Identity politics is a complex and challenging topic. How can we make sense of it?

For decades, I’ve spent a lot of time examining the problem of war along with systems of domination like dictatorships and economic exploitation.

            Then, more recently, I started to hear more and more about identity politics, with a focus on interpersonal bias. What was it all about, and what made a person’s race, gender and sexuality so important? Well, of course, discrimination and oppression are important.

            I spent years on committees raising awareness about sexual harassment and learned about its damaging effects on targets, mostly women. But it isn’t obvious to me how prioritising one’s identity makes a difference to the problem of sexual harassment.

            Then there’s the issue of free speech. For decades, I’ve studied suppression of dissent. In the academic scene back in the 1980s, the most common targets were scholars on the left. I went out of my way to document the stories of a few right-leaning academics who came under attack. It seemed good sense to defend everyone’s right to free speech, even, or especially, those I disagreed with. A common commitment to dialogue and debate seems a good way to protect those with less power.

            But then there was a new development: cancel culture, in other words, censoring people because of their views. In many cases, the cancelling was directed at those with conservative views. The attacks were coming from the left. Or at least that’s according to media coverage. I couldn’t be sure because I didn’t see many cases up close. Meanwhile, I am in touch with whistleblowers, who continue to suffer reprisals. They speak up about corruption, which is seldom connected with identity politics.

            With this background, I tried to learn a little about the topic. With the help of friends, I came across some insightful books. I still don’t understand everything going on, but these books have helped.

            For each one, I start with a summary and then list a series of points that struck me as important. Most of this material is extracted from notes I took about each book just after I read it. The books are presented in chronological order of publication. Along the way, “politically correct” has been superseded by “woke.”

Jeff Sparrow, Trigger warnings: political correctness and the rise of the right (Melbourne: Scribe, 2018)

Sparrow provides an engaging analysis of political correctness (PC) and politics. As he writes, “This book is a polemic, a deliberate attempt to challenge conventional wisdom.” (p. 10) He argues that the right has deployed anti-PC rhetoric to its advantage. This is, he says, because so much of the left has abandoned direct action and mass participation. Instead, representatives of the left — occupying positions in politics, universities or culture — speak on behalf of the masses. Sparrow calls this “delegated politics.” And there’s something else. These left figures look down on the masses, attributing to them regressive attitudes towards women and minorities. Sparrow calls this “smug politics.”

            The main focuses here are the US and Australia, with a brief treatment of Britain and Brexit. The book proceeds as an account of developments in left and right politics in the US and Australia, covering topics familiar to anyone who has followed them over the years.

            For me, the most insightful sections are about how the right has adopted its own form of identity politics while castigating the left over PC. Sparrow’s main complaint is about how the left, in its weakness relying on delegated politics, has lost the orientation to building mass movements.

            He refers to the “delegated left” which speaks from a position of assumed ideological superiority, alienating those on the outside and preventing a more inclusive politics. Sparrow is no friend of the right but wants to understand how right populism has become so successful.

