identity politics

As I was reading Norman Finkelstein's new book, I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It!: Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom, I thought early on of Obama's joke at the expense of Rahm Emanuel: "he's one of a kind, and thank god he's one of a kind." Finkelstein, too, is very much one of a kind. But the analogy with Emanuel fails, because in fact one Rahm Emanuel is far too many whereas one Finkelstein is not nearly enough. We need hundreds of him. That is to say, we need hundreds of left intellectuals with the courage and intelligence to think for themselves and never sell out, to refuse to compromise—even to risk alienating fellow leftists by publicly repudiating woke culture and the more vacuous forms of identity politics in favor of an unstinting adherence to class politics. Nor would it hurt to have more writers who are as eloquent and hilarious as him.

It is widely known on the left that Finkelstein is, as it were, a martyr to truth and justice, having been subject to outrageous calumniation and denied an academic career because of his relentless advocacy of the Palestinian cause. With I'll Burn That Bridge, he shows his willingness to burn bridges not only with the establishment but also with the "left" of today, for which he shows scarcely mitigated contempt. He considers it, or dominant tendencies within it, to have degenerated from soaring moral and intellectual heights with Rosa Luxemburg, W. E. B. DuBois, and Paul Robeson into a censorious, narcissistic, morbidly navel-gazing culture preoccupied with subjectivist trivialities like personal pronouns at the expense of solidaristic struggle for a better world. "Whenever I see he/him or she/her, I think fuck/you." ("You must be living an awfully precious life," he goes on, "if, amid the pervasive despair of an economy in free fall, your uppermost concern is clinging to your pronouns.") If the book is not simply ignored, one can expect that it will elicit a flood of vituperation from leftists and liberals: "racist, misogynistic, transphobic, white supremacist, juvenile, incoherent, petty!" The intelligent reader will not be tempted by such facile judgments but instead will engage with the book's substance, because it has important things to say.