There are two dishonest conversations about wokeness, or identity politics if you prefer the less contentious term. The first from conservatives is wearily familiar. For some on the right, ‘woke’ is now a synonym for ‘anything I can’t abide’. Overuse has made the insult meaningless.
On the left, the dishonesty lies in the denial that a new ideology even exists. Nothing has changed, we are told. To be what Conservatives sneeringly call ‘woke’ is simply to be a decent person who cares about the rights of others as progressives have always done.
“They’re calling you ‘woke’ if you call out bad things,’ cried the actress, Kathy Burke. ‘If you’re not racist, you’re woke. If you’re not homophobic, oh, you’re woke. Be woke, kids. Be woke. Be wide awake and fucking call it out.’
At least Burke had the self-confidence to use the word. Elsewhere in leftish circles uttering ‘woke’ is frowned on. The censure comes even though, unlike so many political labels, ‘Tory’ or ‘suffragette’ or ‘queer,’ for instance, ‘woke’ did not begin life as an insult, but as an authentic African-American injunction from the 1930s to stay alert to injustice.
We should be able to accept that, just because conservatives use ‘woke’ as a catch-all insult, does not mean that a distinct and peculiar version of leftism did not grow up in American universities at the beginning of the century and then went on to take over large sections of the rich world’s left in the 2010s.
Among the many achievements of Yascha Mounk’s The Identity Trap (out in a few days from Penguin) is that he unearths the roots of today’s ideology with the patience of an archaeologist. Mounk calls it the ‘identity synthesis’ – he avoids the word woke, perhaps wisely – and does a superb job of showing how unstable and authoritarian the woke worldview was always going to be.
‘The lure that attracts so many people to the identity synthesis is a desire to overcome persistent injustices and create a society of genuine equals,’ the political scientist writes. ‘But the likely outcome of implementing this ideology is a society in which an unremitting emphasis on our differences pits rigid identity groups against each other is a zero-sum battle for resources and recognition’.
In other words, it’s all very well building your hopes on a rainbow coalition of marginalised groups. But do you know what to do when the colours of your rainbow clash?
On the left, the dishonesty lies in the denial that a new ideology even exists
The emphasis on difference is the glaring divide between 21st century identity politics and all versions of leftism that preceded it. From the determination of the French revolutionaries to tear down the distinction between the aristocracy and the rest of society onwards, a marker of left-wing politics has been a universalist desire to eradicate the penalties brought by class, gender or ethnicity.
As for today’s left, at least in its identitarian variant, well, let us pick from one of countless examples available to Mounk to show how that desire for equality has vanished.
During the pandemic two doctors at Brigham and Women’s Hospital – a predominantly white Harvard teaching hospital – discovered that administrators had discriminated against non-white patients when deciding who to admit to cardiology wards. A plausible and depressing finding.
The doctors’ reaction was extraordinary, however, or would once have seemed so. Instead of working to ensure that patients were treated on the basis of clinical need regardless of class, colour or creed, they activated ‘a preferential admission option for Black and Latinx heart failure patients to our specialty cardiology service’. Using the language of critical race theory, they declared that ‘colour-blind solutions have failed,’ and proposed replacing white racism with anti-white racism. You found similar reasoning across the US bureaucracy during the pandemic. Need no longer became the first determinant of who should receive a vaccine or government grant.
As with so much identitarian thinking there was a rejection of the possibility of objective truth on display at the hospital and a deep pessimism too. Left to their own devices, the reasoning went, doctors will not be able to award access to medical services on the basis of clinical need because no such objective criteria exist. Their innate racism will show itself instead.
The intellectual strands of today’s ideology go back half a century. On their own, many are understandable reactions to oppression. Put together they produce a highly unstable mixture. And a potentially absurd mixture as well. Woke politics needs the authoritarianism, Twitter mobbery, public shamings and ostracisms that so characterise the movement otherwise reasonable criticisms would overwhelm it.
Let’s unravel that ideology strand by strand:
Postmodernism and its discontents
Following the post-modernists and, in particular, Michel Foucault, today’s identitarian ideology denies the existence of grand narratives. There is no objective truth, just infinite viewpoints. Those who pretend otherwise, aren’t struggling as best they can to understand the world; they are concealing the way in which they exercise power by imposing their subjective narratives on others.
Such arguments are familiar to anyone who followed late 20th century debates. But it perhaps needs emphasising that postmodernism challenged traditional 20th century left, and how surprising it is to find it playing any part in the left of the 21st century. My favourite illustration came in a confrontation between Foucault and a puzzled Noam Chomsky at Eindhoven university in 1971.
Chomsky, who respected the old revolutionary communist tradition, argued for opposition to the left’s old enemies: the financial system and multinationals. Chomsky also believed in a real, definable human nature, characterisable via scientific knowledge, and bound up with a need for creative expression, as you would expect from a thinker who discovered children’s innate ability to learn a language.
By contrast, Foucault believed that human nature was historically contingent. Because there was no such thing as a settled human essence, he could not suggest what type of society might be best for human beings.