Jeff Sparrow

• Progressives in the US supported “science” but then sometimes equated “technical expertise with political expertise — to imply that social issues had already been scientifically settled — and that anyone who disagreed was, by definition, an illiterate or a fool.” When progressives couldn’t influence society, they blamed people for being stupid. (101)
• Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd and US president Barack Obama didn’t recognise the importance of rage in the culture-war dynamics. The right was able to channel people’s feelings that their lives were coming apart into anger at cultural elites and support for candidates backing neoliberalism, which damaged traditional cultural ties, completing the circle. (113-114)
• “Advocates of delegated politics presented identity as a fixed category, a basis for political organising. They claimed that race, gender, sexuality, and other ‘identities’ correlated with particular political ideas, attitudes, and demands that wouldn’t, couldn’t, and shouldn’t be embraced by those without the lived experience of that identity.” (132)
• Identity politics became the left’s conventional wisdom, with social change seen as coming from “wealthy and powerful figures serving as a proxy for the dispossessed.” Just when economic divisions among the oppressed were so great, the left couldn’t recognise them. (151)
• Change agents were expected to admit their privileges before doing anything to address social problems. Privilege-checking could be endless, postponing activism and solidarity. The focus on microaggressions implied oppression resulted from individuals rather than social structures. “Intersectionality might, then, have been intended as a radical critique of identity politics, but in practice it reinterpreted identity in an even more paralysing fashion.” (159-162)
• Call-out culture, in which activists mount campaigns over minor transgressions, often operated using social media, was a result of and contributed to the left’s marginality, in which it lacked the connection with mass struggles against which concerns could be assessed. (163-164)
• Trigger warnings and safe spaces reflected a concern about inflaming trauma that made mass campaigns problematic: campaigns provoked bigots, whose reactions might be psychologically damaging. Therefore, only well-prepared elites were in a position to lead progressive politics. (175-176)
• The Global Justice Movement and the Occupy movement were direct-action, participatory movements, but were not greeted with enthusiasm by the delegated-politics left, which was oriented to representation. Strikes are participatory, but are treated as a threat by those committed to representative models, because they challenge the authority of elected leaders. (230-231)
• “For if ‘democracy’ was taken to mean representation, it was entirely democratic to prevent the sexist, racist, and homophobic masses from interfering with progressive politicians.” (234)

Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, The rise of victimhood culture: microaggressions, safe spaces, and the new culture wars (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)

Campbell and Manning describe three cultures: honour, dignity and victimhood. In an honour culture, status is associated with physical bravery, personal reputation is highly important, and insults can lead to personal retribution. In a dignity culture, public reputation is less important, and people are less likely to take offence. In a victimhood culture, people are highly sensitive to insults and emphasise their victim role.

            Each culture is characteristic of particular social conditions. Victimhood culture emerged in elite US campuses and spread beyond. It arises when status differences are small, equality is prized, and appeals can be made to authorities. The social conditions for victimhood culture overlap with some aspects of honour and dignity cultures.

            Campbell and Manning provide many examples, trying to be neutral observers, noting that what seems sensible within one culture can seem harmful or ridiculous to those immersed in another. Their analysis serves as a criticism of victimhood culture, though they have a whole chapter defending a particular approach that separates sociology from pursuing social justice. This is a valuable study to help understand what’s happening in a range of domains and on various issues.

Bradley Campbell

• Victimhood is a moral status based on suffering/need, treated as a virtue, so privilege is, in contrast, a vice. Saying “check your privilege” is like honour-culture shaming of cowards. (22-23)
• Microaggression complaints involve going to authorities. Calling actions “aggression” makes them seem worse than “merely rude, awkward, or ignorant”, and as part of systematic oppression. This labelling is used to win over third parties. (47)
• The social conditions for microaggression complaints are the same as victimhood culture generally: egalitarianism (also in hunter-gatherer societies), reliance on third parties (also in repressive regimes), minorities resenting slights (common but, in many situations, nothing can be done about them). Also relevant: weak ties. In universities, students see themselves as social equals, and live under the aegis of bureaucratic authorities. (65)
• Victimhood culture’s interpretation of harm is so expansive as to be incomprehensible to many others, while those immersed in victimhood culture can’t understand other perspectives. “Not only is everything that is harmful and oppressive bad, but everything bad is harmful and oppressive.” (95)
• “Calls for trigger warnings and safe spaces are as much of an aspect of victimhood culture as are microaggression complaints. They too evince a strong tendency to emphasize victimization and to rely on third parties. Their success illustrates a tendency to defer to victims, to accept their definition of the situation, and to privilege their requests. And they are part and parcel of a language of victimhood that exaggerates harm and emphasizes vulnerability. Words and images are violence, disagreement is a threat, and some victimized groups need special protection from it all.” (97)
• A “purity spiral” involves infighting between activists and victim groups, as a small minority seeks to be holier than thou, displaying zealotry and condemning or expelling deviants for ever-more-minor transgressions, while most others go along with it for fear of becoming targets themselves. (168)
• Few cultures value free speech, but victimhood culture is especially hostile to it, blurring the difference between speech and violence, scrutinising all forms of speech (far more than honour culture) and seeking retribution against anyone who causes offence. (216)
• In victimhood culture and honour culture, there is high sensitivity to slights, but in honour culture individuals deal with it themselves whereas in victimhood culture there is appeal to authorities. However, when campus authorities refuse to act, student activists may try to prevent speakers from speaking. (229)

Jason Manning

Olúfémi O. Táíwò, Elite capture: how the powerful took over identity politics (and everything else) (London: Pluto Press, 2022).

