The rise of nationalist populism and the election of charismatic “strongmen” in many democracies across the world has alarmed defenders of the concept and practices of liberal democracy of the institutions of the post-war liberal internationalist order. Two events in particular, Brexit and the election in the US of Donald Trump and his ongoing multivehicular crash of his presidency, have caused especially acute angst. These phenomena which have mostly been of the cultural nationalist far or Alt-Right sphere have largely been the outcome of the co-option or appropriation of the language of Identity Politics from the citadels of wokeness be they from the Humanities and Social Sciences Faculties of academe; the consciousness raising activities of the women’s movement, black civil rights/liberation movements , gay rights and other new social movements spawned by the 1960s revolution.
Arguably, the greatest driver behind mini Kulturkampf has been the rearticulating of Identity Politics’ central component, dignity, by the supposed losers in the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s - cultural conservatives, be those of religion, nation and gender. Cultural traditionalists’ feelings of indignity and disrespect became much more potent when fused with economic grievances. The greatest lesson of all to learn from the successive waves of reactionary nationalist bacilli that has been sweeping the democratic world in recent years has been that an understanding of human motivations of the human condition beyond the rational, utility maximising agent of economists’ imaginary is essential (Fukuyama: 2019). For it was the use of the discourse of the latter that proved so fatal to the Remain side in the Brexit campaign and in Hillary Clinton’s defeat in the US Presidential election the same year.
The Meaning of Lives
But as important as understanding the motivations of human beings and their quest for meaning beyond the desiccated calculating machines of Homo Economus caricature, it is important to recognise the perils of liberal democracy and society being organised around the orbit of competing identity groups. For unlike competition between interest groups for economic resources and access to decision-makers which are open to bargaining and compromise that between competing identity groups are almost inherently non-negotiable because of the biological determinism of social recognition for race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality (Fukuyama: p.122). Competing demands based around assertion of rights around access to or celebration of cultural totems have a similar zero-sum character (as any amount of disputes around the display of flags and rights and routes of parades in Northern Ireland, rights to worship in Jerusalem’s major religious shrines and demands for the censoring of arts and literary works deemed to offend religious sensibilities such as Salman Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses and the Danish cartoons proves).
Despite the insistence of certain advocates on both Right and Left, identities are not set in concrete. One may be born into certain racial or ethnic groups with a received ethos around gender roles and behaviour, religious beliefs and customs and national and constitutional affiliations. But transcendence from these identities (even the most seemingly primordial) is always a possibility and is a necessary option for one’s journey into adulthood and maturation.
The health and harmony of society requires the possibility that lived experience can become shared experience. Societies need to protect the marginalised and to help the socially excluded, but they also need to arrive at common goals through deliberation and consensus. Liberal democracy requires a unifying but not uniform common narratives and shared acceptance of state institutions and symbolic moments. The shift in both left and right away from economics and overarching High politics towards the protection of ever narrow group identities will have a long-term corrosive impact on societal coherence (Fukuyama: p.122)
Identity is rooted in thymos, which is experienced emotionally through feelings of pride, shame and anger (Fukuyama: p.131). The new social movements that grew from the “generation of 1968” emerged in societies already geared to think in identity terms, and whose institutions were adopting the therapeutic agenda of enhancing people’s self-esteem. Up until the 1960s, concern with identity lay largely in the domain of individuals who wished, in the style of Abraham Maslow and Erik Erickson to realise their potential and to shape their destiny. With the rise of these social movements, many people naturally came to formulate their own aims and objectives in terms of the dignity of the group to which they believed. The feminist mantra that ‘the personal is political’ is supported by research showing that in ethnic movements around the world individual self-esteem is proportional to the esteem bestowed on the larger group with one is associated[1]. Each movement represented people who hitherto had been invisible and suppressed; each resented that invisibility and wanted public recognition of their inner worth. These ‘new’ identity groups were, in fact, were replicating the outlooks and battles of earlier nationalist and religious identity movements. (Fukuyama: p.107).
Each marginalised group had an ideological and strategic choice to follow. Either demand equal treatment from state and society on an integrationist or assimilationist basis: that its members be treated in an identical manner to members of the dominant group. Or assert a separate identity for its members and demand respect for them as different from the mainstream society. Over time, the latter strategy tended to prevail (Fukuyama: p.107) causing some in the commentariat to express concern about the implications for societal cohesion by “separate but equal” demands for group rights and to question the viability of and perhaps the dangers of what was to become known as “multiculturalism.”
What’s in an Identity
The early civil rights movement of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr., simply demanded that American society treat African-American people it treated white people. It didn’t question the legitimacy of US democratic institutions or demand their overhaul. Dr King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington in 1963 couched his assertion of the dignity of African Americans and call for its public recognition in the language of American patriotism. By the end of the 1960s, groups such as the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam emerged asserting the distinctive traditions, heritage and consciousness of African Americans. Like today’s Black Lives Matters movement, they articulated authentic inner selves and unique lived experiences shaped by racism, violence, lynchings and police brutality which could never be those of whites (Fukuyama: p.108).
A similar process developed within the feminist movement. Liberal, mainstream women’s rights campaigns were focused, like those for African-American civil rights, on equal treatment for women in employment, education, the justice system and in the public sphere generally. But from the outset radical and socialist feminists argued that because of the patriarchal nature of society and its policing of women’s bodies, the consciousness and lived experiences of women were so intrinsically different from men that the movement should not be focused on enabling women to behave and think like men or to buy into the dominant masculine culture. This philosophy propelled the demands for reproductive rights (including free, legal and safe abortion), reform of rape laws (including the criminalisation of rape within marriage) and those on domestic violence. More controversial were assertions by radical feminist scholars such as the legal theorist Catherine McKinnon who argued that existing laws on rape were written by ‘a member of the group who do [rape] and who do for reasons that they share in common even those who don’t, namely masculinity and their identification with masculine norms.”[2].
