Against Identitarianism

Or, In Defence of Nuance

As I noted at the end of my last piece, it is to the credit of some of the anti-woke coalition that Trump/Musk taking a chainsaw to American democracy and the international order is drawing wide criticism (shoutout to Quillette’s Claire Lehmann for being particularly implacable in response to the Oval Office shitshow and taking the flak her stance has drawn from the magazine’s populist-leaning audience). Among those anti-woke liberals who have turned out to be pretty much what they said on the tin, there seems to be a dawning awareness that many proponents of the current vibeshift are profound authoritarians in their own right, and that the online populist mob is displaying much the same bullying, dehumanisation and dismissal of its critics that was so infuriating about the woke. In ‘The Online Right Is Building a Monster,’ River Page recently noted:

At every turn, I noted that the left’s extreme cultural politics were alienating and sometimes even materially harmful to the working class. In the laboratory of Twitter, the Frankenstein-left were building a monster—a conglomeration of niche, off-putting, impossible to defend political positions sewn together and stomping about…We’ve gotten to the point where the right-wing hegemony on X is just as—if not more—entrenched than the left’s was…When I pointed this out on Twitter last week, a lot of people called me a faggot. Be that as it may, I’m a faggot who knows to get out of the way when a pendulum is about to swing right into him.

What I’m interested in here is thinking through the how and why of this pendulum swing, and what it tells us about the mechanisms, and reality distortions, of the culture war. Some of the anti-woke culture warriors, most prominently James Lindsay, have taken to diagnosing the populist vibeshift with a case of what he calls ‘the woke right.’ This analysis derives from what Lindsay thought was wrong with wokeism, which was, in short, that it understands the world in terms of oppressor/oppressed dynamics and is hence a subspecies of that perennial American bogeyman, Marxism. (I analyse the argument some feminists took to calling the ‘Marx-to-Women-Have-Penises Pipeline’ here, and explain why I think it does an awful job of explaining what was wrong with woke.)

For Lindsay, what’s wrong with ‘the woke right,’ is that, like the woke left, they have a terrible victim complex and are animated by grievance. There is certainly some truth to this, and one of the enduring ironies of many strands of contemporary populism is that while the online mob likes to run around pointing at anyone saying anything vaguely leftish and shouting ‘critical theory cooties’ at them, their entire ‘red pill’ critique of whatever they deem ‘bad’—the MSM, the globalist elites, the deep state, wokeism, feminism—performs the precise rhetorical move made famous by Adorno’s analysis of the role of ‘the culture industry’ as a type of mass deception intended to keep an exploited populace compliant. Indeed, in form, if not in content, it would be hard to get a cigarette paper between Curtis Yarvin’s railing against the institutions of liberal dominance he calls ‘The Cathedral,’ and the work of The Frankfurt School, or indeed, prominent figures who have spent their careers critiquing Western neoliberalism and imperialism from the left, such as Chomsky. (It is here that we arrive at the troubling spectacle of the tankie/populist, or red/brown, alliance. Because apparently anything is better than neoliberal hegemony, even if that ‘anything’ is basically fascism.[1])

While it is certainly true that much of the populist right is fuelled by the leveraging of grievance, Lindsay is wrong that that is what is wrong with it (and he is also dishonest to pretend that he hasn’t been playing the same game, as if he, and Peterson et al.’s entire careers are not grounded on their ‘white-men-being-oppressed-by-the-wokes’ schtick.) Indeed, the problem with right wing populism is not even that it is populism, because the world is, in fact, and ever more so presently, run by ‘elites’ who are manifestly in the business of fucking over ‘ordinary people,’ and after 40 some years of neoliberal hegemony destroying living standards, meaningful work, communities, public institutions, the social contract, and the general credibility of ‘Western values,’ many people have good reason to feel aggrieved.

I have a lot of time for the left-wing populisms that directed their political ire at the manifestations of systemic material exploitation, be that the anti-globalization movements of the late 90s, or the Occupy and anti-austerity movements of early last decade. Indeed, I strongly suspect that it was neoliberal states’ deployment of their monopoly on the means of violence to crush those movement that led to many lefties lapsing into an idealist, identitarian fantasy which absurdly posited we could all be saved from ‘white-supremacist-cis-het-patriarchal-colonialism’ if only they could make everyone believe that men were women. Which is to say that what is wrong with right wing populism is similar to what is wrong with wokeism: its analysis of the problem with the world, and how to go about addressing it, is a load of reality-distorting bullshit.