This fascinating analysis of identity politics proceeds in a rather indirect way, by developing the concept of elite capture. This involves segments of a challenging group being brought into a privileged position, leaving the structure of oppression unchanged. Táíwò uses the concept of “rooms” in which discussions occur. Only some people are in rooms for the relatively privileged, and deference to representatives of marginalised groups (“deference politics”) in these rooms is a distraction from the more important task of challenging injustice outside, beyond these rooms. In other words, identity politics can get in the way of joining together, with all resources, to develop strategies against the major problems in the world.

            Táíwò draws heavily on Amílcar Cabral, Lilica Boal, Paulo Freire and a few other activist-writers, and devotes much space to racism and related politics. Part of the book is about the exploitation of poor countries, including structural adjustment programmes and their successors, and challenges to this exploitation.

            Elite Capture is short and hard-hitting, yet restrained in its careful intellectual exposition. Táíwò argues in favour of constructive politics, of building the alternative.

Olúfémi Táíwò

• “We should respond to the problems of elite capture, and the racial capitalism that enables it, not with deference politics but with constructive politics. A constructive approach would focus on outcome over process: the pursuit of specific goals or results, rather than mere avoidance of ‘complicity’ in injustice or promotion of purely moral or aesthetic principles.” (12)
• Value capture is the process of stripping the full complexity of values down to a simplified version that serves particular purposes and interests, such as capitalism stripping human values down to profit. Other examples are the gig economy and social media’s use of likes. These simplified metrics can overshadow other values such as pride in one’s work. (52-53)
• “A prime example of deference politics is the call to ‘listen to the most affected’ or ‘center the most marginalized,’ now ubiquitous in many academic and activist circles.” Doing this means giving authority/attention to whoever is in the room that fits the designated category, regardless of their experience or knowledge. Most of the politics of deference occurs among elites in “classrooms, boardrooms, political parties.” It doesn’t address the bigger problems outside these arenas. “This discourse … directs what little attentional power we can control at symbolic sites of power rather than at the root political issues that explain why everything is so fucked up.” (70-72)
• Constructive politics focuses on goals and results, and less on “complicity” in injustices. “If it’s ‘epistemology’ or knowledge practices we’re concerned about, then a constructive politics focuses on institutions and practices of information gathering that are strategically useful for challenging social injustices themselves, not just the symptoms manifest in the room we happen to be in today.” “In general, a constructive politics is one that engages directly in the task of redistributing social resources and power, rather than pursuing intermediary goals cashed out in symbols.” (84)
• The crucial issue is how work in groups relates to wider struggles; the operation of groups is important but not the only thing. (107)
• Pain is a poor teacher. “Oppression is not a prep school.” Deference politics asks too much of the traumatised, putting them on a pedestal and hiding below. (120)

Susan Neiman, Left is not woke (Cambridge: Polity, 2023)

Neiman, a philosopher, challenges the assumption that if you’re on the left politically you must be woke, and that if you’re woke you must be on the left. She does this by examining three ideas that have underpinned the left for more than two centuries: committing to universalism (international solidarity), distinguishing power and justice, and believing in the possibility of progress. Wokeism rejects or neglects each of these and hence departs from the left tradition.

Neiman highlights two intellectual figures whose ideas have been used to sabotage left views about justice and progress: philosopher Michel Foucault and political theorist Carl Schmitt. They saw life as a struggle rather than pursuing a common cause. Neiman counters woke critics who suggest or allege that the Enlightenment should be rejected as an imperialistic European export. Left is not Woke is a sophisticated critique of the tribal side of woke politics, the assumption that identity trumps humanity.