In a similarly reductive sense, McKinnon argues that the right to abortion is framed by the ways men arrange among themselves to control the reproductive consequences of intercourse. In her account “civilisation’s” prerogatives fuses women’s reproductivity with their attributed sexuality in its definition of what a woman is. Women are defined as women by the uses, sexual and reproductive, to which men wish to put them. Therefore, the right to abortion has been sought as freedom from the unequal reproductive consequences of sexual expression, with sexuality centred on heterosexual genital intercourse.[3]
With such diversity within feminist thought, unitary women’s movements inevitably fragmented into particularist agendas. The British women’s movement split in 1978 over whether lesbian separatism was a lifestyle or revolutionary political strategy. The Irish Women’s Liberation Movement, founded in 1970, was to split a year later over whether housing was a socialist or feminist issue. Successor movements throughout the 1970s were to split over abortion (then an utterly taboo subject even for most Irish progressives), the ‘anti-maleness’ of the movement and the ‘national’ question/Northern Ireland.
Lived Experiences
A central core to group identity is that of lived experience which has been a permanent fixture in popular culture since the 1990s. The distinction between experience and lived experience has its origins in the difference between the German words Erfahrung and Erlebnis which exercised the minds of a number of thinkers in the 19th century. Erfahrung referred to experiences that could be shared, such as the viewing of chemistry experiments in different laboratories. Erlebnis (which subsumes the word Leben, or “life”), by contrast meant the subjective perception of experiences, which may not be shareable, or accessible to all. The writer Walter Benjamin in a 1939 essay warned that the “new kind of barbarism” created by what he saw as the series of “shock experiences” had militated against individuals from seeing their. lives as a whole. As a consequence, it was difficult to convert Erlebnis into Erfahrung. (Fukuyama: p.110).
The distinction between Erfahrung and Erlebnis is synonymous with the distinction between experience and lived experience. The latter term entered the English language with the publication of Simone de Beauvoir’s second volume of The Second Sex which was entitled L’experience vecue or “lived experience”. She argued that the lived experience of, men was not that of women. Women’s subjective experiences brought into focus the phenomenon of subjectivity itself which was then applied to other hitherto marginalised groups such those based on race, ethnicity, sexuality, disability etc. Within each of these categories, life experiences of individuals differed (Fukuyama: p.110). Feminist and other radical Identarian theorists have more recently formulated the concept of intersectionality in order to build links based on solidarity and common experiences of oppression. The sharing of feelings and experiences across group boundaries however has been made progressively more difficult by the exponential growth of lived experiences and, thus, identities in the digital era; You Tube stars, bloggers, vloggers and the rest (Fukuyama: pp.110-11).
Multiculturism: Celebration of Difference or Division
Assisted by the adoption of the discourse and practice of the therapy culture by educational, health and social service institutions which meant greater than ever before ministrations to the psyches of people, and by the honing of the consciousness of women and black and other minority ethnic groups in the 1970s and 1980s identity became the property of groups that were seen as having their own cultures shaped and validated by their own lived experiences. Multiculturalism, although widely seen as a synonym for diversity actually became the tableau for a political programme that sought to validate each culture and lived experience equally and to treat each equally regardless of the risk of impeding the autonomy and the right to dissent of individuals within these groups.
The Meaning of Lives
But as important as understanding the motivations of human beings and their quest for meaning beyond the desiccated calculating machines of Homo Economus caricature, it is important to recognise the perils of liberal democracy and society being organised around the orbit of competing identity groups. For unlike competition between interest groups for economic resources and access to decision-makers which are open to bargaining and compromise that between competing identity groups are almost inherently non-negotiable because of the biological determinism of social recognition for race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality (Fukuyama: p.122). Competing demands based around assertion of rights around access to or celebration of cultural totems have a similar zero-sum character (as any amount of disputes around the display of flags and rights and routes of parades in Northern Ireland, rights to worship in Jerusalem’s major religious shrines and demands for the censoring of arts and literary works deemed to offend religious sensibilities such as Salman Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses and the Danish cartoons proves).
Despite the insistence of certain advocates on both Right and Left, identities are not set in concrete. One may be born into certain racial or ethnic groups with a received ethos around gender roles and behaviour, religious beliefs and customs and national and constitutional affiliations. But transcendence from these identities (even the most seemingly primordial) is always a possibility and is a necessary option for one’s journey into adulthood and maturation.
The health and harmony of society requires the possibility that lived experience can become shared experience. Societies need to protect the marginalised and to help the socially excluded, but they also need to arrive at common goals through deliberation and consensus. Liberal democracy requires a unifying but not uniform common narratives and shared acceptance of state institutions and symbolic moments. The shift in both left and right away from economics and overarching High politics towards the protection of ever narrow group identities will have a long-term corrosive impact on societal coherence (Fukuyama: p.122)
Identity is rooted in thymos, which is experienced emotionally through feelings of pride, shame and anger (Fukuyama: p.131). The new social movements that grew from the “generation of 1968” emerged in societies already geared to think in identity terms, and whose institutions were adopting the therapeutic agenda of enhancing people’s self-esteem. Up until the 1960s, concern with identity lay largely in the domain of individuals who wished, in the style of Abraham Maslow and Erik Erickson to realise their potential and to shape their destiny. With the rise of these social movements, many people naturally came to formulate their own aims and objectives in terms of the dignity of the group to which they believed. The feminist mantra that ‘the personal is political’ is supported by research showing that in ethnic movements around the world individual self-esteem is proportional to the esteem bestowed on the larger group with one is associated[1]. Each movement represented people who hitherto had been invisible and suppressed; each resented that invisibility and wanted public recognition of their inner worth. These ‘new’ identity groups were, in fact, were replicating the outlooks and battles of earlier nationalist and religious identity movements. (Fukuyama: p.107).
