identity politics

Identity Politics is Killing Solidarity and Fuelling Fascism

There was a time when we on the British left owned terms like Unity and Solidarity. The broad left had formed around a single, enormous issue: the obscenity of poverty. Thus, the left once represented the disadvantaged, and the right fought to maintain the old status quo. When fascism last surged in the 1930s, it was the left’s broad base that ensured British fascism was crushed: it alone could unite the mighty industrial working class with immigrants and sympathetic liberals. It was opposition to poverty that united white working class people with the immigrants – Irish, Jewish, Black and Asian – that came to Britain over the past century. Ultimately, this was why the left eventually championed the fight against racism: because it understood that the biggest problems faced by immigrants – bad housing, low pay, state indifference, routine violence – were shared by poor white people, and formed alliances in factories and poor communities that transcended race.

Racism was never a one-way street. Tension and violence grew in high-immigration communities because of mistrust and misunderstanding on both sides. Mass immigration – then, as now – benefited the economy as a whole, but placed a disproportionate burden on poor communities. People who complained about rapid, disconcerting change in their neighbourhoods were not uniformly attacked as “racists”; instead, the left sought to find common ground and build unity. The Notting Hill Carnival is one of the lasting testaments to this approach: it was a community creation designed to bring white and black people together in the wake of race riots.

But the Labour Movement, the foundation of the old left, effectively collapsed during the 1980s and 90s for a variety of reasons. The left dwindled, and found new power bases: no longer in factories or council estates; instead in academia and the public sector. It lost touch with working class people, and lost interest in poverty. It instead adopted identity politics, dividing people by race, gender, sexuality just as it once united people across these lines. It became whiter and more middle-class, and gradually came to represent the interests of white, middle-class people above all others. Step by step, from the 80s onward, the left took on the attitudes of the old fascist movements, seeking to divide society into isolated, opposing groups of people.

None of this mattered much, until a new surge in left-wing support followed the 2008 financial crash. My initial excitement at the left-wing resurgence turned into disgust as I saw what the left had now become.

I first noticed the shift via my involvement in sexual freedom causes. The old Christian right had died along with Mary Whitehouse. Now, a new conservative movement surfaced, this time based around the remnants of the old feminist movement. The new attackers of sexual freedom came from the organs of the new-left: universities, trade unions, local authorities and the Labour Party. This new left had lost all interest in tackling poverty and disadvantage, because they had no experience or understanding of it. Instead, they declared gender, skin colour and sexuality to be the true marks of oppression. So, porn and other sexual expression came under attack, not because it was “ungodly” but because it was deemed to “oppress women”. Thieves had stolen the language of the (now defunct) progressive left and used it to advance fascist agendas.

So we saw the grotesque sight of middle-class “left-wing” people declaring themselves to be “oppressed” (for reason of possessing a vagina or extra melanin in their skin), and attacking poor white communities as “privileged”. The new-left had restarted the class war, but this time was firmly on the other side.

So when Edie Lamort, a stripper-activist (who I interviewed some time back), declared herself some years ago to be the “canary in the coalmine”, she was very prescient. The attacks on her and her comrades, by fascists in left-wing clothing, were indeed an early sign of a broad attack on liberal values from the political left.

The pus-filled boil of identity politics, quietly swelling since the 80s, really only burst within the past couple of years. And now, the identity fascists are dismantling all remnants of cross-community solidarity as rapidly as possible. Every progressive movement of recent years is collapsing as identity politics moves in. Among the most spectacular examples has been the undermining of the campaign against police violence in the United States. A few years ago, thanks to smartphones and social media, and campaigns such as Copblock, a bright light was shone for the first time on the astonishing violence of US policing. Although there was clearly a strong racial element, police violence was meted out across all communities. If there was a particular “identity” group at the receiving end, it was overwhelmingly poor, young men, of all races.