Dissecting the various strands that are contributing to this bullshit—Christian nationalism, techno-feudalism, nostalgic quasi-fash fantasies of restoring a Golden Age by purging the nation of aliens and deviants—is one thing I want to do with this project. However, having zoomed out from the trenches of the fight against trans ideology to look at the larger frame of the culture war, I have found myself zooming out further than expected, and now think we cannot begin to understand any of what is happening around us without examining the erosion of political reality that has been underway in Western societies since at least 9/11 (in truth it had always been happening and was only gratuitously accelerated by the concatenation of lies that constituted the War on Terror). Looking at how our politics has taken complete leave of reality over the last quarter century will be the next piece of work I want to undertake here and forms the larger context of the specific reality distortions central to the dynamics of the culture war. Indeed, both the culture war and its larger frame are informed by the same fundamental facts. That our societies are facing a set of profound, and seemingly intractable, material challenges that our managerial political class has little intention, interest, or ideas about how to confront. (And that an army of Russian trolls have been systemically exploiting the fissures arising from the failure to deal with these obdurate material realities, in order to hasten our demise.)

In this context it is probably unsurprising that significant numbers of people have taken their real grievances about how fucked up everything is and channelled them into bullshit woke/red-pill stories about what is wrong and how everything can be fixed with some messianic silver bullet (‘make everyone agree that men are women and everyone is racist’/‘make everyone agree to destroy the troons and deport the Muslims’). The problem with the stories both sides are telling is not that they are structured by grievance or by an analysis of oppressor/oppressed dynamics, but that they are based in idealist, tribal identitarianism and not in grounded, material structural analysis of the mechanisms in question, the facts of which are complex, and don’t lend themselves so easily to scapegoating and sorting everyone into teams of goodies and baddies.

While wokeism purported to use the language of structural analysis, it was, in fact, a form of idealist cultish tribalism structured by the demand that everyone must accept all of its (often bonkers) precepts as a singular job lot or be cast out and indicted as an upholder of the status quo, a racist, a white feminist, or a nazi. Equally, while the populists like to style themselves as defenders of free speech against woke authoritarianism, many of them play the equal and opposite game, positioning all of their critics as members of the ‘other’ tribe and dismissing them without genuine engagement.

By this point I’ve stopped being amused by how regularly feminist veterans of the gender war are asked ‘What is a woman?’ by latterly arrived populists whenever we criticise the Trump administration or indicate that we’re not that keen on Tommy Robinson. Just as the wokes immured themselves against all criticism by positing critics as upholders of white-cis-het-patriarchal power against the marginalised, the populists immure themselves against all criticism by positing critics as upholders of liberal elite/woke power against the oppressed ‘ordinary people.’ The most common response these days to any critique I make of MAGA or Reform-style UK populism is some version of “you think everyone who disagrees with you is *fill in the particular criticism.*” While at first glance this might seem like a reasonable rejection of woke identitarianism, it betrays its own identitarian structure: a gesture that makes sense only by projecting all your critics as liberal elite wokeists, and then dismissing them outright.

The culture war is then, fundamentally, a dynamic of mirror image inversion and projection operating between two identitarian cults. People often ask me what I mean when I say ‘identitarian,’ and this mechanism of the tribal othering of dissenters is the first, and probably most important, thing I mean to convey by it. The second is that the ‘identity’ of the tribal cult is created not by shared material circumstances, or actual political interests, but by a process of identification with the signifiers or beliefs that mark the identity of the tribe. Within wokeism, that identity was something like ‘advocating for the marginalised against the white-cis-het-patriarchal-colonial status quo,’ which, as we know, led to a great number of middle-class straight white people trying to rack up marginalisation points by dying their hair, changing their pronouns, and claiming to be queer. The identities being animated in right wing populism are those they see as being threatened by the woke, most notably conventional ideas of patriarchal masculinity, gender conservative notions about masculine and feminine roles (which in populism, as in Butlerianism, is all wrapped up in the thought of ‘the gender/sex binary), and notions of ethnic purity and the preservation of whiteness (please save us from the endless bullshit about ‘English ethnicity’ for the love of the fucking goddess).

Indeed, and this is part of the story always missed by the populists, the identitarianism of wokeism was formed by inversion from the identitarianism of traditional patriarchal views on gender, race, and religious morality, dating from the post-civil rights/post-feminist revival of fundamentalist Christian conservativism in the 1980s. I have sometimes joked that the creation of the Moral Majority scared the shit out of Judith Butler so completely that she decided the only thing to do was set about abolishing sex. But it isn’t really a joke. When you go back and look at the foundations of the sex denialist arguments, what comes through clearly is a barely disguised terror that all and any appeal to ‘nature’ will be used to justify dragging women back into the kitchen, chaining them to the sink, and confining them to having babies.