Each marginalised group had an ideological and strategic choice to follow. Either demand equal treatment from state and society on an integrationist or assimilationist basis: that its members be treated in an identical manner to members of the dominant group. Or assert a separate identity for its members and demand respect for them as different from the mainstream society. Over time, the latter strategy tended to prevail (Fukuyama: p.107) causing some in the commentariat to express concern about the implications for societal cohesion by “separate but equal” demands for group rights and to question the viability of and perhaps the dangers of what was to become known as “multiculturalism.”
What’s in an Identity
The early civil rights movement of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr., simply demanded that American society treat African-American people it treated white people. It didn’t question the legitimacy of US democratic institutions or demand their overhaul. Dr King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington in 1963 couched his assertion of the dignity of African Americans and call for its public recognition in the language of American patriotism. By the end of the 1960s, groups such as the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam emerged asserting the distinctive traditions, heritage and consciousness of African Americans. Like today’s Black Lives Matters movement, they articulated authentic inner selves and unique lived experiences shaped by racism, violence, lynchings and police brutality which could never be those of whites (Fukuyama: p.108).
A similar process developed within the feminist movement. Liberal, mainstream women’s rights campaigns were focused, like those for African-American civil rights, on equal treatment for women in employment, education, the justice system and in the public sphere generally. But from the outset radical and socialist feminists argued that because of the patriarchal nature of society and its policing of women’s bodies, the consciousness and lived experiences of women were so intrinsically different from men that the movement should not be focused on enabling women to behave and think like men or to buy into the dominant masculine culture. This philosophy propelled the demands for reproductive rights (including free, legal and safe abortion), reform of rape laws (including the criminalisation of rape within marriage) and those on domestic violence. More controversial were assertions by radical feminist scholars such as the legal theorist Catherine McKinnon who argued that existing laws on rape were written by ‘a member of the group who do [rape] and who do for reasons that they share in common even those who don’t, namely masculinity and their identification with masculine norms.”[2].
In a similarly reductive sense, McKinnon argues that the right to abortion is framed by the ways men arrange among themselves to control the reproductive consequences of intercourse. In her account “civilisation’s” prerogatives fuses women’s reproductivity with their attributed sexuality in its definition of what a woman is. Women are defined as women by the uses, sexual and reproductive, to which men wish to put them. Therefore, the right to abortion has been sought as freedom from the unequal reproductive consequences of sexual expression, with sexuality centred on heterosexual genital intercourse.[3]
With such diversity within feminist thought, unitary women’s movements inevitably fragmented into particularist agendas. The British women’s movement split in 1978 over whether lesbian separatism was a lifestyle or revolutionary political strategy. The Irish Women’s Liberation Movement, founded in 1970, was to split a year later over whether housing was a socialist or feminist issue. Successor movements throughout the 1970s were to split over abortion (then an utterly taboo subject even for most Irish progressives), the ‘anti-maleness’ of the movement and the ‘national’ question/Northern Ireland.
Lived Experiences
A central core to group identity is that of lived experience which has been a permanent fixture in popular culture since the 1990s. The distinction between experience and lived experience has its origins in the difference between the German words Erfahrung and Erlebnis which exercised the minds of a number of thinkers in the 19th century. Erfahrung referred to experiences that could be shared, such as the viewing of chemistry experiments in different laboratories. Erlebnis (which subsumes the word Leben, or “life”), by contrast meant the subjective perception of experiences, which may not be shareable, or accessible to all. The writer Walter Benjamin in a 1939 essay warned that the “new kind of barbarism” created by what he saw as the series of “shock experiences” had militated against individuals from seeing their. lives as a whole. As a consequence, it was difficult to convert Erlebnis into Erfahrung. (Fukuyama: p.110).
The distinction between Erfahrung and Erlebnis is synonymous with the distinction between experience and lived experience. The latter term entered the English language with the publication of Simone de Beauvoir’s second volume of The Second Sex which was entitled L’experience vecue or “lived experience”. She argued that the lived experience of, men was not that of women. Women’s subjective experiences brought into focus the phenomenon of subjectivity itself which was then applied to other hitherto marginalised groups such those based on race, ethnicity, sexuality, disability etc. Within each of these categories, life experiences of individuals differed (Fukuyama: p.110). Feminist and other radical Identarian theorists have more recently formulated the concept of intersectionality in order to build links based on solidarity and common experiences of oppression. The sharing of feelings and experiences across group boundaries however has been made progressively more difficult by the exponential growth of lived experiences and, thus, identities in the digital era; You Tube stars, bloggers, vloggers and the rest (Fukuyama: pp.110-11).
Multiculturism: Celebration of Difference or Division
Assisted by the adoption of the discourse and practice of the therapy culture by educational, health and social service institutions which meant greater than ever before ministrations to the psyches of people, and by the honing of the consciousness of women and black and other minority ethnic groups in the 1970s and 1980s identity became the property of groups that were seen as having their own cultures shaped and validated by their own lived experiences. Multiculturalism, although widely seen as a synonym for diversity actually became the tableau for a political programme that sought to validate each culture and lived experience equally and to treat each equally regardless of the risk of impeding the autonomy and the right to dissent of individuals within these groups.
The term was originally used to refer to large cultural groups such as Canadian francophones, Muslim immigrants or African-Americans. However, these groups separated out into smaller and more specific groups with distinct experiences to articulate as well as groups formed by the cross-cutting or intersection of different types of discrimination, such as women of colour, whose lives could not be understood by reference to either race or gender alone (Fukuyama: p.111). The Southall Black Sisters and the Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Organisation are examples of two BAME campaigning organisations in the UK set up to campaign on misogyny issues within minority groups such as ‘honour’ killings, domestic violence and discriminatory application of Sharia Law as well as on external racism.
