In the run-up to the US presidential election in November, it was declared with some satisfaction that Kamala Harris wasn’t doing identity politics. This wasn’t totally accurate: the dominant tenor of her campaign was a robust, militarised, bordered American nationalism. In her debate with Donald Trump, Harris criticised him for selling out to China. In her rally appearances, she extolled Joe Biden’s border security bill, a piece of legislation that sought to give the far right everything it wanted on immigration. In her mind-numbing television appearances, Harris espoused an antiquated bipartisanship, promising to bring Republicans into her administration. American nationalism is identity politics, but it is most politically effective when it is not identified as such: that is, when it goes under the guise of universality.

In the aftermath of Trump’s predictable victory, however, identity was back on the agenda as the lumpencommentariat resumed one of its most inane debates: did people vote for Trump out of economic anxiety – the spiralling cost of living – or status anxiety – the drowning of white America by an influx of Haitian, Mexican and other immigrants? According to Princeton professor Eddie Glaude, the real reason for Trump’s triumph was not inflation, but the fact that for millions of Americans, “whiteness is under threat”.

This is an obviously dubious analysis, given the multiracial coalition behind the Republican candidate. Trump won 40% of Asian voters, 46% of Hispanic voters and 13% of black voters – in every case, a substantial improvement on his performance in 2016 and 2020. Looked at more broadly, this is unsurprising: as the American sociologist Musa al-Gharbi has documented, the “rainbow coalition” that Democrats once expected to secure their long-term hegemony has been moving right since 2012.

Of course, the multiracial right extends beyond this election cycle, and far beyond the US. Consider Charles-Emmanuel Mikko Rasanen, the mixed-race Finnish Nazi who played an organising role in Britain’s summer pogroms. Or Mauricio Garcia, the Hispanic white supremacist who fatally shot nine people at a Texas mall last year. Or Sai Varshith Kandula, the Nazi sympathiser of Indian descent who drove a van into metal bollards near the White House. Or Enrique Tarrio, the Afro-Cuban American former chairman of the Proud Boys and Latinos for Trump, now serving 22 years in prison for his part in the 2021 insurrection on the US Capitol. Then there is the embrace of Kanye West by the American far right, or its rueful admiration for the Taliban after Biden withdrew US troops from Kabul. The right’s politics of race and identity has turned out to be more mobile and adaptable than the essentialist politics of identity absolutism that briefly dominated centre and liberal-left politics during the 2010s.

Identity-talk.

In one sense, the category of identity politics is as vacuous as that of politics or religion. To condemn or praise identity politics without clearly defining what you mean by it is vapid and, usually, hypocritical. Frequently, the most voluble critics of identity politics turn out to be poetasters of ethnic and national identities like the new right intellectual Matthew Goodwin, a famed critic of identity politics (though not his own, of course). Their critique boils down to carping about allegedly excessive recognition extended to ethnic minorities. To that extent, the left’s question should always be: what identity politics? How is the identity in question formed, and what does it do? Is it a tool of liberation or administration? Does it lead toward more expansive, universal solidarities, or does it tend to isolate people in identitarian boxes? Does it empower, or does it offer a mere consolatory simulacrum of empowerment? Does it persecute?

In her book Identity and Capitalism, the American scholar Marie Moran coins the term “identity-talk” to describe the ways in which ‘identity’ became a keyword after the second world war, overladen with multiple meanings but increasingly implying a cultural or group essentialism to replace a discredited biological essentialism. Prior to the cold war, ‘identity’ was a narrow philosophical term, referring to the “sameness of an entity to itself”. In relation to a person, it defined the parameters of property rights and legal responsibility. Overlaid on this, from the late nineteenth century, was the idea of the psychological self. Yet the language of identity gradually became the dominant idiom for understanding the shared experience of oppression, from the first green shoots of identity-talk in the 1950s, where it was associated with Erik Erikson’s psychology and the cultural anthropologies of Franz Boas and Margaret Mead, to the Black feminist Combahee River Collective’s statement in 1977. Once congealed, the concept of identity politics was projected backwards into history so that African American abolitionists and scholars such as Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman and WEB Du Bois became pioneers of it. The result was that struggles against oppression became, in part, struggles to validate particular oppressed identities.