But to make it a “male issue” would have been foolish and divisive. A Martin Luther King character, should one exist today, would identify a common cause and an opportunity for cross-community solidarity; but this is not the liberal 60s, and there appears to be no room for uniting characters like MLK today. Instead, the issue was seized by black nationalists. The hashtag #filmthepolice gave way to #blacklivesmatter. In a remarkable reversal of logic, black nationalists – backed by identity fascists – declared #alllivesmatter to be a “racist” sentiment. Never mind that numerically, the single biggest identity group to be shot by police was white men; or that, proportionately the greatest sufferers were native American men. The issue was now owned by the 24% of victims who were black, and the other 76% were excluded (Source: The Counted). This marked the high watermark of the campaign against police violence: it had been killed by sectarianism. If there ever was a signal to white working class people that nobody cares for them, here it was.

Now, when a 12 year old (white) girl was shot dead by police, there would be no community mobilisation, no public outcry. After all, what hashtag does one use in such a case? #Alllivesmatter was already deemed racist, and #whitelivesmatter would be even worse. So, the girl’s name never made it into the public consciousness: Ciara Meyer RIP: killed by police, forgotten by identity politics.

Now, it seems, the scourge of mass shootings in the US is going the same way. While only a couple of years ago, every shooting was met with horror, and renewed calls for gun controls, now the campaign has been targeted, divided and sunk by identity politics. A steady stream of mass killings – driven by easy access to guns, however much the gun lobby denied it – was punctuated a year ago by the killing of nine people in Charleston, South Carolina. Like many such mass killings, the shooter was an angry/crazy/hateful (take your pick) white man. Unlike most others, the targets were exclusively black.

Dylan Roof, the shooter, was no doubt motivated by racist views: but statistically, the event was an outlier. It makes no sense to declare a single atrocity, carried out by a single person, to be representative of anything but the views of that person. Racial violence has, in fact, tumbled a long, long way since the days of the lynch mob. But identity politics (which previously had no interest in the long succession of mass shootings) now awoke, and declared the issue a black-owned one.

And with the recent mass-shooting in a gay club in Orlando, the divisiveness reaches a whole new level. This time, identity fascists of the right blame “Islam”, while those of the left are determined to blame “Homophobia”. But neither explanation is matched by a genuine trend: neither Islamist nor homophobic atrocities are regular enough events to be anything but outliers. Homophobia may still be commonplace, but is almost certainly at its lowest level in US history. The same old explanation holds true for this mass shooting as for all the hundreds of others: an angry/crazy/hateful individual managed to get hold of military-style weaponry.

Identity politics is really the politics of the self. The identity warrior’s deepest instinct is: “How can I make this all about MEEEE?” Thus, the ever-vapid commentator Owen Jones walked out of a Sky News dicussion on the Orlando shooting, ostensibly because the other commentators were refusing to acknowledge homophobia. But in reality, Jones had finally found an American massacre that he, as a gay man, could associate himself with, and so become outraged about. Never mind that, as a British person, the chance he will ever encounter a mass shooting is close to zero. Never mind that many of the dead were undocumented Latino migrants rather than middle-class British journalists. Jones’ sexuality is the hook with which he can claim a stake in the misery of strangers, far away.

And here is the real tragedy of identity politics: solidarity is dying. While, only a few years ago, we could all unite to express shock at the killing of a black person by a racist, or a gay person by a homophobe, or a Jew by an anti-semite, now this is quietly breaking down. Now, every atrocity is an identity atrocity, and so every atrocity fosters further anger and division, while not so long ago we could unite in our common humanity against the tiny minority that commit vile acts of hate.

Identity politics is the politics of self-pity. If I were to choose this route, I could assert my Jewishness: henceforth, I could declare any anti-semitic attack to be all about MEEE. But I choose not to be defined by my Jewish heritage, however much self-pity it could allow me to wallow in. My children are Nigerian-Jewish; should they revel only in the victimhood of Jews and Nigerians? Should my daughter declare herself a Judeo-Nigerian Feminist, and add gender self-pity to black and semitic self-pity? We are in a race to the bottom: when we selectively ignore horror, because we don’t identify with the identity of the victims, we are losing our humanity.