With the decreased salience of class-based politics due partly to deindustrialisation and the hegemony of neoliberal or market based discourse across particularly the Anglophone world in the late 20th century, the Left began to mobilise or campaign around identity issues with certain marginalised cultural groups e.g. French Muslims or revolutionary movements in the Global South becoming the new proletariat or agents of change. The mainstream, social democratic left began to rely on the community leaders of certain first- and second-generation immigrant groups to “deliver” votes in return for satisfying demands for specific cultural resources and upholding certain community “values”. Examples were the dependence of the British Labour Party on “baradari” networks of kinship among groups of South Asian heritage which did lead to localised municipal corruption in areas like Tower Hamlets and the support given to clerical demands for the banning of the novel Satanic Verses by the renowned British-Asian author Salman Rushdie by certain Labour MPs such as Max Madden (the “book burner of Bradford West” as one Guardian columnist cryptically referred to him). Similarly the Dutch Labour Party in its desire to uphold multicultural harmony in the Netherlands refusal to stand up for the Somalian refugee Ayaan Hirst Ali who in her best seller Infidel, describes the escape of a young Somali woman from sexual slavery to a new life in the Netherlands and then to fresh exile in the US after the murder of her friend Theo van Gogh by Islamist extremists who had threatened her life.[4].
The degree to which dissenting voices within certain “protected” cultural groups should be supported by liberal-left opinion and actions constitutes one of the major fault lines that emerged within liberal and left intellectualism in the post 9/11 world. In his defence of Ayaan Hirst Ali against the views of two prominent liberal intellectuals, Timothy Garton Ash and Ian Buruma”” who described her and her defenders as “Enlightenment fundamentalist [s] and as “absolutist, Hitchens quotes the following from her book:
And asserts that as an African victim of, and escapee, from this system, she feels that she has acquired the right to say so. What is “fundamentalist” about that?[5]
In his critique of Garton-Ash, Buruma and a subsequent article by a Lorraine Ali in February 26 2007 edition of Newsweek stating that “it is ironic that this would-be ‘infidel’ often sounds as single-minded and reactionary as the zealots she’s worked so hard to oppose.”; questions why their human rights considerations grants exemption from criticism to ‘Islam, which is simultaneously the ideology of insurgent violence and of certain inflexible dictatorships?”. Hitchens then puts the questions that are at the heart of negotiating relationships with minority groups in multicultural societies. “Is it because Islam is a “faith”? Or is it because it is the faith in Europe of at least some ethnic minorities.”. He replies to his own questions by stating categorically that “In neither case would any special protection from criticism be justified. Faith makes huge claims, including huge claims, including huge claims to temporal authority over the citizen, which therefore cannot be exempt from scrutiny. And within these “minorities”, there are other minorities who want to escape from the control of their ghetto leaders.’[6]
Hitchens thus makes the definitive argument for rights of the individual to freedom of expression and conscience to trump the majority ethos and (sometimes self-proclaimed) leadership of given ethno-cultural groups. It is a stance that Hitchens adhered to all his life and courageously upheld over the death threats to Salman Rushdie from the Ayatollah Khomeini and his successor Iranian mullahs (sheltering the beleaguered author in his New York residence) and his support for Denmark in the face of Islamic world inspired violent hostility to and boycott of that country’s goods because of the publication of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammed in a satirical magazine.
On the radical left, in the wake of the events of 9/11 and the subsequent US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the amorphous Global War on Terror Muslims (if not the entire ulema then certainly in Western countries) became the new subjective agent for revolutionary change; the new proletariat to replace the old proletarians which the left had been progressively marginalising since the late 1960s.
With the decreased salience of class-based politics due partly to deindustrialisation and the hegemony of neoliberal or market based discourse across particularly the Anglophone world in the late 20th century, the Left began to mobilise or campaign around identity issues with certain marginalised cultural groups e.g. French Muslims or revolutionary movements in the Global South becoming the new proletariat or agents of change. The mainstream, social democratic left began to rely on the community leaders of certain first- and second-generation immigrant groups to “deliver” votes in return for satisfying demands for specific cultural resources and upholding certain community “values”. Examples were the dependence of the British Labour Party on “baradari” networks of kinship among groups of South Asian heritage which did lead to localised municipal corruption in areas like Tower Hamlets and the support given to clerical demands for the banning of the novel Satanic Verses by the renowned British-Asian author Salman Rushdie by certain Labour MPs such as Max Madden (the “book burner of Bradford West” as one Guardian columnist cryptically referred to him). Similarly the Dutch Labour Party in its desire to uphold multicultural harmony in the Netherlands refusal to stand up for the Somalian refugee Ayaan Hirst Ali who in her best seller Infidel, describes the escape of a young Somali woman from sexual slavery to a new life in the Netherlands and then to fresh exile in the US after the murder of her friend Theo van Gogh by Islamist extremists who had threatened her life.[4].
The degree to which dissenting voices within certain “protected” cultural groups should be supported by liberal-left opinion and actions constitutes one of the major fault lines that emerged within liberal and left intellectualism in the post 9/11 world. In his defence of Ayaan Hirst Ali against the views of two prominent liberal intellectuals, Timothy Garton Ash and Ian Buruma”” who described her and her defenders as “Enlightenment fundamentalist [s] and as “absolutist, Hitchens quotes the following from her book:
I left the world of faith, of genital cutting and forced marriage for the world of reason and emancipation. After making this voyage I know that one of these two worlds is simply better than the other. Not for its gaudy gadgetry, but for its fundamental values.