Given how the politics of the gender war has played out over the last few years—hello ‘sex realist’/‘reactionary feminism’—I have become somewhat more sympathetic to this terror than I used to be. The same can also be said for how woke race identitarianism—which used to enrage me by imperiously projecting its ‘decolonising’ vision, grounded in the specific racial history of the United States, across all of time and space—has now neatly inverted itself into bare, unconcealed racism. (To be clear, if you are calling entire groups of people ‘barbarians’ on the basis of their colour or creed, that is racism (and no, that doesn’t mean you can’t criticise Islamism)). What has happened here is that the political convictions of right wing identitarianism were inverted into left wing identitarianism which have now been inverted back into right wing identitarianism with added backlash rocket fuel. And the majority of human beings who are not card-carrying members of either of these two tribes are now left standing in the middle looking at the wreckage piling up and scratching our heads in desperation.

What needs to be underlined looking at this table of inverted oppositions, is that both sides represent significant distortions of reality. It’s not really that cognitively trying to look at each pair and work out how the truth is somewhere in the middle (depending on the specificity of time and place), which makes it all the more infuriating that our political discourse is being held hostage by this obdurate polarisation. I have spent my life trying to understand why our thinking lurches incessantly back and forth, first to one pole, and then, by reversal, all the way back again, a mad, maddening pendulum swing that never comes to rest in the middle where we all know reality actually resides. Some of this is to do with the features of the human intellect and the way our concepts are formed through identity and opposition. Some of it is to do with our desire for secure universal knowledge and comforting moral rules, a longing to be free of the burden of looking closely at the world and having to form our own fallible judgements, each and every time. But much of it is also to do with the emotional rewards of tribalism, of in-group/out-group affiliation, of friend/enemy distinctions, and what we gain when we adopt an identity that tells us who is good and who is bad, and who we can legitimately use as a repository of all our anger, fear, resentment and grievance.

The irony of wokeism, of course, was that it came, in good part, from an analysis of how these mechanisms of hierarchy, othering, and projection work, and then promptly turned them back into another form of tribalism in which you could happily spend weeks kicking ‘bigots’ around on Twitter. In the process, it produced an enormous amount of resentment and gave an enormous amount of ammunition to a lot of people who, it turns out, actually are bigots, and who now have the added rhetorical advantage of deflecting from their bigotry by proclaiming ‘you think everyone who disagrees with you is a racist’ when someone points out that what they have just said is actually really fucking racist.

The only thing those of us huddled on the windy isthmus between these two warring tribes can do is keep mapping, loudly and insistently, the reality that is the space in between, and refusing to be assigned to either team. It is not a complete accident that when populists decided to turn me into a tribal totem of the other and engage in repeated efforts to burn me at the stake for heresy, one of my signature crimes was saying wordy overly complicated stuff and engaging in way too much nuance to apparently be trustworthy. It was, we were told, all very simple. And the only possible reason for saying complicated shit was treachery and nefarious duplicity (as well as being ‘lah-de-dah’ and ‘up yourself’ of course).

But the simple fact is that reality is complicated, and the people we should be sceptical about are the ones telling us that it isn’t. It is also no accident that when authoritarians ride into town, among the first people they target are the thinky ones (and the way right wing populism has replaced elite-as-in-billionaire with elite-as-in-thinky is crucial to its demagogic and authoritarian operation). None of this means that it isn’t sometimes necessary to draw clear boundaries and assert them to protect yourself or your own interests. When someone is trying to dominate you, the choice really is quite binary: you can either resist or submit. But resistance is not the same as determining that the world is black and white, that your tribe is the unequivocal good and theirs the unequivocal evil, or that you have carte blanche to dominate them back in an act of retaliation or vengeance.

If we care about actually being good or right, rather than ‘belonging to the tribe that has designated itself as good and right,’ we must never buy, definitively, into identitarian opposition, and the dehumanising hierarchies between ‘us and them,’ or the reality twisting, it engenders. Nuance is a crucial tool here. It is the moment-by-moment practice of staying close to the ground, resisting the emotional seductions of certain, secure, tribal idealisation for the messiness, complexity, and specificity of the world as it is. It is the tool we can use to ‘jam the machinery,’ as Irigaray would say, of identitarian opposition, with all its reality distortion and polarising hatred. It is, at base, an instrument of justice, both to the representation of reality, and to individual human beings in their unique specificity. As the world starts to go up in flames—much to the delight of disaster capitalists and authoritarian oligarchs—it is an instrument that reality-based people, irrespective of their other political commitments, must doggedly refuse to relinquish.

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[1] It’s worth pointing out here is that leveraging this anti-imperialist feeling among the Western left has been a principal strategy of Russian propaganda efforts, especially with respect to the war in Ukraine, cue John Pilger on Russia Today. None of which is to say that the critique of Western imperialism is wrong, much of it is not. My objection is not to the critique, it is to the leveraging and framing of the critique towards the end of engendering support for or justification of other types of authoritarianism and imperialism.