The Third-Rail Issue of Identity Politics

A specter is haunting the Western world—the specter of identity politics. It widens the field of struggle for individual rights and promises dignity to the oppressed, but it is also a lightning rod issue and antagonizes more than a few. It is often dismissively labeled “woke,” is blamed for tearing societies apart, and is even seen as the harbinger of civilization’s end. How progressive is this “woke turn” in Western societies? It’s a term some embrace, and some find repellent, but it is one which we all, in different ways, inhabit in the current zeitgeist. What’s the matter with identity politics?

“Identity is an inevitable and essential place to start and a terrible place to finish. It’s like fire—it can warm you and it can burn you. … All too often we talk about identity politics only as being something of the left. … There is a notion that when we talk about identity politics that we’re always talking about black people and gays and women and so on. Actually, when you talk about the flag and the nation and Christianity and so on, you’re also talking about identity politics and actually … from the right is where most of the violence is coming from.” —Gary Younge.

This podcast series tells the true story of the 1970s book “The Limits to Growth”—a worldwide bestseller that is widely agreed to have re-oriented the environmental movement to the global impacts of human activity. Scientists Dennis and Donella Meadows found that the global trajectory of unfettered economic growth risked triggering a collapse of modern civilization by the middle of the 21st Century. They also described an alternative scenario of prosperity for all with limited growth, imitating the balances found in natural environmental systems. However, their theories were attacked by mainstream scientists, business interests and, most notably, economists, who refused to acknowledge the possibility that humankind may not be able to indefinitely seek unfettered growth in our economic activity.

“The team simulated ten new scenarios. One with unlimited mineral resources, another with faster rates of technological progress, and a third, a complete switch from fossil fuels to nuclear energy, and so on. In most scenarios humanity flourished initially, as the economy expanded, incomes rose, and nutrition and health improved. But even where the population eventually stabilized, exponential growth in consumption caused humanity to use up more and more natural resources, to produce more pollution or waste at rates too fast for the earth to absorb them and regenerate. This eventually caused humanity to overshoot the earth’s capacity and, like the Kaibab deer, suddenly collapse. In each scenario, collapse came within 50 to 100 years.”

Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks against Israel were a “carnival of killing” and “systematic murder of people in their homes,” fueled by rage at the intensification of Israeli repression against Palestinians, but also a desire for revenge. In Israel’s military response against Gaza, the country’s “disregard for Palestinian life has never been more callous or more flagrant, and it’s being fueled by a discourse for which the adjective ‘genocidal’ no longer seems like hyperbole,” writes Shatz, in a wide-ranging, multidimensional essay that strives for moral clarity amid much moral confusion. Among his targets, he critiques the “the ethno-tribalist fantasies of the decolonial left, with their Fanon recitations and posters of paragliders” which, for Shatz, “are indeed perverse.”

“Some of the decolonials—notably France’s Parti des Indigènes de la République, who hailed Al-Aqsa Flood without qualifications—seem almost enthralled by Hamas’s violence and characterise it as a form of anti-colonial justice of the kind championed by Fanon in ‘On Violence’, the controversial first chapter of The Wretched of the Earth. … It is, of course, true that Fanon advocated armed struggle against colonialism, but he referred to the use of violence by the colonised as ‘disintoxicating’, not ‘cleansing’, a widely circulated mistranslation. His understanding of the more murderous forms of anti-colonial violence was that of a psychiatrist, diagnosing a vengeful pathology formed under colonial oppression, rather than offering a prescription. … But Fanon also wrote hauntingly of the effects of war trauma—including the trauma suffered by anti-colonial rebels who killed civilians. …To organise an effective movement, Fanon believed, anti-colonial fighters would have to overcome the temptations of primordial revenge, and develop what Martin Luther King, citing Reinhold Niebuhr, called a ‘spiritual discipline against resentment.’”

Argentina’s extreme-right, libertarian presidential candidate—who will compete in the Nov. 19 runoff vote against the center-left Peronist Serio Massa—has a deep-seated admiration with Judaism. He has promised to convert, and uses Jewish symbols at political events, a counter-intuitive approach in a country that until 1994 required presidents to be Catholic, a religion most of the population remains affiliated with.