In his critique of Garton-Ash, Buruma and a subsequent article by a Lorraine Ali in February 26 2007 edition of Newsweek stating that “it is ironic that this would-be ‘infidel’ often sounds as single-minded and reactionary as the zealots she’s worked so hard to oppose.”; questions why their human rights considerations grants exemption from criticism to ‘Islam, which is simultaneously the ideology of insurgent violence and of certain inflexible dictatorships?”. Hitchens then puts the questions that are at the heart of negotiating relationships with minority groups in multicultural societies. “Is it because Islam is a “faith”? Or is it because it is the faith in Europe of at least some ethnic minorities.”. He replies to his own questions by stating categorically that “In neither case would any special protection from criticism be justified. Faith makes huge claims, including huge claims, including huge claims to temporal authority over the citizen, which therefore cannot be exempt from scrutiny. And within these “minorities”, there are other minorities who want to escape from the control of their ghetto leaders.’[6]
Hitchens thus makes the definitive argument for rights of the individual to freedom of expression and conscience to trump the majority ethos and (sometimes self-proclaimed) leadership of given ethno-cultural groups. It is a stance that Hitchens adhered to all his life and courageously upheld over the death threats to Salman Rushdie from the Ayatollah Khomeini and his successor Iranian mullahs (sheltering the beleaguered author in his New York residence) and his support for Denmark in the face of Islamic world inspired violent hostility to and boycott of that country’s goods because of the publication of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammed in a satirical magazine.
On the radical left, in the wake of the events of 9/11 and the subsequent US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the amorphous Global War on Terror Muslims (if not the entire ulema then certainly in Western countries) became the new subjective agent for revolutionary change; the new proletariat to replace the old proletarians which the left had been progressively marginalising since the late 1960s.
This was concretised in the Stop the War Coalition in the UK and its later party political manifestation, Respect, which was an alliance of far left organisations like the Socialist Workers Party and the Communist Party of Britain and the Muslim Association of Britain, the UK franchise of the Muslim Brotherhood. Hooking up with such forces of clericalist reaction did not appear to faze veteran activists such as the Stop the War convenor Lindsay German, who when challenged on the attitude of Islamists to homosexuality told an SWP conference that ‘I am in favour of defending gay rights, but I am not prepared to have it as a shibboleth’ or its first chair, Andrew Murray, who while finding gender-segregated meetings ‘uncomfortable’ but agreed in order to facilitate the attendance of Muslim women.[7] . It was in the post 9/11 era coinciding with the Second Intifada in the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip that the Palestinian cause became a leitmotiv identity issue for many on the left.
How the Right Bit Back
One of the most ironic, if not astonishing, features of the resurgence of cultural conservatism in the USA especially and its articulation of identity discourse through Alt-Right nationalism has been the co-option of the language of the counter-culture; of that of anti-elitism and anti-establishmentarianism. The 2016 Presidential election witnessed the astonishing spectacle of the Republican Party, the traditional party of Cold War and national security posturing and a party and candidate running on a strong law-and-order platform dismiss the dangers of Russia’s meddling in American elections and some its Congressional representatives talking about secret cabals in the FBI and the Department of Justice. Paranoia about government and its secret agendas has migrated from the concerns about the military-industrial complex that the anti-Vietnam war Left of the 1960s to the Trumpian Right now blaming the so-called deep state for plotting against the President (Kakutani,2019).
The Trump campaign depicted itself as an insurgent, revolutionary force, battling on behalf of its marginalised constituency and summoning language associated with 1960s radicals but also with the contemporary tub-thumping populism of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn with their invocation of “The Many not the Few”. “We’re trying to disrupt the collusion between the wealthy donors, the large corporations, and the media executives,” Trump declared at one rally. And in another he called for replacing this “failed and corrupt political establishment.” (Kakutani: p.45). The “Drain the Swamp” strapline of the Trump campaign could have been that of any populist campaign, left or right.
The genius of the Alt-Right has been their appropriation of identity maxims of the counter-cultural right and their use of dumbed-down interpretations of the works of Derrida, Baudrillard and Lyotard that have crept into popular culture. During the first round of culture wars in the US in the 1960s, many of the new left rejected Enlightenment ideals such as rationality and science. As Shawn Otto wrote in The War on Science[8], the postmodern disqualification of the scholarly and neutral bona fides of scientists on the basis that they were formed by a specific cultural particularity, led to the views taking hold amongst left-leaning humanities academics that science was “the province of a hawkish, pro-business, right-wing power structure – polluting, uncaring, greedy, mechanistic, sexist , racist, imperialist, homophobic, oppressive, intolerant.” This litany of the mortal sins of wokedom added to “A heartless ideology that cared little for the spiritual or holistic well ness of our souls, our bodies, or our Mother Earth.” (Kakutani: p.54).
Wiser counsels of course have totally debunked the case that a researcher’s cultural background could influence verifiable scientific facts. To paraphrase Otto again atmospheric CO2 or the Covid-19 pathogen are “the same whether the scientist measuring it is a Somali woman or an Argentine man”[9]. Unfortunately, the distrust in expertise which this risibly reductionist narrative of science along with the palpable distrust of representative institutions and professional elites created the climate for today’s antiscientists – the climate change deniers and antivaxxers with their demonic accounts of the evil empires of Big Pharma and Public Health bureaucracies.
Despite the optimism of authors like Fukuyama with his hubristic End of History ,metanarrative of the triumph of liberal democracy and free markets and Andrew Hartman who in his 2015 book, A War for the Soul of America[10] wrote that by the 21st century “a growing majority of Americans now accept and even embrace what at the time seemed like a new nation…” the culture wars came roaring back in the second decade of the 21st century. Hard-core constituents of the Republican base – the Tea Party, birthers, evangelical conservatives and fundamentalists, white nationalists – mobilised against President Obama and his policies. And, as has been so widely commented on, candidate and President Trump inflamed the partisan cleavages in American society by revving up the fears and insecurities of white working-class voters perplexed by a changing world through providing targets for their anger – immigrants, African Americans, women, Muslims. In many ways, the Democratic candidate in 2016 – Senator Hillary Clinton – was the perfect personal projection for “ordinary folk’s” resentment of the liberal, monied, East Coast networked elites. Appeals to rationality such as the prospect of a possible sexual predator in the White House with access to the nuclear codes fell on deaf ears; the same outcome for those who warned of the perils of Brexit and for British Labour Party grandees who warned of the unelectability of a party led by Jeremy Corbyn. In all three it was the emotions of people who felt locked out the decision-making circles of establishment elites that won the day. Trump’s rabble rousing about external threats to the US and his unashamed invocation of America First with all the dark, nativist underside of America that that slogan stands for is the classic populist authoritarian strategy of deflecting attention from policy failures.