            The introduction offers examples of woke politics and its shortcomings. The next three chapters are more analytical and theoretical, though breezy compared to much writing on these topics. The final chapter is a passionate plea to continue the struggle and not succumb to despair and cynicism. Overall, this is a potent intellectual counter to identity politics.

Susan Neiman

• Being a victim used to be stigmatising but now has become a claim to authority. (16)
• Being a victim may enable understanding but doesn’t necessarily do so, so it shouldn’t be an automatic source of authority. “I’d prefer we return to a model in which your claims to authority are focused on what you’ve done to the world, not what the world did to you.” (19)
• White support for Black Lives Matter was through “a common commitment to universal justice”, not being an “ally.” “To divide members of a movement into allies and others undermines the bases of deep solidarity, and destroys what standing left means.” (31)
• The capacity to reason is a tool against elite-based authority, in that everyone can think for themselves. Enlightenment thinkers didn’t want limits on thinking imposed by authorities. (67-68)
• “We’ve long known that the personal is political, but when only the personal is political, we have given up hope. Changing your pronouns may feel like radical change, but the vehemence of woke arguments about the importance of pronouns is the expression of people who fear they have little power to change anything else.” (140)
• There’s a search for general explanations for how the world works, leading to ideologies. “The dominant contemporary ideologies combine to create a fraudulent universalism which reduces all the complexity of human desire to a lust for wealth and power.” (141)
• Neiman writes, “about progressive abandonment of three principles essential to the left: commitments to universalism, a hard distinction between justice and power, and the possibility of progress.” (142)

Yascha Mounk, The identity trap: a story of ideas and power in our time (Allen Lane, 2023; Penguin, 2024)

The Identity Trap is a powerful critique of identity politics and a defence of universal values. Mounk doesn’t like the term “identity politics” and instead refers to the “identity synthesis.” It is a sprawling collection of ideas. Mounk pins it down to seven main themes: scepticism about objective truth; the use of discourse analysis for political purposes; an intensive emphasis on identity; pessimism about progress through conventional means; laws sensitive to identity; intersectionality as an imperative; and standpoint epistemology. Mounk explains each of these with examples.

            The Identity Trap is a comprehensive analysis of the problem of identity as a basis for social progress. Mounk traces the origin of the identity synthesis, analyses the factors that enabled its rapid rise, acknowledges the value of the motives behind it — and then turns to critique. He starts with the intellectual origins of the synthesis, for example the original idea of intersectionality. According to Mounk, identity advocates took these ideas and turned them into something more far-reaching, something so radical that the original theorists don’t go along with it.

            Mounk argues that the identity synthesis, by rejecting universal values, has become counterproductive to its own goals. For example, identity advocates encourage people to think of themselves in terms of their group identities, specifically race, gender and sexuality. This is in the US. Strangely, other identities aren’t emphasised, indeed seldom mentioned, notably social class, also nationality. Not only are Black children encouraged to think of themselves in terms of Blackness, but the ideology has gone so far as to encourage white people to think of themselves in terms of whiteness. Mounk says this hinders the human solidarity needed for social progress.

            Mounk endorses liberalism in the sense of a belief in universal values. He concludes his book with suggestions for avoiding the identity trap.