“Milei’s attempt to affiliate himself with Judaism is far more than a mere bid to attract Jewish voters disillusioned with the main parties of left and right: It is an eschatologically charged political theology that draws on the symbolic elements of religious Zionism. … Milei deploys sacred language for his political ends and conjures up a non-secular vision of Argentina that appeals to a growing contingent of evangelicals (as his Brazilian counterpart Jair Bolsonaro does far more overtly). At the same time, he aligns himself with an outsider religion. In Catholic Argentina, the Jew is the Other, and for Milei, Jews are, above all, outsiders and minorities; by becoming one, he is trying to position himself outside the country’s political establishment. Milei presents himself as a member of a political minority others are trying to erase from the political map—just as the Jews were once targeted for extermination.”

Germany’s historical reckoning with the Holocaust has “gone haywire, as the determination to root out antisemitism has shifted from vigilance to hysteria”—an approach that must be situated in the country’s adoption of a historically unique collective identity starting in the 1960s, that of perpetrators. While acknowledging racism and antisemitism is essential, in recent years, cases of “philosemitic repression” and “cancel culture” in Germany have vastly impacted free speech and critical discussions of history. “The most astonishing feature of this philosemitic fury is the way it has been used to attack Jews in Germany,” Neiman argues.

“One result of the formulaic approach to historical reckoning is the tendency to view groups that have been oppressed as if they spoke in a monolithic voice forever fixed on their own oppression. If Germany considers only those Jews who focus on antisemitism to be authentic, America is in danger of viewing only those people of color who view racism as the source of every evil to be genuine. … Ultimately it should be possible to examine historical crimes with care and nuance, though we know these qualities are in short supply. One lesson Americans can learn from the Germans is how badly things can go wrong when care and nuance are missing.”

The European New Right is generally understood to practice a metapolitical strategy derived from the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, the crux of which is activism in the cultural and intellectual fields in order to achieve the ‘hegemony’ that Gramsci believed was a necessary precondition for political power. The ideological revolution must precede the political revolution. But the ENR’s reception of Gramsci is selective, and limiting the utility of the Gramscian framework for understanding the movement’s actual metapolitical practice, which is better comprehended in terms of the theoretical perspective devised by researchers of the culture wars in the United States.

“The predominance of culture war–style framing within a society—the obsession, that is, with winner-take-all battles for the fate of civilization or the soul of the nation—is not only a possible sign of the New Right’s metapolitical success but also as a precondition for a popular reception of the ENR’s radical version of those themes. When politics is absorbed by hot-button issues like abortion, immigration, ‘political correctness’, and the proper depiction of the past (including questions of national guilt), it is a boon time for the ENR and its U.S. offshoot, the alt right, whose stark binaries and existential pathos match the culture war mood. … As we have seen, at the level of catastrophist talk, the mainstream right and extremist right frequently speak the same language. This common culture war framework can prime mainstream conservatives to be receptive to ENR claims that sound similar in their disparagement of the left but aim at far more radical goals.”

Sohrab Ahmari’s “Tyranny Inc.” strives to bring together young conservatives and socialists to combat neoliberalism and advocate for the revival of a “common good” conservatism, while examining the influence of corporations in contemporary society. Ahmari is working to establish a shared perspective between critics of neoliberalism from both sides of the ideological divide, aiming to curb corporate dominance and promote a fairer society. However, his endeavors have encountered difficulties within the Republican Party, where economic populism is secondary to other issues, casting doubt on the likelihood of a substantial conservative populist movement.

“It was Donald Trump, railing against the “rigged system” in 2016, who paved the way for the ascent of the post-liberal right—a movement of intellectuals, politicians, and activists that opposes not only “woke” liberalism but liberalism itself. Alongside other prominent post-liberals, including political theorist Patrick Deneen and legal scholar Adrian Vermeule, [Ahmari]rejects the sacred tenets of individual freedom and market fundamentalism that cemented themselves in the conservative movement in the early days of William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review and reached the height of popularity during the Reagan presidency. Embracing the “pre-liberal” politics of family and community, the post-liberals mourn this era as a misguided departure from a deeper tradition and call instead for the restoration of “common good” conservatism. … Ahmari stands out in this group for having a deeper interest in wealth inequality and the material dimensions of corporate power.”