Is it surprising, therefore, that poor whites would now also choose to unite around their racial identity? Is the rise of Donald Trump or of Nigel Farage so surprising in this climate? This new ascent of the fascist right was clearly preempted and driven by the rise of fascist politics on the left. We have no chance of resisting the rise of of the far-right in Europe and America if we adopt fascist methods and ideas ourselves. We need to rediscover the solidarity of the old left: we must stand shoulder to shoulder with those who suffer, however much – or little – they resemble ourselves.

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37 thoughts on “Identity Politics is Killing Solidarity and Fuelling Fascism

  1. Interesting read. Where did you get the stats on police violence in the USA and the other groups affected? If that’s true that’s very interesting, although I don’t think the article is less relevant if they aren’t 🙂

  2. I think the author is wrong. The Left needs identity politics and should not give into the reactionary backlash against identity politics, which is a rightist trend. Just look at the “alt-right” neo-Nazi vitriol for “social justice warriors”, which the author even echoes by labeling his opponents “identity warriors”. It was precisely the phony universalist racism and sexism within the left, this thinking which holds that the industrial proletarian struggle against poverty was supreme and every other struggle was subordinate to that, which pushed women and “minorities” to distance themselves from this white male eurocentric left. The task now is to finish the job and abolish this chauvinistic left and make a new one by bringing the spirit of pluriversalism under one umbrella–universalsm as pluriversalism. That means upholding fluidity in engagement between the priorities of different liberation struggles and not subordinating women’s, immigrants’, blacks’, etc. struggles to the proletarian one, but also not negating the value of Marxian contribution to critical theory or the need for a proletarian struggle or the fact of class as a marker of oppression.

    Now for a few point-by-point responses:

    1) “the biggest problems faced by immigrants” : the author has conveniently failed to mention all of the major problems immigrants face that set them apart from native workers: deportation, grappling with cultural dislocation and displacement, language barriers, saudade for one’s home country. These are all issues that are of no concern to the “poor white people” the author contrasts with immigrants (as if white people were all from one country? this weird white nationalism could use unpacking…)

    2) Seeking to “find common ground and build unity” with people complaining about the way immigrants change their neighborhoods doesn’t mean you should ignore their problematic views on immigrants. The author exhibits the phenomenon of white fragility by insinuating that to address (“call out”) racist views is “attacking” the people that hold them, to their own detriment.

    3) The author complains that the left came to become more composed of middle class whites and focus on their interests, and then goes on to accuse black nationalists as a part of this pseudo-leftist fascism. This is a contradiction.

    4) It simply doesn’t follow logically that taking a feminist stance leads one to sexual conservatism.

    5) The old “but poor people can’t have any kind of privilege!” meme seriously needs to be canned. Go back to Du Bois: whiteness is first and foremost a psychological wage, not a monetary one. Again, pointing out that poor people with light skin have somewhat of an advantage over poor people with dark skin is not “attacking” them and it is in fact an attack on all poor people to whip up this race war narrative.

    6) The notion that #BlackLivesMatter ignores police brutality against anyone who isn’t Black is patently false. A regular BLM meme is to present a case of a white person brutalized by police and ask why no one is speaking out against it with the AllLivesMatter hashtag, and charge, correctly, that #AllLivesMatter is used almost exclusively to negate anti-racist struggles. All Lives Matter trolls didn’t go out to protest for Ciara Meyer, they just point to BLM’s lack of street mobilization in that case to try to derail and discredit where a large part of the African-American liberation movement is at these days. You have to be willfully ignorant to not see that there is a special oppression against African-American people in the USA.

    7) Identity politics is the acceptance of the personal as political, which also means acknowledging that the “self” exists only in its social relations. Ideally, the postulate of identity politics should not be “everything is about me” but “we are about everything”, similar to the slogan nothing about us without us.

