At last an intelligent consideration of the link between post modernism, liberal ‘identity politics’, and the current crisis of democracy. Post modernism was always essentially a reactionary intellectual movement, and US liberalism has always been at home with individual rights rather than collective rights. Where they link up is in the hysterical focus of ‘wrong think’ or ‘wrong speak’ by the DEI industry in typical US fashion, to the complete eclipse of a wider consideration of a collective history and the shared experiences of humanity. The ‘beauty’ of all of it, is that it leaves economic modes of domination unquestioned, validates the successful individual striving of the dominated in any hierarchy and ensures that modes of collective action and organisation are left unaddressed.
there is no mention of "postmodernism" in this essay at all, what are you talking about?
postmodernism is a loosely-defined skepticism against all-encompassing social narratives like psychoanalysis, feminism or marxism. it insists instead on leaning into all or none of these narratives to explain social phenomena. if anything, this essay's insistence on combining political economy and anti-racist analyses is itself post-modernist. oh, but you don't care about that right? you're just lazily using the word as a slur.
There’s a lot here I agree with, but marshaling the discourse around Israel/Palestine as a means of indicting the Democratic center without even a mention of the catastrophic response of the identitarian left to Gaza makes a Bernie Sanders voting social democrat like myself want to LOL.
It’s true: the mainstream of the Democratic Party, represented in a figure like Joe Biden failed to adhere to any kind of universalism (or extension of basic human empathy) to the deaths of Palestinians in Gaza. But the response from the mass movement left and the Palestine solidarity movement *also* represented an abandonment of any kind of pretense of universalism, instead replacing it with a selective and quite shameful weaponization of the DEI toolkit that Waleed critiques here. The pro-Palestine left in the US represented a fusion of the worst kind of symbolic identitarianism that Waleed critiques with a radical and overtly illiberal, decolonial left politics — neither of which were rooted in any kind of neutrality or universalism.
So instead what we got was an entire social justice movement suddenly throwing out its most cherished principles when they got too inconvenient: “deference politics? Lived experience? Intent vs impact? All that stuff is actually bullshit when it comes to the Jews, but we’re going to hang on to it for ourselves, thank you very much.”
The problem was compounded by guilt ridden American Jews, represented in movements like INN and JVP, who were so eager to check their privilege and pass the mic to the oppressed, that they began passing them to people who themselves were not committed to any kind of universal principles or collective liberation in Israel/Palestine, but were in fact just good old blood and soil nationalists, but for the other “side.” If the cause wasn’t Palestine, we’d see these organizations for what they are: guilt ridden white liberals, not leftists.
And yet: these movements were welcomed and celebrated within the pro-Palestine left because they served their purpose. And so all of the critiques of this kind of identity-based liberalism that isn’t really committed to changing anyone’s material reality suddenly flies out the door.
The language of the left moved away from worker/boss to these highly reductive (and frankly not very left) binaries of oppressor/oppressed that have done great damage not only to left coalitions in the US, but for the cause of Palestine itself. And this language, combined with a non-Jewish majority eager to sublimate their white/settler guilt onto an internalized other, created the conditions for the paroxysm of cruelty, campism, and antisemitism that has roiled the left over the last two years.
What is also true is that unlike previous ruptures, like BLM, there is nowhere for corporations to go in order to co-opt and tame these revolutionary impulses, because there are simply too many people opposed to creating antizionist training seminars at Chase Manhattan Bank (and thank god for that). Instead, Jews are simply left isolated and betrayed by people they used to consider allies, and worst of all, the occupation and dispossession of Palestinian life continues unabated in the West Bank and Gaza. But at least some people get to feel good about being “on the right side of history” when they go to sleep at night.
I don’t agree with this at all. When anti-Zionists say “Israelis and Palestinians should have equal rights,” what language do you think they are speaking?
Some say this, yes. Other antizionists, like Students for Justice in Palestine (who organized many of the encampments) or Within Our Lifetime say every Israeli is a “settler” and therefore a legitimate target for Hamas atrocities. Yet others, like Noura Erakat, tell Jews that they are not a people, but merely a religion, and are welcome to stay as guests in Palestine if they’d like. Almost always, the first group is comfortable standing in solidarity with (or at least ignoring) the illiberalism of the latter two.