Yascha Mounk

• The left historically has been committed to universalistic principles, to overcome oppression. But this commitment has changed in recent decades. (9)
• The identity synthesis is a lure, promising to oppose injustice. Its ideas attract intelligent people with good intentions. Yet it subverts its own goals. (16)
• The origin of the identity synthesis was in Paris in the 1950s and 1960s, when Foucault and other postmodernists rejected grand narratives, became sceptical of objective truth and universal values, and argued that discourses were key to social control (rather than top-down control). (36-37)
• The US left increasingly focused on oppression associated with race, gender and sexuality, especially after the collapse of state socialism. This new orientation began transforming campus intellectual life, including with the rise of units examining identity. The identity synthesis grew out of influences from postmodernism, postcolonialism and critical race theory. (75-76)
• Intersectionality came to be used as a way to coerce activists to subscribe to the orthodoxy on a range of issues. (87)
• Social media enabled the popularisation of a degraded version of the identity synthesis, by letting young people play with identity labels. Social media enabled identity groups to be information targets, and legacy media joined in, eventually affecting much of the US white, highly educated population. (96)
• The identity synthesis entered the corporate sector, with diversity trainings, due to top companies recruiting students from elite universities steeped in the synthesis, spreading then to other companies. (107-110)
• After Trump’s election in 2016, some activists, frustrated by not removing him from office, turned their attention towards other activists. Peer pressure can be oppressive; dissenters are needed to prevent dysfunction, but after Trump’s election, and the sense of external threat, dissenters were treated as traitors. (125-126)
• Standpoint feminist ideas were popularised into three claims: oppressed groups share significant experiences; experience of oppression gives unique insights; and these experiences can’t be adequately communicated to outsiders. Standpoint feminists don’t necessarily accept these claims. A fourth claim is that members of dominant groups should defer to members of oppressed groups. Contrary to this, it’s not obvious who speaks on behalf of oppressed groups, and solidarity can be built through listening and empathising. (145-146)
• When progressives censor ideas unwelcome in venues they control, they legitimise censorship in other arenas, including of their own ideas. (172)

Musa al-Gharbi, We have never been woke: the cultural contradictions of a new elite (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2024)

Al-Gharbi analyses a group in the US that he calls “symbolic capitalists.” These individuals don’t do manual labour, but rather rely solely on their minds to make a living. They include academics, journalists, lawyers and managers, among others. They sit between the ruling class and the working class. Others have called them the new class or the professional-managerial class, among other names, and there have been debates among Marxists and sociologists about whether this group constitutes a class. By calling them symbolic capitalists, al-Gharbi emphasises how they use their intellectual skills as a resource to gain economic and reputational returns. In the US, many symbolic capitalists are comparatively well off and/or high status.

            The curious thing about symbolic capitalists is that, while being privileged, they espouse social justice, aligning themselves with those subject to prejudice and degradation. But, al-Gharbi argues, this operates only at a rhetorical level. In terms of political practice, as a group they do little to change the system, meaning they do little that might compromise their own privilege.

            Symbolic capitalists are keen on identity issues, especially gender, race and sexuality. They are keen on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, which bring some women and minorities into their ranks. What this doesn’t do is change the economic circumstances of the bulk of the population.

            Al-Gharbi argues that by endorsing progressive views on gender, race and sexuality, symbolic capitalists serve their own interests, by positioning themselves as superior to the unenlightened masses and, more importantly, to other symbolic capitalists, who can be condemned as prejudiced. He examines US history and finds periodic surges of similar alarm about prejudice.

            Not only do symbolic capitalists see themselves as allies of downtrodden groups. Many of them see themselves as members of these groups. Al-Gharbi says symbolic capitalists are disproportionately white, highly educated, and heterosexual in behaviour, yet ever more are identifying as non-white, LGBTIQ and disabled.

            These claims about intellectual workers are sweeping, and if there’s any limitation to al-Gharbi’s analysis, it’s that he makes generalisations about symbolic capitalists. But, as he accepts throughout, he is one of them himself, part of the group whose actions he analyses.

            As al-Gharbi analyses it, identity politics is a preoccupation of symbolic capitalists, but not of much concern among other sectors of the population. In the US, symbolic capitalists have found a home in the Democratic Party, where they have gradually set the agenda for the party, focusing on identity issues, not on economic inequality. This has alienated ever more poor, white, working-class voters, causing some to switch to the Republicans, which seems inexplicable to symbolic capitalists.

            Al-Gharbi explicitly says he is not making any recommendations. He simply offers his analysis. We Have Never Been Woke is massively referenced and draws on a range of theoretical perspectives, especially the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu. It’s the sort of book that only another symbolic capitalist would want to read — and that is the prime target audience.