The account given by Christopher Wylie of his time as a research director with the notorious and now defunct private British military contractor Cambridge Analytica (CA) is a classic case study in the production of a modern right-wing cultural identity (Wylie, 2019). Funded by the billionaire Robert Mercer on a crusade to start his own far-right insurgency, Cambridge Analytica combined psychological research with private Facebook data to make an invisible weapon with the power to change what voters perceived as real.
Wylie begins his dissection of the process of identity formation as it played out in his time with CA by discussing the importance of the symbiosis of politics and fashion with its core cycles of culture and identity. He observes that when a society lurches into extremism, so does its fashion. Extremism be it Maoism, Nazism, White Supremacism or Jihadism (and maybe Northern Irish paramilitarism) share a look in common. Extremism starts with how people look and how society feels. Sometimes it creates literal uniforms: olive tunics and caps with red stars, red armbands, white pointed hoods, polo shirts and tiki torches, MAGA hats. These uniforms become enmeshed with the wearer’s identity, converting their thinking from This is what I believe into This is who I am. Extremist movements utilise aesthetics because so much of extremism is about changing the aesthetics of society (Wylie: pp.44-46)
Enter stage right was Steve Bannon. On the death of its founder Andrew Breitbart (who had introduced Robert Mercer to Bannon) he assumed his place as senior editor and his philosophy. This was the Breitbart Doctrine which holds that politics flows from culture, and if conservatives wanted to successfully counteract left wing and liberal ideas in America, they would first have first challenge the culture. So, Breitbart was to be a vehicle for promoting a counter-culture of the Right (Wylie: p.61).
Bannon had already selected the gaming industry in Gamergate as a site for his cultural struggle. This involved the mass doxing and harassment (including death threats) by angry young men against the women who protested the gross misogyny of the gaming industry. But he realised that the nihilistic anger and misogyny of an army of 'incels’ (involuntary celibates) and other supposedly disenfranchised young males needed another focus and he found it in CA (Wylie: p,62).
To Bannon, when anonymous users of Reddit and 4chan posted their unmediated rage and bile online, they were revealing their true selves, unfiltered by a ‘political correctness’ that was preventing them from speaking these ‘truths’ in public. He knew that there was a sub-culture of peopled by millions of intense and angry young men. Trolling and cyber-bullying were key calling cards of the Alt-Right but Bannon went further and made automated bullying and scaled psychological abuse modus operandi for CA. One of the most effective messages the firm tested was getting subjects to ‘imagine an America where you can’t pronounce anyone’s name. Another tactic was to promote the belief that ‘politically correct’ liberals were seeking new ways to mock and humiliate ‘regular’ white Americans by showing subjects blogs such as People of Walmart that made fun of them (Wylie: p.127).
CA used such content to frame the notion of race relations as a zero-sum game and to promote the doctrine of ‘race realism’. CA framed political correctness as an identity threat (that because of it “you cannot speak about it”) provoked a ‘boomerang’ effect in people where counternarratives would actually solidify, not weaken, the prior bias or belief. This means that when targets would see clips containing criticism of racist statements by candidates or celebrities, this exposure would actually further entrench the target’s racialised views.
How the Right Bit Back
One of the most ironic, if not astonishing, features of the resurgence of cultural conservatism in the USA especially and its articulation of identity discourse through Alt-Right nationalism has been the co-option of the language of the counter-culture; of that of anti-elitism and anti-establishmentarianism. The 2016 Presidential election witnessed the astonishing spectacle of the Republican Party, the traditional party of Cold War and national security posturing and a party and candidate running on a strong law-and-order platform dismiss the dangers of Russia’s meddling in American elections and some its Congressional representatives talking about secret cabals in the FBI and the Department of Justice. Paranoia about government and its secret agendas has migrated from the concerns about the military-industrial complex that the anti-Vietnam war Left of the 1960s to the Trumpian Right now blaming the so-called deep state for plotting against the President (Kakutani,2019).
The Trump campaign depicted itself as an insurgent, revolutionary force, battling on behalf of its marginalised constituency and summoning language associated with 1960s radicals but also with the contemporary tub-thumping populism of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn with their invocation of “The Many not the Few”. “We’re trying to disrupt the collusion between the wealthy donors, the large corporations, and the media executives,” Trump declared at one rally. And in another he called for replacing this “failed and corrupt political establishment.” (Kakutani: p.45). The “Drain the Swamp” strapline of the Trump campaign could have been that of any populist campaign, left or right.
The genius of the Alt-Right has been their appropriation of identity maxims of the counter-cultural right and their use of dumbed-down interpretations of the works of Derrida, Baudrillard and Lyotard that have crept into popular culture. During the first round of culture wars in the US in the 1960s, many of the new left rejected Enlightenment ideals such as rationality and science. As Shawn Otto wrote in The War on Science[8], the postmodern disqualification of the scholarly and neutral bona fides of scientists on the basis that they were formed by a specific cultural particularity, led to the views taking hold amongst left-leaning humanities academics that science was “the province of a hawkish, pro-business, right-wing power structure – polluting, uncaring, greedy, mechanistic, sexist , racist, imperialist, homophobic, oppressive, intolerant.” This litany of the mortal sins of wokedom added to “A heartless ideology that cared little for the spiritual or holistic well ness of our souls, our bodies, or our Mother Earth.” (Kakutani: p.54).