And all three of these groups are happy to hold up Jews who weaponize the very worst kind of symbolic identity politics in order to serve their aims. So you get Jews speaking “as Jews” in order to criticize Israel who will then turn around and invoke their “whiteness” in order to remain silent about the intolerance and antisemitism of the groups they are lending their imprimatur to. It’s just a deeply grotesque and cynical weaponization of all the sorts of things being critiqued in this essay.
I’m not knowledgeable enough on this issue to speak to all of your critiques Josh, but I will say this: I’m a non-Jew living in NYC, but I was personally appalled by the people who tore down/defaced hostage posters. Like WTAF?
Does this mean that the left got too stuck on the specifics of what the Israeli government was doing to Gaza and why? There should have been a universalist interpretation of targeted crime? The Jews have suffered too you know?
What I mean is that there’s no room for this kind of superficial liberal identitarianism within the “left” as Waleed conceives of it, with the exception of Jewish identity politics, and in that case, only insofar as it serves the goals of the pro-Palestine movement, including its most extreme and violently nationalist wings.
I agree with your point and also saw the blood and soil nationalism side of the US/UK pro-Palestine movement (the murder of two DC Jews, the kerosene attack on the Jewish marathon runners, the public attacks throughout the Gaza war in the UK). Your point is more salient about the broader Palestine land back movement, but I think Waleed’s point was limited to some inside baseball DNC event where the DNC leaders effectively defanged the whole Palestinian voice at the DNC by making it “Arab-only” and a space to talk about pain and injustices (identitarian).
I really liked this thoughtful essay and appreciate Waleed’s frustration with a lack of focus on material outcomes. So let’s talk about that. When I engage with people to my left, I ask them what they are trying to achieve in concrete terms- and many times the answer references one of the Nordic countries. That’s a good answer- the Nordic countries are great places. But is the American left really ready to sign up for all the policies that are required to make the Nordic political economy work? Sure - they have higher taxes on the wealthy, but also higher taxes on the middle class and the poor too (check out their VAT rates). But probably the biggest point of friction is the fact that the Nordic countries understand that if you want to create more equity via a politics of high taxes and a high level of services, then the services actually have to be good. The Stockholm subway provides good wages and benefits to its workers but doesn’t tolerate NYC levels of featherbedding. (Two operators per subway train?). You won’t find mentally disturbed people in public areas of Copenhagen, they have been swept up for involuntary treatment. These countries have a solid consensus that you remove people by force from all public spaces when they are behaving in anti-social ways. That’s how you maintain a high level of public services that people are willing to pay high taxes to fund. It’s fine if you don’t want to do these things but then I don’t understand why you would expect to get Nordic outcomes if you aren’t willing to implement Nordic policies.
Brilliant reframing of what looks like radicalism but is really liberalism's exhausted form. Your point about identity politics as the 'left wing of neoliberalism' cuts to the core of why these debates feel so stuck, institutions reach for trainigns and statements because structural reform became unimaginable after gridlock set in. When you can't pass housing policy or labor law, politics slides into who gets recognized and who feels safe, leaving economic domination totally intact.
"In that moment, the exercise did what radical educators hope this kind of popular education can do: make structures visible and intimate, generate empathy, and build a kind of mutual respect that “we’re all equal here”
I'd assume most people don't want to educate in this manner, and if they don't should they be expected to?
Where does Matthew get his history? The US since its inception was founded on pluralism, multiculturalism, and identity groups. It has never been individualist. It only became an issue with the rise of interest group democracy in 50s-60s; when pluralism became politicized. Liberal Democracy was a clean break from classical liberalism. It has nothing to do with individualism anymore than rules of a football game. The football game is about teams not individuals.
The transition to liberal democracy was a project to turn the political sector into a competitive marketplace just like the economy. Its still liberalism, just different from classical liberalism.
Thoughtful piece as always. I like your focus on the narrowing of vision. I'm actually trying to reach you @Waleed, to see if I can use your post on the abolitionists resistance to the slave catchers for an updated version of my anthology on political hope, The Impossible Will Take a Little While. I filled out the form on The Bloc, but it didn't have room to send the actual piece--if you could email me at paul [at] paulloeb.org I'll do so. You can see info on the current edition of the book at www.paulloeb.org It's sold about 120,000 copies over two editions and 20 years. Thanks for all you do.