And yet against this identity-talk has always been a radical, if at times inaudible, critique of identity as a rallying point for anti-oppression struggles. For one thing, identity seemed too ripe for ruling class appropriation. The “saris, samosas and steel bands” version of symbolic recognition that some sought for their oppressed identities could be easily satisfied without the need for any major social or economic change.

In an attempt to neutralise the radical struggles of the oppressed and head off their wayward universalising possibilities, governments sought to form relationships with promoted community representatives. This was a disciplinary politics, however – the obverse of policing. New Labour put it into overdrive, fostering relations with politically chastened Muslim leaders while unleashing the violent apparatus of counterterrorist policing and surveillance aimed at curbing “radicalisation”. It is no coincidence that as identity-talk has proliferated, particularly among the liberal centre, so has identity bureaucracy at airports, the drive for identity cards, and the multiplying techniques for validating online identities. This returns the concept of identity to its origins in efforts by early modern liberal political philosophers like John Locke to ground the emerging social logic of capitalism in a conception of the self: to this extent, identity has always been about policing and property.

The explosion of identity-talk that commanded broad, yet thin, assent during the 2010s did not at first come from above. It was anchored in movements like the new feminism and Black Lives Matter, but it also in part reflected a historical collapse of faith in traditional leftist politics and a suspicion of universalisms that had often proved to be parochial or Eurocentric. The language of privilege-checking and staying in your lane that took off on the internet in this era was, in the most generous reading, a rebuff of efforts at premature universality. The invitation was to think about how one’s relative advantages as a white male, for instance, might be subtly shaping one’s political assumptions. Yet manifestly, that was not the only plausible reading: enthusiasms of that era included the reification of identity and the absolutisation of its claims on political life, instead of opening up identities into multiple levels of contestation and struggle. At its worst, it involved an attempt by comparatively small numbers of educated militants to trump the rigours of persuasion – what the Jamaican-British sociologist Stuart Hall called “the harsh discipline of democracy” – by means of identity-based moral self-righteousness.

It was this version of identity-talk that proved most useful to ruling-class politics in the populist era, as in the spiteful liberal invective about “Bernie bros” or – far more insidious and ultimately destructive – the libel of Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters as antisemitic. What, after all, could be more patently cynical, when a specific claim of antisemitism was held up to justified scrutiny, than to say, “Actually, non-Jews (and Jews we disagree with) don’t get to define antisemitism”? And yet the implication that Jews or any other group adhered to a single cohesive identity, rendering all political disagreements moot (recall that anti-Zionist Jews were singled out for special contempt as “nutters” and not proper Jews) was not wildly out-of-key with the leftist common sense of the time, which is one reason why it was so paralysing. Given the genocidal mania that was, it later transpired, brewing in the faction that claimed a monopoly on Jewish identity, the effects of this were disastrous. The same hard centre that orchestrated this appropriation of woke idiom to shake loose left coalitions under Corbyn then cheerfully pivoted to anti-woke, nationalist identity politics once its foe was defeated – that much-vaunted pragmatism in action.

Here is the insidious subtlety of reaction. While the Black American philosopher Audre Lorde famously warned that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”, it turns out that the tools of the oppressed can easily be used against them. And yet at the same time, the new right turns out to have a deeply opportunistic relationship to identity. The Jewish far right, for example, calumnies everyone from the UN to Amnesty International as antisemitic while allying with overt antisemites and trafficking in the most flagrantly antisemitic idiocies, from Soros conspiracy theories to cultural Marxism. It is as though, for all the right’s obsession with mobilising identities as the ground of all valid solidarities, identity is ultimately subordinate to metapolitical affiliation.

Identity fatigue.

