe and concluded that all its equality laws could not hide the fact that it was a deeply antisemitic continent. Hitler proved them right, and the result was Israel.

Critical race theorists believe that civil rights are an illusion, and the result is special schemes to give priority to members of minorities, which naturally provoke resentment because they conflict with basic notions of fairness.

Below is an updated piece which attempts to explain, dispassionately I hope, how strange and radically new woke ideology is.

(There’s a paywall in there. You can subscribe if you want to support my journalism or take a free trial if you just want to browse.)

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The roots of wokeness

There are two dishonest conversations about wokeness, or identity politics if you prefer the less contentious term. The first from conservatives is wearily familiar.  For some on the right “woke” is now a synonym for “anything I can’t abide”.  Overuse has made the insult meaningless.

On the left, the dishonesty lies in the denial that a new ideology even exists. Nothing has changed, we are told. To be what Conservatives sneeringly call “woke” is simply to be a decent person who cares about the rights of others as progressives have always done.

“They’re calling you ‘woke’ if you call out bad things,” cried the actress, Kathy Burke.  “If you’re not racist, you’re woke. If you’re not homophobic, oh, you’re woke. Be woke, kids. Be woke. Be wide awake and fucking call it out.”

At least Burke had the self-confidence to use the word. Elsewhere in leftish circles uttering “woke” is frowned on. The censure comes even though, unlike so many political labels, “Tory” or “suffragette”  or “queer,” for instance, “woke” did not begin life as an insult, but as an authentic African-American injunction from the 1930s to stay alert to injustice.

We should be able to accept that, just because conservatives use “woke” as a catch-all insult, does not mean that a distinct and peculiar version of leftism did not grow up in American universities at the beginning of the century and then went on to take over large sections of the rich world’s left in the 2010s.

Among the many achievements of Yascha Mounk’s The Identity Trap  (is that he unearths the roots of today’s ideology with the patience of an archaeologist. Mounk calls it the “identity synthesis” – he avoids the word woke, perhaps wisely – and does a superb job of showing how unstable and authoritarian the woke worldview was always going to be.

“The lure that attracts so many people to the identity synthesis is a desire to overcome persistent injustices and create a society of genuine equals,” the political scientist writes. “But the likely outcome of implementing this ideology is a society in which an unremitting emphasis on our differences pits rigid identity groups against each other is a zero-sum battle for resources and recognition”.

In other words, it’s all very well building your hopes on a rainbow coalition of marginalised groups. But do you know what to do when the colours of your rainbow clash?

The emphasis on difference is the glaring difference between 21^st century identity politics and all versions of leftism that preceded it. From the determination of the French revolutionaries to tear down the distinction between the aristocracy and the rest of society onwards, a marker of left-wing politics has been a universalist desire to eradicate the penalties brought by class, gender or ethnicity.

As for today’s left, at least in its identitarian variant, well, let us pick from one of countless examples available to Mounk to show how that desire for equality has vanished.

During the pandemic two doctors at Brigham and Women’s Hospital—a predominantly white Harvard teaching hospital—discovered that administrators had discriminated against non-white patients when deciding who to admit to cardiology wards. A plausible and depressing finding.

The doctors’ reaction was extraordinary, however, or would once have seemed so. Instead of working to ensure that patients were treated on the basis of clinical need regardless of class, colour or creed, they activated “a preferential admission option for Black and Latinx heart failure patients to our specialty cardiology service”. Using the language of critical race theory, they declared that “colour-blind solutions have failed,” and proposed replacing white racism with anti-white racism.

You found similar reasoning across the US bureaucracy during the pandemic. Need no longer became the first determinant of who should receive a vaccine or government grant.

As with so much identitarian thinking there was a rejection of the possibility of objective truth on display at the hospital and a deep pessimism too. Left to their own devices, the reasoning went, doctors will not be able to award access to medical services on the basis of clinical need because no such objective criteria exist. Their innate racism will show itself instead.  

The intellectual strands of today’s ideology go back half a century. On their own many are understandable reactions to oppression. Put together they produce a highly unstable mixture. And a potentially absurd mixture as well. Woke politics needs the authoritarianism, Twitter mobbery, public shamings and ostracisms that so characterise the movement otherwise reasonable criticisms would overwhelm it.

Let’s unravel that ideology strand by strand

Postmodernism and its discontents

Following the post-modernists and in particular Michel Foucault today’s identitarian ideology denies the existence of grand narratives. There is no objective truth, just infinite viewpoints. Those who pretend otherwise, aren’t struggling as best they can to understand the world; they are concealing the way in which they exercise power by imposing their subjective narratives on others.

Such arguments are familiar to anyone who followed late 20^th century debates. But it perhaps needs emphasising that postmodernism challenged traditional 20^th century left, and how surprising it is to find it playing any part in the left of the 21^st century. My favourite illustration came in a confrontation between Foucault and a puzzled Noam Chomsky at Eindhoven University in 1971.

Chomsky, who respected the old revolutionary communist tradition, argued for opposition to the left’s old enemies: the financial system and multinationals. Chomsky also believed in a real, definable human nature, characterizable via scientific knowledge, and bound up with a need for creative expression, as you would expect from a thinker who discovered children’s innate ability to learn a language.

By contrast, Foucault believed that human nature was historically contingent. Because there was no such thing as a settled human essence, he could not suggest what type of society might be best for human beings.

Instead of believing in justice or in creating the good society, he believed in exposing the power that was hidden in language or behind the masks of apparently benign organisations. “The real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the workings of institutions, which appear to be both neutral and independent,” he declared.  

Chomsky was suspicious, and from a radical left-wing perspective you can see why. Foucault’s argument that modern societies control people through subtle discourses made notions of the revolution or of the working class new sources of oppression. I am not saying that Foucault had a duty to support the Marxist left or any other type of left. After Lenin, Stalin and Mao, there were good reasons to reject it.

My point is more basic than that. Woke or identitarian leftism feels so strange because it comes from a tradition that has little to do with left-wing politics.

Post colonialism and the indulgence of tyranny

Edward Said used Foucault’s emphasis on the oppression hidden in western discourse to devastating effect in his critique of the orientalism of western imperialists. Ever since a frankly fanatical concern about policing language has dominated a strand of the academic left. But Said could also see the problem with Foucault’s vastly simplified view that “power is everywhere”.