I don't understand how this essay is meant to contradict what Yglesias said. In your own account, identity politics seems to be the "elite, anemic offspring" not of liberalism, but of leftism: as you say, it borrows the Marxist critique of liberalism's fictional neutrality, but restricts the scope of this critique to matters of identity and epistemology. Why describe this phenomenon as a descendant of liberalism, rather than a watered-down version of Marxism?
As far as I can tell, when you say identity politics is the offspring of liberalism, you just mean that it is a response to liberalism's contradictions and failures. But by this definition, pretty much everything—Marxism, fascism, etc.—would count as the offspring of liberalism.
I have a hard-earned humanities degree - and yet all this stuff that's taken over everything in the past decade is COMPLETELY incompatible with both my education, and with my own life and thoughts. There's no place for this in me, and no place for me in it. This isn't mind-expanding, it's mind-STULTIFYING...and the idea that the individual doesn't exist is brick-stupid on its face, if not outright terrifying (we're all individuals before we're even taught anything about groups, so how can anyone buy it in the first place?!). That's fascism in a nutshell.
It's impossible to communicate with what amounts to a weaponized language-virus that demands you learn about it and gives NOTHING back, it just devours you the more you do. There's no way to interface with it - or its adherents - if you reject its foundations. It's a bad-faith missionary-cult, Christianity stripped back down to its essentials as a spiritual war-juggernaut, and without any of the temperance forcibly acquired after centuries of religious war. 30 seconds' critical thinking is enough to nip most any of its talking points in the bud, and the fact that that hasn't been enough to make it a non-starter terrifies me for what it says about others.
It's everything it claims to oppose; if old-school neo-Nazis and Klansmen are the tail of a rattlesnake, this is its fresh head enjoying the same prestige (and oh gee, backed by the same interests!) that they did 100 years ago. We must stop indulging their delusions of opposition.
"The mullahs of the Islamic world and the mullahs of the Hindu world and the mullahs of the Christian world are all on the same side. And we are against them all." - Arundhati Roy
You've written a lot of good stuff, but you really knocked it out of the park with this essay. Thanks.
At last an intelligent consideration of the link between post modernism, liberal ‘identity politics’, and the current crisis of democracy. Post modernism was always essentially a reactionary intellectual movement, and US liberalism has always been at home with individual rights rather than collective rights. Where they link up is in the hysterical focus of ‘wrong think’ or ‘wrong speak’ by the DEI industry in typical US fashion, to the complete eclipse of a wider consideration of a collective history and the shared experiences of humanity. The ‘beauty’ of all of it, is that it leaves economic modes of domination unquestioned, validates the successful individual striving of the dominated in any hierarchy and ensures that modes of collective action and organisation are left unaddressed.
there is no mention of "postmodernism" in this essay at all, what are you talking about?
postmodernism is a loosely-defined skepticism against all-encompassing social narratives like psychoanalysis, feminism or marxism. it insists instead on leaning into all or none of these narratives to explain social phenomena. if anything, this essay's insistence on combining political economy and anti-racist analyses is itself post-modernist. oh, but you don't care about that right? you're just lazily using the word as a slur.
This has literally nothing to do with "post-modernism" lol
There’s a lot here I agree with, but marshaling the discourse around Israel/Palestine as a means of indicting the Democratic center without even a mention of the catastrophic response of the identitarian left to Gaza makes a Bernie Sanders voting social democrat like myself want to LOL.
It’s true: the mainstream of the Democratic Party, represented in a figure like Joe Biden failed to adhere to any kind of universalism (or extension of basic human empathy) to the deaths of Palestinians in Gaza. But the response from the mass movement left and the Palestine solidarity movement *also* represented an abandonment of any kind of pretense of universalism, instead replacing it with a selective and quite shameful weaponization of the DEI toolkit that Waleed critiques here. The pro-Palestine left in the US represented a fusion of the worst kind of symbolic identitarianism that Waleed critiques with a radical and overtly illiberal, decolonial left politics — neither of which were rooted in any kind of neutrality or universalism.
So instead what we got was an entire social justice movement suddenly throwing out its most cherished principles when they got too inconvenient: “deference politics? Lived experience? Intent vs impact? All that stuff is actually bullshit when it comes to the Jews, but we’re going to hang on to it for ourselves, thank you very much.”