Wiser counsels of course have totally debunked the case that a researcher’s cultural background could influence verifiable scientific facts. To paraphrase Otto again atmospheric CO2 or the Covid-19 pathogen are “the same whether the scientist measuring it is a Somali woman or an Argentine man”[9]. Unfortunately, the distrust in expertise which this risibly reductionist narrative of science along with the palpable distrust of representative institutions and professional elites created the climate for today’s antiscientists – the climate change deniers and antivaxxers with their demonic accounts of the evil empires of Big Pharma and Public Health bureaucracies.
Despite the optimism of authors like Fukuyama with his hubristic End of History ,metanarrative of the triumph of liberal democracy and free markets and Andrew Hartman who in his 2015 book, A War for the Soul of America[10] wrote that by the 21st century “a growing majority of Americans now accept and even embrace what at the time seemed like a new nation…” the culture wars came roaring back in the second decade of the 21st century. Hard-core constituents of the Republican base – the Tea Party, birthers, evangelical conservatives and fundamentalists, white nationalists – mobilised against President Obama and his policies. And, as has been so widely commented on, candidate and President Trump inflamed the partisan cleavages in American society by revving up the fears and insecurities of white working-class voters perplexed by a changing world through providing targets for their anger – immigrants, African Americans, women, Muslims. In many ways, the Democratic candidate in 2016 – Senator Hillary Clinton – was the perfect personal projection for “ordinary folk’s” resentment of the liberal, monied, East Coast networked elites. Appeals to rationality such as the prospect of a possible sexual predator in the White House with access to the nuclear codes fell on deaf ears; the same outcome for those who warned of the perils of Brexit and for British Labour Party grandees who warned of the unelectability of a party led by Jeremy Corbyn. In all three it was the emotions of people who felt locked out the decision-making circles of establishment elites that won the day. Trump’s rabble rousing about external threats to the US and his unashamed invocation of America First with all the dark, nativist underside of America that that slogan stands for is the classic populist authoritarian strategy of deflecting attention from policy failures.
The account given by Christopher Wylie of his time as a research director with the notorious and now defunct private British military contractor Cambridge Analytica (CA) is a classic case study in the production of a modern right-wing cultural identity (Wylie, 2019). Funded by the billionaire Robert Mercer on a crusade to start his own far-right insurgency, Cambridge Analytica combined psychological research with private Facebook data to make an invisible weapon with the power to change what voters perceived as real.
Wylie begins his dissection of the process of identity formation as it played out in his time with CA by discussing the importance of the symbiosis of politics and fashion with its core cycles of culture and identity. He observes that when a society lurches into extremism, so does its fashion. Extremism be it Maoism, Nazism, White Supremacism or Jihadism (and maybe Northern Irish paramilitarism) share a look in common. Extremism starts with how people look and how society feels. Sometimes it creates literal uniforms: olive tunics and caps with red stars, red armbands, white pointed hoods, polo shirts and tiki torches, MAGA hats. These uniforms become enmeshed with the wearer’s identity, converting their thinking from This is what I believe into This is who I am. Extremist movements utilise aesthetics because so much of extremism is about changing the aesthetics of society (Wylie: pp.44-46)
Enter stage right was Steve Bannon. On the death of its founder Andrew Breitbart (who had introduced Robert Mercer to Bannon) he assumed his place as senior editor and his philosophy. This was the Breitbart Doctrine which holds that politics flows from culture, and if conservatives wanted to successfully counteract left wing and liberal ideas in America, they would first have first challenge the culture. So, Breitbart was to be a vehicle for promoting a counter-culture of the Right (Wylie: p.61).
Bannon had already selected the gaming industry in Gamergate as a site for his cultural struggle. This involved the mass doxing and harassment (including death threats) by angry young men against the women who protested the gross misogyny of the gaming industry. But he realised that the nihilistic anger and misogyny of an army of 'incels’ (involuntary celibates) and other supposedly disenfranchised young males needed another focus and he found it in CA (Wylie: p,62).
To Bannon, when anonymous users of Reddit and 4chan posted their unmediated rage and bile online, they were revealing their true selves, unfiltered by a ‘political correctness’ that was preventing them from speaking these ‘truths’ in public. He knew that there was a sub-culture of peopled by millions of intense and angry young men. Trolling and cyber-bullying were key calling cards of the Alt-Right but Bannon went further and made automated bullying and scaled psychological abuse modus operandi for CA. One of the most effective messages the firm tested was getting subjects to ‘imagine an America where you can’t pronounce anyone’s name. Another tactic was to promote the belief that ‘politically correct’ liberals were seeking new ways to mock and humiliate ‘regular’ white Americans by showing subjects blogs such as People of Walmart that made fun of them (Wylie: p.127).
CA used such content to frame the notion of race relations as a zero-sum game and to promote the doctrine of ‘race realism’. CA framed political correctness as an identity threat (that because of it “you cannot speak about it”) provoked a ‘boomerang’ effect in people where counternarratives would actually solidify, not weaken, the prior bias or belief. This means that when targets would see clips containing criticism of racist statements by candidates or celebrities, this exposure would actually further entrench the target’s racialised views.
For Bannon, this tactic of framing racialised views through the prism of identity prior to exposure from a counternarrative in effect inoculated target groups from those counternarratives criticising ethno-nationalism. This reinforcement cycle in which subjects’ racial views would be strengthened may in part because the area of the brain that is most highly activated when we process strongly held beliefs is the same area that is triggered when we think about who we and our identity. This cycle may well have been at work when media criticism of Donald Trump’s allegedly racist or misogynist statements stiffened the resolve of his supporters who would internalise the critique as threatening to their identity, their very sense of self. Furthermore, CA discovered that anger put people in a frame of mind in which they were more indiscriminately punitive, particularly to out-groups and to underestimate the risk of negative outcomes such as the domestic economic damage that a hypothetical trade war with China could cause. For people in such angry frames of mind, such outcomes were acceptable since immigrant groups and urban liberals would also suffer (Wylie: pp.127-29)
A similar dynamic was at play during the Brexit campaign where poorer Leave voters were totally unreceptive to Remain arguments about the possible economic damage that Brexit could wreak as for them the ‘economy’ was something that globe-trotting elites employed in the City of London ‘worked’ in. Pride in national and cultural identity really did come before prosperity for such cohorts.
