The Problem Of Progressive Identitarianism

THE PROBLEM OF PROGRESSIVE IDENTITARIANISM Identity politics is an often thrown around word in the world of 21st century politics, particularly among the young and terminally online. This term was originally coined not by frustrated young white men, who are most associated as users of the term today, but rather black lesbian feminists in the 1970s who were part of a socialist collective critical of white feminism and the civil rights movement for not addressing their needs as individuals and as collective identities. Identity politics is seen as a rather contentious and divisive issue among the political left where positive, negative and mixed views can be found debated among everyone from Young Labor types to hardcore commies. On the political Right it is almost universally decried but oftentimes practiced anyway because they lack the selfawareness and/or honesty to admit that they are champions of the politics of identity but of the hierarchical and oppressive as opposed to needs based variety. Nonetheless, identity politics on the Left can also lead to some pretty dark places, not in its commonly understood form, as is often debated about today, but rather as progressive or leftwing identitarianism. Identitarianism is usually associated with right-wing radicalism, white nationalism and racism - anextreme reactionary equivalent identity politics nothing like what the first people to coin the term must have imagined it to mean. In left-wing and progressive spaces, a similar form of identitarian politics has hold, not actually to service the needs of those otherwise marginalized by their very identity and who they are in the hierarchies of capitalist society but rather to exclude, attack and brow-beat anyone different to them regardless of one’s place in said hierarchy. Anyone looking for examples of said progressive identitarianism in our upcoming state and federal elections is likely to find nothing more than some standard identity politics or right-wing shittiness. However, looking to North America one can find much clearer examples starting with the online fans of the sitting Vice-President Kamala Harris whose bullying behaviour stood out among ‘progressives’, a curious thing for such boring and incompetent purely representational politics. Hilary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren are other figures I would associate with progressive identitarianism, and not vicariously like Kamala. Indeed, both women are remembered for launching bizarre pseudo-feminists attacks on Bernie Sanders and the movement behind him, smearing them all as sexist and threatening. This was despite Bernie’s humble social democratic platform which included taxing both women’s corrupt donors to pay for expanding healthcare coverageand cutting the American Empire’s military budget to pay for welfare programs like a fifteen dollar minimum wage, waiving all student debt and introducing paid maternity leave (what a misogynist pig). Hillary and Elizabeth, on the other hand, ended up running on the idea that a woman running the most powerful and dangerous nation on earth was sufficient merit to give them power. Elizabeth even originally supported many ideas similar to Bernie’s but started courting donors instead of voters and promptly abandoned them. Needless to say, unlike the original identity politics aimed at serving the needs of marginalised communities, progressive identitarianism tends to fulfill the whims of selfish people, particularly politicians, journalists and capitalists. Other, more mundane and less manipulative, example of progressive identitarianism include a few BlackLivesMatter organisers insisting that black and white people march separately against the police brutality that affects almost all Americans; or the Canadian teachers’ union introducing race weighted internal voting. Funnily enough, progressive identitarianism evokes far more outrage from the Right than it does on the Left, where people are not as gung-ho about attacking feminist figures or racial justice movements, but conservative critics are just being shallow, many of the worst aspects of progressive identitarianism are just a shiny but broken mirror of their own politics. While one may easily dismiss progressive identitarianism as a uniquely American disease, anyone intimately familiar with student politics at home in Australia could tell you a similar story whether it is in student elections, campus boards or indeed events like the National Union of Students’ annual conventions. Progressive identitarianism is here to stay.