The problem was compounded by guilt ridden American Jews, represented in movements like INN and JVP, who were so eager to check their privilege and pass the mic to the oppressed, that they began passing them to people who themselves were not committed to any kind of universal principles or collective liberation in Israel/Palestine, but were in fact just good old blood and soil nationalists, but for the other “side.” If the cause wasn’t Palestine, we’d see these organizations for what they are: guilt ridden white liberals, not leftists.
And yet: these movements were welcomed and celebrated within the pro-Palestine left because they served their purpose. And so all of the critiques of this kind of identity-based liberalism that isn’t really committed to changing anyone’s material reality suddenly flies out the door.
The language of the left moved away from worker/boss to these highly reductive (and frankly not very left) binaries of oppressor/oppressed that have done great damage not only to left coalitions in the US, but for the cause of Palestine itself. And this language, combined with a non-Jewish majority eager to sublimate their white/settler guilt onto an internalized other, created the conditions for the paroxysm of cruelty, campism, and antisemitism that has roiled the left over the last two years.
What is also true is that unlike previous ruptures, like BLM, there is nowhere for corporations to go in order to co-opt and tame these revolutionary impulses, because there are simply too many people opposed to creating antizionist training seminars at Chase Manhattan Bank (and thank god for that). Instead, Jews are simply left isolated and betrayed by people they used to consider allies, and worst of all, the occupation and dispossession of Palestinian life continues unabated in the West Bank and Gaza. But at least some people get to feel good about being “on the right side of history” when they go to sleep at night.
I don’t agree with this at all. When anti-Zionists say “Israelis and Palestinians should have equal rights,” what language do you think they are speaking?
Some say this, yes. Other antizionists, like Students for Justice in Palestine (who organized many of the encampments) or Within Our Lifetime say every Israeli is a “settler” and therefore a legitimate target for Hamas atrocities. Yet others, like Noura Erakat, tell Jews that they are not a people, but merely a religion, and are welcome to stay as guests in Palestine if they’d like. Almost always, the first group is comfortable standing in solidarity with (or at least ignoring) the illiberalism of the latter two.
And all three of these groups are happy to hold up Jews who weaponize the very worst kind of symbolic identity politics in order to serve their aims. So you get Jews speaking “as Jews” in order to criticize Israel who will then turn around and invoke their “whiteness” in order to remain silent about the intolerance and antisemitism of the groups they are lending their imprimatur to. It’s just a deeply grotesque and cynical weaponization of all the sorts of things being critiqued in this essay.
I’m not knowledgeable enough on this issue to speak to all of your critiques Josh, but I will say this: I’m a non-Jew living in NYC, but I was personally appalled by the people who tore down/defaced hostage posters. Like WTAF?
Does this mean that the left got too stuck on the specifics of what the Israeli government was doing to Gaza and why? There should have been a universalist interpretation of targeted crime? The Jews have suffered too you know?
What I mean is that there’s no room for this kind of superficial liberal identitarianism within the “left” as Waleed conceives of it, with the exception of Jewish identity politics, and in that case, only insofar as it serves the goals of the pro-Palestine movement, including its most extreme and violently nationalist wings.
I agree with your point and also saw the blood and soil nationalism side of the US/UK pro-Palestine movement (the murder of two DC Jews, the kerosene attack on the Jewish marathon runners, the public attacks throughout the Gaza war in the UK). Your point is more salient about the broader Palestine land back movement, but I think Waleed’s point was limited to some inside baseball DNC event where the DNC leaders effectively defanged the whole Palestinian voice at the DNC by making it “Arab-only” and a space to talk about pain and injustices (identitarian).
I really liked this thoughtful essay and appreciate Waleed’s frustration with a lack of focus on material outcomes. So let’s talk about that. When I engage with people to my left, I ask them what they are trying to achieve in concrete terms- and many times the answer references one of the Nordic countries. That’s a good answer- the Nordic countries are great places. But is the American left really ready to sign up for all the policies that are required to make the Nordic political economy work? Sure - they have higher taxes on the wealthy, but also higher taxes on the middle class and the poor too (check out their VAT rates). But probably the biggest point of friction is the fact that the Nordic countries understand that if you want to create more equity via a politics of high taxes and a high level of services, then the services actually have to be good. The Stockholm subway provides good wages and benefits to its workers but doesn’t tolerate NYC levels of featherbedding. (Two operators per subway train?). You won’t find mentally disturbed people in public areas of Copenhagen, they have been swept up for involuntary treatment. These countries have a solid consensus that you remove people by force from all public spaces when they are behaving in anti-social ways. That’s how you maintain a high level of public services that people are willing to pay high taxes to fund. It’s fine if you don’t want to do these things but then I don’t understand why you would expect to get Nordic outcomes if you aren’t willing to implement Nordic policies.