    I don’t doubt that there are some legitimate criticisms to make about identity politics; I just haven’t found any strong ones here.

    This photo of a protester at NYU from 1970 also very nicely refutes the entire argument that identity politics undermines cross ethnic/race/gender/sexuality/ability solidarity:

    https://www.flickr.com/photos/jstheater/3665984661/

    1. “The task now is to finish the job and abolish this chauvinistic left and make a new one by bringing the spirit of pluriversalism under one umbrella–universalsm as pluriversalism. That means upholding fluidity in engagement between the priorities of different liberation struggles and not subordinating women’s, immigrants’, blacks’, etc. struggles to the proletarian one, but also not negating the value of Marxian contribution to critical theory or the need for a proletarian struggle or the fact of class as a marker of oppression.”

      Be honest, You’re one of those clever bots that emits words in nonsensical streams that imitate the pseudo intellectualism excrement that pours out of academics and airhead students that uses as many words as possible yet means nothing… Right?

      Because you just cannot be serious. It’s too funny.

    2. “1) “the biggest problems faced by immigrants” : the author has conveniently failed to mention all of the major problems immigrants face that set them apart from native workers: deportation, grappling with cultural dislocation and displacement, language barriers, saudade for one’s home country.”

      Deportation is not a problem for legal immigrants; “cultural dislocation and displacement, saudade for one’s home country” all sound pathetically minor, especially since ideally you should be assimilating if you came at all. So it’s really just language barriers, and most countries are good at that nowadays.

      “2) Seeking to “find common ground and build unity” with people complaining about the way immigrants change their neighborhoods doesn’t mean you should ignore their problematic views on immigrants.”

      Too bad those problematic views don’t exist. It’s just that if they point out that a demographic change brought some other kind of change, that’s automatically racist and you will go ahead and shun these people.

      “The author exhibits the phenomenon of white fragility by insinuating that to address (“call out”) racist views is “attacking” the people that hold them, to their own detriment.”

      Isn’t it interesting that you have a terminology to automatically disqualify any time white people feel bad about something? White tears, white fragility, white privilege… it’s all to avoid engaging in actual dialogue. You can disagree with people without “calling them out”; a call-out in this context is something you’re doing for yourself to show everyone how great and non-racist you are.

      “3) The author complains that the left came to become more composed of middle class whites and focus on their interests, and then goes on to accuse black nationalists as a part of this pseudo-leftist fascism. This is a contradiction.”

      You think black nationalists give a flying fuck about poor black people? You must be joking. You know how many larger problems black people have than just “the government”? Take that away, and most black people are still going to be poor, uneducated, and members of a victim culture that idolizes money, with more deadbeat dads than you can shake a stick at. The government’s “systemic racism” is exactly the kind of problem that concerns only upper middle class whites.

      “4) It simply doesn’t follow logically that taking a feminist stance leads one to sexual conservatism.”

      Well maybe not but it’s what happened so that seems pretty irrelevant.

      “Affirmative consent” basically says that women aren’t mentally strong enough to muster up a “no” or a “stop it” even if they’re being raped. That’s literally victorian-era sexism, the idea that a woman isn’t strong enough to decide anything for herself so the man has to take total control of the situation. There’s even cases where a third-party complaint gets guys punished even if the woman says she wasn’t raped, which means under these rules women are so weak they can’t even successfully deny their rape. Do you begin to understand how insane this all is?

      “5) The old “but poor people can’t have any kind of privilege!” meme seriously needs to be canned. Go back to Du Bois: whiteness is first and foremost a psychological wage, not a monetary one. Again, pointing out that poor people with light skin have somewhat of an advantage over poor people with dark skin is not “attacking” them and it is in fact an attack on all poor people to whip up this race war narrative.”

      But you must admit that it’s a ridiculously tiny privilege, dude. And if anything, considering the cultural shift, black people are receiving more of a psychological wage – they’ve got someone to blame AND solidarity with other black people, including shoutouts from rich and successful black celebrities. Poor white people don’t get any of that.