Musa al-Gharbi

• Symbolic capitalists participate in activities that sustain inequalities, despite their rhetoric of support for causes. Woke causes are fine, but symbolic capitalists have never been woke. They have just believed they were. (20)
• If symbolic capitalists are seen as selfish, their interests are compromised. This leads to status competition within symbolic professions over who is the most committed to the oppressed, with those not seen as being committed becoming vulnerable. (66)
• “Symbolic capitalists love intermediaries like Uber, Grubhub, and Amazon precisely because they carry out the requisite exploitation to enable symbolic capitalists’ idiosyncratic preferences and lifestyles, but they also help create a ‘distance’ between symbolic capitalists and the workers exploited on their behalf.” (155)
• Woke companies are radical in their words, not their deeds. They do this to attract the right sorts of workers and appeal to their customers: “… business leaders and corporations try to demonstrate that they share symbolic capitalists’ values and politics.” (213)
• Symbolic capitalists favour social justice compatible with meritocracy. This maintains hierarchy, while enabling minorities to become elites. (216)
• Identities that were previously stigmatised can become holders of “totemic capital,” gaining opportunities, moral authority, self-worth, and perceptions of greater merit. “In an ostensibly meritocratic system — where prestige, opportunities, and compensation are supposed to be afforded on the grounds of merit — people therefore have a strong incentive to present themselves as disadvantaged.” (251)
• “Conspicuous antiracism, feminism, and so on have become status markers among urban, highly educated elites …” Acknowledging one’s privilege signals one’s status and hardly ever includes efforts to reduce one’s privilege. (271)
• “… the attitudes and dispositions associated with ‘wokeness’ are primarily embraced by symbolic capitalists. Wokeness does not seem to be associated with egalitarian behaviors in any meaningful sense. Instead, ‘social justice’ discourse seems to be mobilized by contemporary elites to help legitimize and obscure inequalities, to signal and reinforce their elite status, or to tear down rivals — often at the expense of those who are genuinely vulnerable, marginalized, and disadvantaged in society.” (296)

Conclusion

There’s a lot of material in these books, much more than outlined here, with many different pieces of evidence and arguments. I don’t pretend to understand the nuances, but there seem to be a few commonalities. These authors are critical of identity politics in one way or another while being sympathetic to the goals of identity campaigners: they are opposed to racism, sexual and gender discrimination, and other forms of oppression. Thus, they might be considered sympathetic critics.

            They differ in their prescriptions for change. The question is how to pursue social justice. One theme is support for universal values, values that apply to all humans, without distinction.

            One of the areas motivating my interest in this area is free speech, including openness to dissenting ideas. From what I can tell, a focus on identity sometimes offers a pretext for censorship, but only for censorship for those on the other side. This is contrary to everything I’ve learned about how to defend free speech.

            Another area is sexual harassment. Gender is a key issue in identity politics. Yet despite the salience of gender in identity debates, pro and con, I’ve yet to see anything that helps in a practical sense in preventing, discouraging or dealing with sexual harassment. I doubt it would help to call it gender harassment.

            Finally, the problem of war. Is there anything in what Mounk calls the identity synthesis that helps challenge the war system? Or is there anything in the critiques of the identity synthesis that assists? If so, I haven’t seen it.

            Actually, there is one identity highly relevant to the problem of war: national identity. In wartime, nationality becomes an obsession. People are expected to support their leaders and troops, and enemies are stigmatised. They are foreigners, loyal to another state, to another set of rulers. Nationalism is linked to war preparations and warfighting, so perhaps, in this sense, identity is a big part of the problem. Yet with all the focus on race, gender and sexuality, nationality seems to be forgotten.

            For those concerned about war, and about other big issues like genocide and climate change, it could be that identity struggles are more a distraction than a help.

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

Thanks to Jungmin Choi, Marina Granato, Olga Kuchinskaya, Julia LeMonde and Erin Twyford for useful comments.