Judith Butler with a Pretty Damn Good Indictment of Identity Politics!

Dr. Judith Butler, the extremely influential (to fans), notoriously obscure (to critics) academic gave an interview and was asked about everyone’s favorite totem, woke. It’s a rich text! I think the claim that Democrats did not lose the election because of “wokeness”/social justice politics/identity politics is plainly correct, indisputably correct. I think the ongoing pretense that the word “woke” has literally no denotative content is a bizarre and sad affect that a lot of progressive people are clinging to with white knuckles as a way to avoid the fact that their political movement has eaten shit as badly as a political movement can, in the past few years. What’s striking to me, though, is that this answer, while seemingly dismissive of the question, actually amounts to a major capitulation, for the social justice set, on basic political questions. Which simply points again to a particular fashion of left politics that is fully in retreat.

So, first things first, I think the idea that the election was lost because of what’s commonly called identity politics is pretty clearly wrong. I’m on the move today and cannot find a link for the life of me, but Gallup put out a pretty large poll asking people who had voted to rank the issues that influenced their vote, and those issues associated with identity politics were consistently ranked quite low. Almost every credible analysis of this past election points to several dominant issues: dissatisfaction with the economy generally and anger over inflation particularly, immigration, and the vague but profoundly powerful anti-incumbent sentiment that’s swept the entire democratic world. Immigration sits at the nexus of the economy, foreign policy, and identity, but few people would invoke it if asked what identity politics constitutes. I just don’t believe that this election was fundamentally about social issues at all, and I think that if you consider it for a few minutes, you’ll agree that Republicans should be happy to win on the economy and immigration, rather than on identity issues. I do think, though, that the way identity politics/woke stuff is expressed is part of a major problem for the Democrats and liberals - the default woke mode of engaging that dominated the American left-of-center from 2012ish to 2022ish was just so profoundly unpleasant, so ludicrously self-righteous and uncompromising.

And as much as it annoys me, I have concluded that perhaps the most powerful force in politics is people’s resentment at being talked down to. That can be a problem with almost any kind of political agenda, but it has proven absolutely fatal for the woke set. Two things true at the same time, right? “Woke” certainly didn’t cost Democrats the election, but the discursive and emotional conditions of the woke world are an albatross around the neck of liberal elites who heavily influence public perception. That whole means of engagement was a terrible mistake, though of course standard-issue liberals and socialists sneering neoliberals can all be equally off-putting; the Democrats were fucked regardless, and no, we don’t need to give up on LGBTQ rights (or police reform etc) to achieve future victories, that’s a distortion and always was.

For the record, Butler is less dogmatic and more amenable to other forms of political engagement than people might think, if you actually care to read various interviews or lectures. On the other other hand, as I will never stop saying, the OG critics of identity politics were not right-wing, they were socialists - Eric Hobsbawm and Todd Gitlin and Michael Parenti and Richard Rorty and Barbara Ehrenreich and Adolph Reed…. These people have been very influential, and it’s simply a mistake to sweep all criticisms of identity politics under the right-wing banner to make life argumentatively easier. You can certainly disagree with those writers, but you can’t keep denying that there were lefties who produced profoundly influential critiques of what we call identity politics. Butler is, among many other things, a historian.

As far as “no one knows what woke is,” I’m just exhausted at this point. Let’s do this exercise one more time. If I said to you “Hey that guy is really woke,” would you think “Oh, that means he’s a conservative”? No. Would you think “Oh, that means he’s a center-left neoliberal type, market defender, wants to dismantle regulations”? No. Would you think “Oh, that means he’s an old-school trade unionist, someone who thinks that the labor movement is the only vehicle for a truly left politics”? No. No, you would never think any of that. Because that’s not what woke is. And if you know what woke is not, doesn’t that mean that you have to have at least some sense of what woke is? People don’t agree about what “liberal” or “conservative” means either, along with dozens of other terms, yet we use them every day without issue. The continuing insistence that there is no definition of woke is simply a matter of people trying to hide their own politics from public review. That is to say, it’s an act of weakness.

