Is identity politics killing left-wing poltiics?
"Katy Barnett['s] parents both came from very poor backgrounds...
She sees herself as on the left of politics, but she has also challenged some left-wing views, and over the years she has noticed that this has become increasingly hard to do.
In 2018, some students approached her, worried about the welfare of two academics who had been targeted by anonymous online allegations about their teaching approach to separate legal cases involving sexual violence and racism. The academics were condemned even for reading from court transcripts that contained descriptions of these acts.
“The substance of the allegations seemed to be that they were white males and inherently prejudiced, and should not even speak about these things,” Barnett says. She wrote an article arguing that it should be a civil wrong to mount a campaign, especially online, to try to get someone sacked.
Many people, including students, liked the piece. But she was attacked on social media – not for the article’s content, but simply because, after mainstream media outlets rejected it, she had sent it to Quillette, a libertarian and mostly centrist website that is hated in parts of the left. A man she had known for 10 years announced on Facebook that he refused to read it, and unfriended her. “I recall sitting in my office with my head between my knees, having a panic attack,” she says.
She also tweeted about an Indian international student who had taken a case against Monash University after he was failed on a class assignment all the way to the Court of Appeal. The Court rejected his claim. Barnett noted wryly that if the student had only put as much effort into his study as into his legal case he would have passed with ease.
In response, a man tweeted: “It’s wonderful to see a white privileged middle-class woman punch down on a person of colour.” That outraged Barnett, who says she had not even registered the student’s ethnicity.
She tweeted back: “How dare you make presumptions about me.” Despite her red hair and pale skin, she has Indigenous ancestry, she told her antagonist. (She had discovered a few years earlier that her grandfather came from the Darumbal people of north Queensland.) Seeing her response, the keyboard warrior changed his Twitter handle and name, and cancelled himself from the platform...
She thinks the changes she has seen over the past decade are bigger and more serious than just toxicity on Twitter.
In the university, some colleagues express anxiety about debating difficult issues, especially about race, gender and sexuality, and fear that such debates will lead to complaints and attacks. Others confess that they avoid contentious topics entirely. Yet, Barnett says, “the whole point of academia is that there should be many views. Our job is not to teach people what to think, but how to think.”
She also hears new, essentialist thinking. After she commented publicly on an Indigenous issue, a friend said: “It is OK for you to speak on these things because you have an Aboriginal ancestor.” Barnett replied: “But for a long time I didn’t know I had an Aboriginal ancestor – was it not OK then?”
“Today, victimhood seems to give status,” Barnett says. ”“Yet many in the academy don’t understand what it is to truly struggle. Class has been totally forgotten.”...
Many of the young people Barnett teaches also view themselves as on the left, as progressive. But many see politics almost exclusively through the lens of identity politics, with its intense focus on race, gender and sexuality.
Two narratives lie inside Barnett’s story. First, identity seems to be replacing class as the foundation of left-wing thought. Second, and related to the first, nearly everyone in the modern left is university-educated. These changes could be epochal in the long history of the left, shaping mainstream politics for years to come...
In a host of countries, including Australia, social democrats are struggling to balance the interests of their two big support bases: educated progressives and working people, who in Australia are majority Anglo-Celtic but also contain people from many migrant and refugee backgrounds and Indigenous Australians.
The gaps between these groups over climate change, identity politics issues and – in many countries – immigration, can seem too great to enable a centre-left party to craft a coherent policy platform and election-winning story.
Fifty years ago, there was no such divide. The proportion of the population that was university-educated was just too small. As late as 1975, only 15 per cent of Australian 19-year-olds went to university. Most young people left school to enter factories, trades and shops, as well as nursing and white-collar jobs in banks, company offices and even the public service. Half of all workers were union members.Today globalisation and technological change have swept away the manufacturing and clerical jobs that were so plentiful in 1975. Unions represent a mere 14 per cent of workers, and just over 5 percent of workers are under 24 years old. As the number of middle-income jobs has shrunk, inequality and the premium paid for a good education have soared...
As the size of the tertiary-educated class has expanded, its political views have changed places with those of the less educated. French economist Thomas Piketty calls it “the great reversal”. Piketty analysed electoral results in the US, Britain and France since World War II to show that in 1960, a person of low education and income in these countries was almost certain to vote left. Today, except for members of some minority groups, that person is increasingly voting right. At the other end of the scale, a person of high education levels in 1960 was most likely to vote right. Today, he or she is almost certain to vote left...
Working people often resented “the attention progressive political parties give at their expense to minority groups and what is nowadays called identity politics”...
The risk for Labor is that if its membership continues to shrink and become more concentrated in the inner cities, the priorities of its progressive activists will predominate. The party has a model for where that might lead in the crushing defeat of British Labour, including the loss of many working-class seats, under Jeremy Corbyn in 2019.