This is really good. It's notable that you invoke Bayard Rustin, since he is also someone Yglesias refers to regularly. For example: https://www.slowboring.com/p/bayard-rustins-ideas-matter?utm_source=publication-search
Brilliant reframing of what looks like radicalism but is really liberalism's exhausted form. Your point about identity politics as the 'left wing of neoliberalism' cuts to the core of why these debates feel so stuck, institutions reach for trainigns and statements because structural reform became unimaginable after gridlock set in. When you can't pass housing policy or labor law, politics slides into who gets recognized and who feels safe, leaving economic domination totally intact.
"In that moment, the exercise did what radical educators hope this kind of popular education can do: make structures visible and intimate, generate empathy, and build a kind of mutual respect that “we’re all equal here”
I'd assume most people don't want to educate in this manner, and if they don't should they be expected to?
I admire your patience with these fools Waleed...
Where does Matthew get his history? The US since its inception was founded on pluralism, multiculturalism, and identity groups. It has never been individualist. It only became an issue with the rise of interest group democracy in 50s-60s; when pluralism became politicized. Liberal Democracy was a clean break from classical liberalism. It has nothing to do with individualism anymore than rules of a football game. The football game is about teams not individuals.
The transition to liberal democracy was a project to turn the political sector into a competitive marketplace just like the economy. Its still liberalism, just different from classical liberalism.
Thoughtful piece as always. I like your focus on the narrowing of vision. I'm actually trying to reach you @Waleed, to see if I can use your post on the abolitionists resistance to the slave catchers for an updated version of my anthology on political hope, The Impossible Will Take a Little While. I filled out the form on The Bloc, but it didn't have room to send the actual piece--if you could email me at paul [at] paulloeb.org I'll do so. You can see info on the current edition of the book at www.paulloeb.org It's sold about 120,000 copies over two editions and 20 years. Thanks for all you do.
I don't understand how this essay is meant to contradict what Yglesias said. In your own account, identity politics seems to be the "elite, anemic offspring" not of liberalism, but of leftism: as you say, it borrows the Marxist critique of liberalism's fictional neutrality, but restricts the scope of this critique to matters of identity and epistemology. Why describe this phenomenon as a descendant of liberalism, rather than a watered-down version of Marxism?
As far as I can tell, when you say identity politics is the offspring of liberalism, you just mean that it is a response to liberalism's contradictions and failures. But by this definition, pretty much everything—Marxism, fascism, etc.—would count as the offspring of liberalism.
Here's my problem with all this:
Occam's Razor tells me none of it should exist.
I have a hard-earned humanities degree - and yet all this stuff that's taken over everything in the past decade is COMPLETELY incompatible with both my education, and with my own life and thoughts. There's no place for this in me, and no place for me in it. This isn't mind-expanding, it's mind-STULTIFYING...and the idea that the individual doesn't exist is brick-stupid on its face, if not outright terrifying (we're all individuals before we're even taught anything about groups, so how can anyone buy it in the first place?!). That's fascism in a nutshell.
It's impossible to communicate with what amounts to a weaponized language-virus that demands you learn about it and gives NOTHING back, it just devours you the more you do. There's no way to interface with it - or its adherents - if you reject its foundations. It's a bad-faith missionary-cult, Christianity stripped back down to its essentials as a spiritual war-juggernaut, and without any of the temperance forcibly acquired after centuries of religious war. 30 seconds' critical thinking is enough to nip most any of its talking points in the bud, and the fact that that hasn't been enough to make it a non-starter terrifies me for what it says about others.
It's everything it claims to oppose; if old-school neo-Nazis and Klansmen are the tail of a rattlesnake, this is its fresh head enjoying the same prestige (and oh gee, backed by the same interests!) that they did 100 years ago. We must stop indulging their delusions of opposition.
"The mullahs of the Islamic world and the mullahs of the Hindu world and the mullahs of the Christian world are all on the same side. And we are against them all." - Arundhati Roy