“Identity Politics”

It is time progressives stood up to the racism, classism and misogyny of wokeness.

The Identity Myth by David Swift is a fun and clever book. It’s a counterblast to the Flapper Girl socialism of Novara Media. It brilliantly dismantles the ‘NeoOrientalism’ of the identitarian left. It lights a fire under the arse of the graduate left who say, without a flicker of shame, that 65-year-old working-class people who own their homes are the new propertied elite while posh twentysomethings with PhDs who pay sky-high rents in hip Hackney are the new proles. If you’ve ever found yourself wondering how the left lost the plot, how a movement founded to represent the interests of the working class ended up treating the working class as a lost, hopeless, mostly racist cause, you could do worse than start here.

The stock market has plummeted, erasing hundreds of billions of dollars in household wealth in the span of weeks. War in Ukraine is a distinct possibility and not merely a worst-case scenario. Stakes as high as these tend to concentrate the mind. As a result, the ongoing and seemingly endless debates about “wokeness”—for want of a better term for the way a powerful sliver of the left discusses race and identity—seem odd and even unimportant.

The white upper middle class is deranging American politics. We should have seen it coming.

In 2010, America’s last famous novelist, Jonathan Franzen, launched on the reading public Freedom, his tale of a striving family headed by Walter and Patty Berglund. They were gentrifiers in St. Paul, Minn. The paterfamilias was a lawyer at the conglomerate 3M but no corporate cutthroat. He biked to work and was in the outreach-and-philanthropy department. The Berglunds were “the super-guilty sort of liberals who needed to forgive everybody so their own good fortune could be forgiven; who lacked the courage of their privilege.”