A progressive politics that emerges almost exclusively from universities will take particular forms. The student cohort is much more culturally and economically diverse than it once was. Yet political or viewpoint diversity on campus seems to have shrunk...
Haslam noticed that concepts of harm were taking on broader meanings across many fields of academic research...
In a 2016 paper Haslam gave the trend a name: “concept creep”. He thinks an increased focus on harm is helping to shape the goals of the progressive left.
“It has become standard operating procedure in sections of the left to appeal to harm, to the need to protect the vulnerable, when trying to justify some initiative,” Haslam says in an interview. “It also explains why verdicts on behaviour are so moralistic, since harm is central to moral judgment.”
He sees these trends playing out in the claims of identity politics, with their frequent use of terms such as hatred, phobia, racism and violence. “People are reacting in a way that seems disproportionate to the acts themselves (at least if you don’t accept the recent stretching of these concepts), and in a way that is turbo-charged by social media and political polarisation.”...
“concept creep runs the risk of pathologising everyday experience and encouraging a sense of virtuous but impotent victimhood.”
Haslam’s work shows how ideas born in universities migrate over time to the wider society, as students in the humanities, psychology and law go on to work in the media, arts, publishing, the public service and education – fields where the priorities of the progressive left will be most powerfully expressed.
A left dominated by the educated class is likely to be idealistic and principled in fighting racism, sexism and prejudice of any kind. It will support redistribution of wealth – it remains a left-wing movement – but is likely to register material issues and poverty as more distant concerns. It will focus intently on climate change and on creating the no-carbon economy, but be less sensitive to the claims of workers whose jobs are lost in the transition to it...
In times of crisis, the new progressive left may also be more concerned with order and stability than the right, a historic reversal. In Victoria during the recent lockdown, the left followed COVID rules, while part of the right, dominated by men, was rioting on the streets.
Being educated, progressives will be concerned with proper behaviour, even good manners; hence their frequent use of terms such as “problematic” and “inappropriate”. Some may unconsciously look down on those without education and the “right views” – the people whom Hillary Clinton called “the basket of deplorables” in the 2016 campaign. The risk of this elitism is why Thomas Piketty calls the new progressives: “the Brahmin left.”
Finally, this left-wing movement will focus on language. It may be the first in history to use words that are incomprehensible to people without degrees. That language has some very long words – like cis-gender, intersectionality, heteronormativity, othering – and some very short ones. Like pronouns...
Rather than accept that misunderstandings will happen, but that people of good faith will work them out, the commission has scripted public servants’ speech, seemingly to avoid causing hurt to a group seen as vulnerable.But in focusing so much on words – even policing them – progressives risk alienating those with a less confident attitude to language...
Lahooti was born in Norway, the son of a molecular biologist and an anthropologist who were refugees from Iran...
“I saw there are two cultures in Australia.”
His new friends and colleagues were “middle and upper-class people,” and he felt that because he was not white, they sometimes treated him with excessive respect. They would disagree with each other, but not with him. None had Indigenous friends. If he used the word, ‘Aboriginal,’ people would look uneasy; the right term was ‘Indigenous’ or ‘First Nations’. Lahooti was confused: his Perth friends had called themselves Aboriginal.
These white people romanticised difference, glamorised poverty, and wanted above all not to be white. He, on the other hand, wanted to fit in and to be treated the same as everyone else.
Lahooti saw the same attitudes when he started work in the film industry: well-meaning people had a concept of race and identity into which he, as a person of colour, was expected to fit. “They don’t tell you to parrot it, but you know that if you lean into it in your work, you’ll get their support,” he says.
For example, a “really nice woman” who was part of a film writers workshop would get uncomfortable and propose a different approach every time Lahooti wanted to round out a Middle Eastern character with some unpleasant qualities. “I remember thinking, that’s not a character, that’s a deity and the only real character I can relate to is the bad guy, the straight white male character.
“It’s like, ‘If we push positive representation of people of colour we are helping you. We want you to represent our idea of what you are.’”
Lahooti draws many lessons from his experience. First, “if you want to be anti-racist, focus less on race. Focussing too much on it creates similar problems to ignoring it.” Second, don’t claim to be a victim without real cause.
“Over the last few years I see a massive culture of trending victimhood,” he says.
“People who think they are victims are going to be open to authoritarian ideas.” That is why Lahooti is troubled by cancel culture. “It’s puritanical. It’s the best gift we can give to anyone who wants to shut down any liberal movement or people who express liberal ideas.”...
Figures compiled by Osmond Chiu of the Per Capita think tank show that in Britain, Canada and New Zealand, 10 per cent or more of MPs have non-European backgrounds. By contrast, just nine of 227 Australian federal MPs have non-European backgrounds – compared to 21 per cent of the population – while another seven are Indigenous...
The risk for Labor is that even with massive growth in the university-educated cohort, it still comprises fewer than one in three Australian adults. Even if they all voted left – which is impossible – they alone cannot supply an electoral majority."