As the headline here alludes, I actually quite like Butler’s response as a simple and direct criticism of identity politics: you can’t build a political coalition through emphasizing difference, you can’t staple together certain minority identities while rejecting majority identities and win elections. The only thing the left has is people power, and while there’s certainly idealized forms of identity politics that don’t get in the way of building people power, in reality they inevitably amount to telling big groups of people that their problems aren’t problems and they don’t deserve help. (See “white tears.”) Butler’s response defends the importance of identity but also underlines the fact that true mass politics simply aren’t possible when waged through a purely identity lens. As Gitlin once wrote, “If there is no people, only peoples, there is no left.”

Now I think this is the most important part, actually, and it’s also the part that liberals are most rabidly dedicated to ignoring: if someone had said exactly what Butler says here, on Twitter in 2018, they would have been ripped to shreds, tarred as racist and bigoted by thousands of people for daring to suggest that the lens of identity (and especially race) was ever inferior to any other lens. And you know it! Everyone knows it! If you pulled Butler’s name off of this, and any details about gender identity or whatever else, and you posted this on the heyday of Screaming Social Justice Twitter, you would endure days of invective for violating identity norms. Which is really stupid, because even if I wouldn’t put it all this way, Butler’s engagement is really worth considering here. It’s precisely the sort of respectful internal criticism of social justice hysteria that we really badly needed but which was mercilessly policed out of the conversation back then. And, crucially, Butler’s stance now represents a calculated evolution in that school of politics, a strategic withdrawal from certain fronts of that war - but it’s represented by many people sharing it as a defense of social justice politics. It’s a classic retcon, albeit a welcome one. Which just goes to underline one incontrovertible truth about 21st-century online politics: nobody can take an L.

That's why the broad American left-of-center so badly needs to examine what the fuck happened in the 2010s and early 2020s, how we went down this utterly bizarre rabbit hole. There needs to be a postmortem. I keep asking for this and nobody steps up to the plate: there’s few pieces that would be more useful, published in a can’t-miss big deal publication, than an essay that asks just what the fuck happened in the media between Obama’s second term and the Biden administration. As I’ve said, it would have to be written by a big-deal writer with impeccable progressive social-justice-friendly politics who’s nevertheless willing to critique, preferably a woman or a writer of color. In other words, we need a piece that’s not like the kind I write, critiques from outside of the social justice space, but rather a critical look from a credentialed insider within the kind of publication that was conquered by social justice politics. Yes, the social justice movement conquered a lot more than just media and journalism. But I think the story that’s most immediately relevant and profound is how the default person in media went from being, in 2012, a vaguely apolitical center-left liberal Democrat to, by 2016, a relentlessly hectoring social justice advocate. The change happened in my world and before my eyes and I still feel a certain kind of whiplash about it. The story deserves to be told, even though - or especially because - it’s such an embarrassing story for the industry.

I was reading this Osita Nwanevu piece about the Young Adult fiction Twitter meltdowns of the late-2010s and I marveled at it; it feels like it comes from a different world. I don’t pick on the piece because it was written by someone who didn’t know what they were doing, but precisely because it was written by someone who very much does. Nwanevu is a very bright political mind and capable writer, but in the piece he struggles and strains to defend behaviors that, it seems clear, he knew full well to be indefensible. YA publishing is not a site of meaningful political struggle, the controversies were dictated by the very worst aspects of social media conformity and vindictive righteousness, and demanding political purity from fiction is always bad, but particularly when you haven’t read the fiction in question. Nwanevu goes for the standard issue “Well no one was actually hurt by these cancellations,” which prompts the immediate question of why then they were worth doing. But I’m really just interested in the bigger story here: can the liberal media (that is to say, the mainstream media) ask itself why it fell into this morass of these clearly toxic politics? Why a political writer with much bigger fish to fry felt moved to defend a particularly ugly brand of quasi-political culture policing that’s now disavowed even by many of the people who once enthusiastically took part in it?

In other words, can the liberal media take this L?