      “6) The notion that #BlackLivesMatter ignores police brutality against anyone who isn’t Black is patently false. A regular BLM meme is to present a case of a white person brutalized by police and ask why no one is speaking out against it with the AllLivesMatter hashtag, and charge, correctly, that #AllLivesMatter is used almost exclusively to negate anti-racist struggles.”

      how is that not “ignoring”? They aren’t protesting, they aren’t outraged, they don’t care, they just use those deaths to score points. “oh u all lives matter guys are hypocrites” no, all lives matter people just don’t like racism, unlike you retards

      “All Lives Matter trolls didn’t go out to protest for Ciara Meyer, they just point to BLM’s lack of street mobilization in that case to try to derail and discredit where a large part of the African-American liberation movement is at these days. You have to be willfully ignorant to not see that there is a special oppression against African-American people in the USA.”

      but not in matters of police brutality. seriously, aside from media-promoted anecdotes (you can hear similar ones about white suspects, but those don’t get media coverage), there’s no good statistics making any kind of argument on this matter. Given that black people are performing a massive percentage of America’s crimes, you’d honestly expect them to be shot even more often than they are, and as I recall the only study to test if police would shoot black guys more often than white guys showed that, while police felt more threatened by black people, they shot them less often as well. If BLM wants to transition to general racial whatever, that’s their choice, but if you’re talking about police brutality, you must be able to see it’s a larger problem than just racism.

      “7) Identity politics is the acceptance of the personal as political, which also means acknowledging that the “self” exists only in its social relations. Ideally, the postulate of identity politics should not be “everything is about me” but “we are about everything”, similar to the slogan nothing about us without us.”

      But who is “we”

      that’s the issue, because you have set up a “we” which is very small; only look like you, only have the same genitals, and only have the same political views. and of course, people that share your look but not views, or views but not looks, or have the wrong pair of genitals, are not allowed. that’s by definition divisive; you have set yourself up with a lot of enemies who are close to you and could be friends instead. not only that, but most identity politics movements tend to attack those people most virulently, when they could be attacking actual problems. that’s because identity politics is bullshit; it’s all about the self, which is to say the ego, which is to say that its followers are more interested in maintaining and boosting their egos than changing minds and getting things done. what should matter is not the self, but the idea.

    3. One photo from the 70s (even though the author of the article states that the fall of the left happened from the 80s onwards), you believe this refutes everything written. Ha ha ha, you’re an idiot.

      You did notice that in that picture she wrote on here sign “Student Power”. Since when are students, who have always been and remain to this day typically from well off backgrounds. Need power. College and University students are the ones who invariably go on to hold power in our society.

      “A regular BLM meme is to present a case of a white person brutalized by police and ask why no one is speaking out against it”

      Funny how this is never seen.

      “All Lives Matter trolls didn’t go out to protest for Ciara Meyer”

      Why would trolls actually protest anything? That’s a deflection, BLM regularly ignore any violent police incident that isn’t against black people & you well know it.

      “I just haven’t found any strong ones here.”

      Largely because you’ve dismissed the claims made here & done so using poorly designed rhetoric. I mean one photo, really?

      “Go back to Du Bois: whiteness is first and foremost a psychological wage, not a monetary one.”

      Du Bois did not employ any form of empirical research in her writings. She made bold assertions that you feel are right. You would’ve been as well to say “Go watch Star Trek”.

      “It simply doesn’t follow logically that taking a feminist stance leads one to sexual conservatism”

      Did he say feminism lead to sexual conservatism? He stated where the route of sexual conservatism is based. He didn’t say that everyone involved with the groups found on University Campuses where sexual conservatives. You might not understand the distinction.

      “The author complains that the left came to become more composed of middle class whites and focus on their interests, and then goes on to accuse black nationalists as a part of this pseudo-leftist fascism.”