There is, evidently, a growing exhaustion with this style of identity politics and its pieties. At the more harmless end of the backlash are the piss-taking memes about “holding space for Defying Gravity”, and mockingly celebrating “the Black solo polyamorous hijabi amputee”. Politically, however, the vibe shift is broadly to the right – not toward an exit from identity’s political claims, but toward a redistribution of sanctified victimhood and a revaluation of identities (white, male, western) once deemed problematic.
Some on the left, anxious to communicate with a version of popular common sense, have long tried to avoid the pitfalls of ‘identity’ by vaunting an anti-identity, class-based, universalist left politics. Yet it must be admitted that this brought its own problems, with its genuflection to a reified and labourist conception of class. At its least convincing it entailed a silly attack on “Tumblr liberalism” led by the likes of Irish writer Angela Nagle, which was so historically bowdlerised, so indiscriminate in its offensive, and so clearly freighted with its own reactionary commitments, that it could only perpetuate and thrive on the spiral of outrage, brittle belligerence and sanctified victimhood that it claimed to skewer.

More strategically considered has been a series of surveys supported by The Jacobin Foundation, a non-profit foundation that operates the eponymous US magazine, which published the surveys’ findings, which seek to establish a basis for “common sense solidarity”. According to its findings, most people don’t respond to “woke messaging” and “group-based appeals” but do favour a “universal” language that prioritises “bread-and-butter economic issues”. This is explicitly a matter of framing, since “ending systemic racism” was popular across “virtually all demographic groups” provided it was part of a universalist pitch. If the left’s main goal was to be electorally competitive, this would perhaps be a sufficient response to the identitarian stramashes.

The problem is that the electoral terrain is itself shaped by an increasingly febrile series of identifications. We have seen, in recent years, mass movements for Gaza and Black Lives Matter around the world; the Nuit debout (“rise up at night”) and gilets jaunes in France; the Querdenken (“lateral thinking”) anti-lockdown movement in Germany; and three years of protest in Chile triggered by a public transport fare evasion campaign in Santiago. All of these have erupted as flash movements with relatively short life cycles, based on the momentum of particles of sentiment aggregated on the social industry through hashtagged solidarities. These volatile patterns, reflecting the identity politics of the internet, shape popular subjectivity in accelerated bursts of enthusiasm before fading. They will often leverage legacy patterns of identity – this was certainly the case with the racist riots that swept Britain in the summer – but they also represent a novel politics of identity where one’s hold on a particular ipseity is fleeting. As such there is no way not to be implicated in some version of identity politics.

This doesn’t mean yielding to identity as the privileged rallying point for our political projects. There is something deathly in identity, in that it reduces us to a list of attributes in lapidary fashion. Here lies the subject: gender, race, class, nation. It often recruits us to a narrow-minded and coercive idea of what a person can be. Insofar as identity becomes the basis of a community, it can also circumscribe our political possibilities and align us with leaderships we’d be better off without. At worst, it is a reactionary trap, a way of binding us to violent, oppressive projects.

Identity is also work. The endless labour of producing an identity, a version of oneself that one finds worthy of respect, is not in and of itself a desirable thing. It is, in some important ways imposed: racism, sexism, and transphobia, for instance, all force a burden on those subject to ascriptive denigration, to explain, account for and validate themselves. Even if it’s possible to find a consolatory security in such identity work, it isn’t freely chosen. One of the privileges of not being denigrated in this way is being spared identity work. And yet late capitalism, particularly its commodity tools like smartphones and platforms, now involves everyone in a constant and exhausting labour of identity. As a condition for access to community we are enjoined to continuously produce a digital self – a self that can be accountable to the machine and its relentless appetite for monetisable content, that can be corralled at short notice into the latest ecstatic wave of tribal online sentiment.

What would a viable anti-identity politics look like? It would be hopeless to bypass identity in the name of an abstract universality, for reasons I’ve set out above. However, the problem over the last decade or so has often been the use of abstract identities to thwart concrete universalities. The claims of oppressed minorities have been appropriated and weaponised just at the point where a real social majority was being built. Yet they can only be effectively weaponised for as long as we agree to sacralise identity and not properly historicise its claims. We can take heart in the fact that identity is losing its halo.

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