Identity Politics is Dead

The shallow and sanctimonious cult conferred a fortune on its high priesthood but never did anything for the "victims" it claimed to serve.

Of all the tedious artifacts of the cultural and political left, identity politics has always struck me as the phoniest. The cult was spawned by the thinkers of the New Left in Frankfurt and Paris, and then borrowed by American academics of doubtful education and intelligence. These secular priests borrowed Marx’s idea of the repressed proletariat, and grafted it onto black people, women, gays, and every other artificially constructed group identity they could come up with.

Just as Marx was wrong about “the proletariat” or working class being doomed to remain mired in the poor economic conditions of the mid 19th century, the Cultural Left (which originally consisted mostly of comfortable college professors) morbidly fantasized that blacks and women were doomed to remain mired in an entirely negative image of the 1950s. However, with “help” from their enlightened benefactors—that is, the Woke Priesthood—these legions of oppressed victims could ascend to their rightful place in the sun.

Former Harvard President Claudine Gay is a prominent votary of the DEI Cult. Like Barack Obama, she held one of the highest positions on earth.

From Marx, the Cultural Left also borrowed the idea of “false consciousness”—that is, that people in a capitalist society are unaware that they are part of a system that promotes inequality. If only these “victims” would wake up and obtain what Marx called “class consciousness,” they would revolt and overthrow their oppressors. Instead of using Marx’s outdated sounding “class consciousness,” the New Left adopted the cornpone sounding “woke.”

It always seemed obvious to me that the Cult of Woke never served anyone but its High Priesthood, which has siphoned off billions for DEI programs (with fat salaries and benefits) in universities and corporate boardrooms.

As for the victims: If you tell a young person he is a victim, he is probably going to believe you, act like a victim, and see every setback as an expression of his victimhood instead of an impediment that he could overcome with diligence.

With Trump’s resounding victory, the American people (including blacks, women, gays, etc.) have declared that Identity Politics is Dead—”swept into the dustbin of history” as the Marxists used to say about outmoded ideas and arrangements.

RIP identity politics. I won’t miss you.