The Western political elite has been badly stung by its losses in the voting booths in 2016 in Britain and the US, hence its manic response of trashing Trump and belittling Brexit, desperately seeking to undemocratically overturn both. Joining in this emotional cauterwauling has been the contemporary Left, too, because it is liberal progressives who have been politically traumatised by the 2016 populist rebuff of many of it’s key progressive shibboleths (the wonders of ‘Diversity’, the goodness of multiculturalism, etc.)
2016 was a severe reality check for a left which had largely ceased to engage with the fundamental economic and cultural concerns of the Western (and still mostly white) working class. Traditional class politics had been under siege since the 1980s from a sustained economic and government assault by market-fundamentalist neo-liberalism and, in response, the contemporary Left has retreated from class politics to a politics which views almost every political issue through a prism of personal and group ‘identity’.
What matters now to the contemporary Left is a person’s skin colour, ethnicity, chromosonal configuration, gender identification and ever-tinier slivers of an ever-expanding LGBTQI spectrum. Culture wars have replaced class war, with the Left getting drawn into contests with ever smaller political dragons such as micro-aggressions, ‘cultural appropriation’, ‘Trigger Warnings’, ‘Safe Spaces’, gendered bathrooms and all the rest.
‘Cultural-Marxism’, the Right call this strategic reorientation by the left away from old-fashioned class and economic Marxism. The contemporary Left now serves a kaleidescopic constituency of population minorities, its policy platform dominated by the honey-pot of free government money and services, positive discrimination, protection against ‘offensive’ language, a get-out-of-jail-free card for ‘victims’ of ‘racist’ police, etc.
So hypnotised has the contemporary Left become by identity politics that it is now largely inert on the question of political agency by a working class that, pace Marx, is the class that can effectively challenge capitalist economic and ideological power.
A Populist Left, on the other hand, would reject the colonisation of left-wing politics by issues of identity. It would reject the great idée fixe of our time - ‘Diversity’ - where ‘intersectionality’, ‘inclusivity’, ‘white supremacy’ and sundry ‘phobias’ (Islamophobia, xenophobia, transphobia, etc.) are increasingly the only concepts that the contemporary left bothers with. The day-to-day political campaigns of the contemporary Left are neurotically fixated on uncritical support for all the hyper-activist identity politics movements and their extreme fringes such as ‘Black Lives Matter’, ‘Taking the Knee’, ‘#MeToo’, transgenderism, open border fundamentalism and other manifestations of post-Marxist political identitarianism.
Dispute this new program of the new Identitarian Left, and it will defend itself from criticism through hair-trigger deployment of discussion-killing epithets such as ‘racist!’, ‘xenophobe!’, ‘Islamophobe!’, ‘white supremacist’ and the like. This reflexive response may offer emotionally consoling therapy for a progressive Left bewildered and angry about its growing alienation from its old working class social base (‘our understanding of the world is correct and virtuous, it’s just the people who get it wrong!’) but all that this yelling does is to wrap another layer of protective bubble-wrap around the contemporary Lefts’ insular, politically-shrinking world as it retreats from class to ‘identity’ at its political core. Calling its critics horrid people (bigots, white supremacists, etc.) merely serves to cover up the identitarian Left’s failure to prevail in a contest of fundamdamental ideas based on class interests.