CA also began to develop some ‘truths’ around the ‘closet’ many Americans felt they lived in. Straight white men who due to the social privileges that went with the milieu and value set they grew up found the challenges to their speech around women or people of colour that accompanied changing social mores in Americas threatening to their identity as ‘regular men’. Wylie notes how the discourse that emerged from groups of angry straight white men resembled that of liberation discourse from gay communities. Despite the vast difference in the context of the closet, both groups felt the burden of the closet, and they did not like the feeling of having to change who they felt they were in order to measure up to what was now required in society. These straight white men felt a subjective experience of oppression in their own minds (just as out-groups like immigrants, gays, people of colour and women had or still felt). They were primed for a call to make “America Great Again” – for them. (Wylie: p.117)
Just as Islamist Jihadis sought to swim in the sea of the mass of humiliated Arab and/or Muslim masses by promising the restoration of the Caliphate and the Nazis exploited German people’s humiliation created by defeat in World War I and the Great Depression. While the identity conflicts created by the loss of social privileges, the loss of jobs to the not so hidden hands of globalisation and loss of trust in liberal democratic institutions in the US and Western Europe may not result in the cataclysms of an Adolf Hitler or an ISIS; contemporary history does give us stark reminders of what can happen when group identity is privileged ahead of shared societal identity.
Bibliography:
Fukuyama, Francis (2019) Identity. Contemporary Identity Politics and the Struggle for Recognition. London: Profile Books
Kakutani, Michiko (2018) The Death of Truth. London: William Collins Books
Wylie, Christopher (2019) Mindf*ck. Inside Cambridge Analytica’s Plot to Break the World. London: Profile Books .
[1] Donald Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985) pp.141-43
[2] Stuart Jeffries, “Are Women Human?” (interview with Catherine MacKinnon), Guardian, 12th April 2006
[3] Catherine McKinnon, Towards a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1989), pp.189-190
[4] Christopher Hitchens She’s No Fundamentalist, in Slate, 5 March 2007) in In Christopher Hitchens (2011) Arguably London: Atlantic Books pp.712-15
[5] Ibid
[6] Ibid
[7] Dave Rich (2018) The Left’s Jewish Problem. Jeremy Corbyn, Israel and Antisemitism. London: Biteback Publishing, pp.181-82
[8] Shawn Otto (2016), The War on Science: Who’s Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It (Minneapolis: Milkweed), pp.180-81
[9] Ibid
[10] Andrew Hartman (2015), A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (Chicago: Chicago University Press) The culture wars compelled Americans, even conservatives, to acknowledge transformations to American life. And although acknowledgement often came in the form of rejection, it was also the first step to resignation, if not outright acceptance.
A similar dynamic was at play during the Brexit campaign where poorer Leave voters were totally unreceptive to Remain arguments about the possible economic damage that Brexit could wreak as for them the ‘economy’ was something that globe-trotting elites employed in the City of London ‘worked’ in. Pride in national and cultural identity really did come before prosperity for such cohorts.
CA also began to develop some ‘truths’ around the ‘closet’ many Americans felt they lived in. Straight white men who due to the social privileges that went with the milieu and value set they grew up found the challenges to their speech around women or people of colour that accompanied changing social mores in Americas threatening to their identity as ‘regular men’. Wylie notes how the discourse that emerged from groups of angry straight white men resembled that of liberation discourse from gay communities. Despite the vast difference in the context of the closet, both groups felt the burden of the closet, and they did not like the feeling of having to change who they felt they were in order to measure up to what was now required in society. These straight white men felt a subjective experience of oppression in their own minds (just as out-groups like immigrants, gays, people of colour and women had or still felt). They were primed for a call to make “America Great Again” – for them. (Wylie: p.117)
Just as Islamist Jihadis sought to swim in the sea of the mass of humiliated Arab and/or Muslim masses by promising the restoration of the Caliphate and the Nazis exploited German people’s humiliation created by defeat in World War I and the Great Depression. While the identity conflicts created by the loss of social privileges, the loss of jobs to the not so hidden hands of globalisation and loss of trust in liberal democratic institutions in the US and Western Europe may not result in the cataclysms of an Adolf Hitler or an ISIS; contemporary history does give us stark reminders of what can happen when group identity is privileged ahead of shared societal identity.
Bibliography:
Fukuyama, Francis (2019) Identity. Contemporary Identity Politics and the Struggle for Recognition. London: Profile Books
Kakutani, Michiko (2018) The Death of Truth. London: William Collins Books
Wylie, Christopher (2019) Mindf*ck. Inside Cambridge Analytica’s Plot to Break the World. London: Profile Books .
[1] Donald Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985) pp.141-43
[2] Stuart Jeffries, “Are Women Human?” (interview with Catherine MacKinnon), Guardian, 12th April 2006
[3] Catherine McKinnon, Towards a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1989), pp.189-190
[4] Christopher Hitchens She’s No Fundamentalist, in Slate, 5 March 2007) in In Christopher Hitchens (2011) Arguably London: Atlantic Books pp.712-15
[5] Ibid
[6] Ibid
[7] Dave Rich (2018) The Left’s Jewish Problem. Jeremy Corbyn, Israel and Antisemitism. London: Biteback Publishing, pp.181-82
[8] Shawn Otto (2016), The War on Science: Who’s Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It (Minneapolis: Milkweed), pp.180-81
[9] Ibid
[10] Andrew Hartman (2015), A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (Chicago: Chicago University Press) The culture wars compelled Americans, even conservatives, to acknowledge transformations to American life. And although acknowledgement often came in the form of rejection, it was also the first step to resignation, if not outright acceptance.
⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter seeking the Promised Land of the Premiership!