      So the implication fo your statement is that black people can’t be middle class.That’s pretty racist in my view.

      “doesn’t mean you should ignore their problematic views on immigrants”

      No one argued that they should be ignored.

      “The author exhibits the phenomenon of white fragility”

      Change the word white to black, does it sound like an attack? Good I’m glad we’ve fixed that issue.

      “the author has conveniently failed”

      A presumed malicious intent. I wonder if that’s based on your perception of the race and gender of the author.

      1. You are familiar enough with Du Bois’ work to dismiss it as unempirical but not enough to know that Du Bois wasn’t a woman? Lolzzz.

        The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was one of the biggest catalysts of the Civil Rights Movement, giving rise to the Black Panthers. Brown Berets were an outgrowth of the Annual Chicano Student Conference and worked closely with SNCC. Weather Underground came out of the Students for a Democratic Society. The student movement in China started the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in the same time period. The May ’68 revolt in France started with student protests, and in Prague a student self immolated to protest the Soviet invasion. You are just ignorant of history if you think there weren’t a lot of students from working class backgrounds looking to challenge the power structure in that era.

        “The first reaction of some supposedly left wing political leaders to the students’ struggle that erupted in France in the first week of May 1968 was to denounce the students as upper class kids, “fils de papa”.

        Such claims were utterly mistaken in the 1960s and early 1970s. The bulk of students at that time came from the middle and lower sections of the middle class, and mixed with them were many students from working class backgrounds.”

        http://socialistreview.org.uk/309/students-and-working-class

    4. Identity politics is a mechanism that can drive a wedge between those of common cause and will be used to do exactly that.

      Poverty is a bigger issue. Remove poverty, educate, and then discuss the identity politics gripes. If you miss out the educate stage, it doesn’t work so well.

    5. Fuck you and and your non-sequitur fascist rantings. Consummate ignorant elitist hypocrites, you and your ilk are not only part of the problem: YOU ARE THE PROBLEM! A mere blunt instrument of the ruling order of jewish capitalism, and the emergent global technocratic world order. Divide and conquer. Fools! The whole lot of you!

  3. Wow, I am impressed with your knowledge of America, its politics, crime, and social problems. Now tell me, who ties your shoelaces?

  4. Is this a spoof? The author correctly notes how destructive identity politics is, but continues to use the terminology. Trump is called a fascist by the Left because he eschews political correctness, the stock in trade of identity politics. Sounds like the author’s epiphany is a work in progress.

  5. “with the recent mass-shooting in a gay club in Orlando…identity fascists of the right blame “Islam”,”

    How can anyone take this writer seriously after that phrasing? It was an Islamic terrorist who massacred all those people. Gee whiz, are you so wrapped up in your leftist religion you can’t even acknowledge a basic fact?

  6. It should be pointed out that the political spectrum in Europe (with fascistic ideologies located on the ‘right’) is not the American spectrum. In the US, we did not have the centuries-long experience of the Estates, and the partitioning between the left and the right, between the bourgeoisie/proletariat, and the nobilities of the sword and robe.

    In the US, political ideologies that place the State in a position of primacy are all on the left (this places the varieties of socialism on the same side as the varieties of fascism), and ideologies that place the individual in a position of primacy are on the right (classical liberalism, modern libertarianism, anarcho-capitalism, and the like). Whenever someone tries to apply the European political spectrum to American politics, there you have someone who is either ignorant or malevolently attempting to confuse the discussion.

  7. “The broad left had formed around a single, enormous issue: the obscenity of poverty.” Don’t be naive. It’s always been about amassing power, just for a different gang. Nonetheless, it is somewhat refreshing to see an avowed leftist recognize that identity politics is fundamentally flawed and dangerous.

  8. Bollocks! The Left has always been about division. The only unity and solidarity that comes from the Left is that everyone is left lying face down in the mud.

  9. A little bit of revisionism here. The left in the 30s were really keen on Hitler’s and Mussolini’s national socialism. The word socialism in the name surely gives it away. It was the British people with their inherent common sense which rejected this ideology in spite of the push for it from the left.