Instead of believing in justice or in creating the good society, he believed in exposing the power that was hidden in language or behind the masks of apparently benign organisations. ‘The real political task in a society such as ours is to criticise the workings of institutions, which appear to be both neutral and independent,’ he declared.
Woke or identitarian leftism feels so strange because it comes from a tradition that has little to do with left-wing politics
Chomsky was suspicious, and from a radical left-wing perspective you can see why. Foucault’s argument that modern societies control people through subtle discourses made notions of the revolution or of the working class new sources of oppression. I am not saying that Foucault had a duty to support the Marxist left or any other type of left. After Lenin, Stalin and Mao, there were good reasons to reject it.
My point is more basic than that. Woke or identitarian leftism feels so strange because it comes from a tradition that has little to do with left-wing politics.
Post colonialism and the indulgence of tyranny
Edward Said used Foucault’s emphasis on the oppression hidden in western discourse to devastating effect in his critique of the orientalism of western imperialists. Ever since a frankly fanatical concern about policing language has dominated a strand of the academic left. But Said could also see the problem with Foucault’s vastly simplified view that ‘power is everywhere’.
The result is to ‘justify political quietism,’ he complained, as any future society, however radical, its aims will be just as oppressive as our own.
Postcolonial studies often failed to come to terms with a related critique that the work of its academics was very useful to genuinely oppressive dictators. If a ruling clique says that human rights are not universal but are a white, orientalist discourse, or that human rights are western rights, or anti-Islamic rights, they can get away with murder. That failure is with us today. The modern left’s lack of concern for human rights, most notably freedom of speech, is rooted in its willingness to dismiss basic freedoms as white, imperialist inventions.
The double standards of ‘strategic essentialism‘
You can see the tensions between the belief that narratives and concepts have no objective reality and left-wing politics in our day. It is a given of the identitarian movement, for example, that biological sex is ‘assigned at birth’ by society rather than being a biological fact. And yet the suggestion that racial identity is equally fluid is met with fierce resistance, even though it is an academic commonplace to say that ‘race is a social construct’.
The rather cynical answer devised by the Indian philosopher Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak was to embrace ‘strategic essentialism’: a political tactic in which minority groups, nationalities, or ethnic groups mobilise on the basis of shared gendered, cultural, or political identity, even though their leaders and intellectuals know that the shared essences are fake social constructs.
How long they will be able to get away with such cynicism is another matter entirely. Famously, Rachel Dolezal, a white American woman who tried to pass as mixed race was denounced for appropriating blackness.
Indeed, the charge of cultural appropriation is one of the gravest in identitarian criminal code. Yet how can racial identity be immutable when biological sex is not? How can cultural appropriation be a crime when cultures are social constructs? Who in these circumstances owns a culture and has a right to police its borders?
Critical race theory
The deep pessimism that so characterises US leftism is at most in the rejection of the gains of the civil rights movement and the attack on desegregation from Daniel Bell and other critical race theorists. I have more sympathy for them than Mounk does. Not because I agree that racism is as bad now as 50 years ago, or go along with Robin DiAngelo and other hucksters who prey on liberal guilt by insisting that many whites are racists. But simply because Alexis de Tocqueville, not a philosopher one associates with wokeness, was right when he explained the French Revolution by saying, ‘Evils which are patiently endured when they seem inevitable become intolerable once the idea of escape from them is suggested.’
You should not expect anyone to accept the reassurance that racism is not as bad as it once was and bite their tongues. Nevertheless, even if the pessimism of the critical race theorists is understandable, its emphasis on insurmountable barriers between white and black reinforces the central problem of woke or identitarian thought.
You have a politics that absolutely insists on the importance of identity, while at the same time supporting an ideology which denies that identities can exist as anything other than social constructs.
To make matters worse the identitarian consensus then insists with equal vigour that only the approved speakers from each marginal group have the right to lay down the law. British Asians and West Africans who support the Conservative party or women who oppose trans rights are the wrong type of minority voice and must be silenced.
The American politician Ayanna Pressley sounded what should have been the death knell of the woke movement in 2019 when she explained its aims with brutal honesty.
“We don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice. We don’t need black faces that don’t want to be a black voice. We don’t need Muslims that don’t want to be a Muslim voice. We don’t need queers that don’t want to be a queer voice”
You must be the right type of brown, black, Muslim or queer voice, uttering the right sentiments or you too will be cancelled for being in some unexplained manner an inauthentic brown, black, Muslim or queer voice.
It’s hard to believe that Foucault would have supported the denial of individuality and authoritarianism his intellectual legacy produced. Foucault died of Aids in 1984. In a bravura passage, Mounk imagines him living on to the present. How could a philosopher who distrusted simplistic narratives of good and evil approve of today’s gormless moralising? Foucault hated the way in which exemplary punishments for aberrations from a social norm could induce people to become their own taskmasters, striving to discipline their own thoughts and actions. Isn’t that precisely what the identitarian left seeks to do today?
And the philosopher who abhorred surveillance would surely have abhorred the way that Twitter and Facebook have been transformed into modern-day panopticons where every ideological error is identified and punished.
There are many reasons to suspect why today’s authoritarian consensus won’t survive. But the last one is the best one: it doesn’t deserve to.
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