Let's Take a Look at That Rob Henderson NYT Video
anti-woke identity politics
So let’s look at the Rob Henderson video from the New York Times that I’ve embedded above. I find it useful for understanding the whole anti-woke tendency, in 2024, which I think can currently be defined as a group of people who are winning and who were arguably always winning but who have built a brand identity as permanently-powerless outsiders. The video is a good example of what goes wrong when the branding of heterodoxy obscures the fundamental core ideas beneath: it embraces quintessentially woke logic in the service of attacking the woke, an anti-left identity politics, and it’s not at all clear to me that he’s aware of that. I think his position is a good indication of the basic reality of the anti-woke wing of political commentary: just gore the right ox, and you will advance. Which, of course, is the mirror image of the very social justice politics the anti-woke media exists to skewer. Those exist in a mutually parasitic relationship, which is why people in the anti-woke universe cannot straightforwardly acknowledge the swift decline of social justice politics. To do so would be to demonstrate that their project is no longer useful.
Says Henderson
I’m the rare Ph.D. who grew up carrying everything I owned in a trash bag, starting when I was 3. I lived in 10 foster homes before I joined the Air Force. Then I went to Yale on the G.I. Bill and on to Cambridge.
So here’s the most important point, right on top: whatever Henderson’s video is, whether right or wrong, it’s identity politics at its purest. There’s no contesting that fact. A core element of identity politics is the notion that an individual’s various biographical and demographic characteristics are central to their credibility and the validity of their arguments. This has been a repetitive element of Henderson’s self-presentation as a commentator and is the most important part of this video - “I was poor, and then I went to Yale, and yet I am anti-left.” Well, his anti-left ideas might be right or wrong. But the centrality of his identity as a once-poor person turned Ivy Leaguer turned professional anti-woke writer must be subject to the exact same logic as every other endorsement or rejection of identity politics. If it’s illegitimate to say “abortion is wrong, and you should listen to me because I am a woman, and you are wrong because you are a man” it must be equally wrong to say “I’m a once-poor Yale graduate who knows that the wokies are wrong because they’re privileged.” Both are identical expressions of the idea that political righteousness descends straightforwardly from political identity. And the rejection of that idea is close to the core belief of the anti-woke/anti-left tendency that Henderson represents. If this logic can be embraced selectively, then it really is just “lefties annoy me.”
When you use the term identity politics, you end up referencing a particular set of policy and political goals and beliefs, but you are directly discussing a methodology of politics. This is the only lens through which critiques of identity politics mean anything beyond “I don’t like progressives/liberalism/the left.” If your immediate reaction to my pointing out that Henderson is practicing identity politics is to say “but he criticizes woke people!!!” then I’m afraid that’s an artifact of never having understood what exactly identity politics are in the first place. And you cannot be an opponent of identity politics and say someone is wrong because they are privileged. That is no different whatsoever from saying “these people are right because they are privileged”! This is really basic stuff. It’s not just that Henderson places undue emphasis on his own background; it’s that he places almost all of his emphasis on the backgrounds of his vague target, affluent woke protestors, I guess. They’re wrong because their views are not entirely in line with what Henderson takes to be the view of supposedly ordinary people. That is quite literally the video’s only argument, and to be honest it’s not an argument at all.