  10. “But I choose not to be defined by my Jewish heritage, however much self-pity it could allow me to wallow in.”

    It’s safe to say that you don’t have a good grasp of the breadth and depth of Jewish culture, if you think your Jewish heritage is all about oppression and persecution. Most of the Jews whom I know that define themselves by their Jewish heritage find it a source of inspiration, not self-pity.

    Besides, no matter how much you insist to your leftist comrades that you’re a citizen of the world, they’ll still hold your heritage against you. Despite many Jews’ affinity for socialism, the left has been hostile to Jews and Judaism since Marx.

  11. All About “MEEE”? No wonder this blindsides you. You do not grasp the core essence of the Left: tribalism.

    The Left did not go bad; it has always been tribal. All that BS about poverty was just its beachhead. Now that it’s got nearly everyone tribalized, defining identity by reference to the tribes they dissolve themselves in – including what is laughably called the “alt right” – it’s just jettisoning some of the old lies. It doesn’t need them anymore.

    The sort of cannon fodder who takes to identity politics does so because there is no “MEEE” in there anywhere. He’s the ultimate in literal selflessness, and so needs a ready-made soul to fill the empty vessel. He could do the hard work of defining himself as an individual (ooh, how “selfish”) – or head on down to Lefty’s local identity shop and grab one ready-made off the shelf. Of course, what Lefty sells is *tribal* identies, such as race, gender, class, etc.

    This is your monster, Dr. Frankenstein.

  12. Meh.

    All leftists devour themselves. Where’ve you been since the French Revolution?

    ( 50 year old construction worker )

  13. Agreed with this article until Islam was mentioned. I mean, come on man! Arabian ex-Muslims should get way more support from the left, seriously. Even moderate Muslims are not very gay or women friendly. And Islam is NOT a race!

    The left is mostly silent on people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who had her genitals mutilated under this disgusting ideology. So much for “feminism”.

  14. “….fascists in left-wing clothing…”

    Is all but tautological. Most fascists in history have been left-wing.

  15. You need a mirror, your analysis on the fascist left is well done, but you fuck it up when you start talking about Trump supporters and people like Nigel Farage as “far right”. You’re doing exactly what the far left is doing.

  16. “This time, identity fascists of the right blame “Islam”, while those of the left are determined to blame “Homophobia”. But neither explanation is matched by a genuine trend: neither Islamist nor homophobic atrocities are regular enough events to be anything but outliers.”

    Islamic atrocities are only rare in the US. Globally they’re a daily occurrence. Last week, 599 people died in 39 jihadi attacks in 13 countries, 706 injured. There were 12 suicide blasts. In June there were 237 attacks in 33 countries killing 2035 and 2006 injured. There were 43 suicide attacks.

  17. Good article. It could be that the only good thing to come out of the fascist white identity politics of Trump is to finally make the left recognize their own fascist identity politics. Both are equally wrong, and I notice their are both triumpies and lefties commenting here who dont realize that truth.

  18. All those buttblasted left and right radicals in comments. I personally agree with author, and hope that this line of thought will spread around more.

  19. I love the mental gymnastics all these theorybros must have to go through to convince themselves that identity politics is somehow separate to class struggle.

  20. ««”This time, identity fascists of the right blame “Islam”, while those of the left are
    determined to blame “Homophobia”.”»»

    This is so dumb it actually hurts my brain.

    Islamists ARE right-wingers. They are very homophobic and if you are a leftist who disagrees with homophobia it would actually technically put you straight in the maligned “right-wing” camp. So much for your black and white partisan bullshit.

    Are human beings really this deluded? Perhaps we need a couple of more years to EVOLVE? Have I stepped into the twilight zone? Am I fucking dreaming, here in 2016?

    BTW I fully agree with the commenter who mentioned Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Awesome woman. The type of person this disgusting world needs more of.

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