I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It!: Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom

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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.

As Finkelstein says, "When the 'hour of serious danger' to the status quo struck during Bernie Sanders' class-struggle insurgency, the 'true nature' of woke radicalism—not just its opportunism but, even more, its rancid, reactionary core—was exposed as each and all of these erstwhile 'radicals' enlisted under the banner to stop him.This issue bears, of course, on Finkelstein's own career, but he is hardly the only academic to have been disciplined in recent decades for alleged "incivility" or taking unpopular political stands. It is likely they couldn't have had such a destructive impact had the FCC's Fairness Doctrine not been repealed in 1987.

woman—is, in its parochialism and vitiating of solidarity against capitalism, not what a real left politics looks like. Doesn't it conclusively demonstrate the inanity of a standard commanding restrained and temperate language? But if the likes of Marx wouldn't qualify for a tenured appointment at a first-rank university, isn't that a reductio ad absurdum? Issues of online content moderation, too, come into play in any debate over censorship, and Finkelstein doesn't say much about these.Finkelstein is aware that the identity politics of the left isn't quite the same as the identity politics of the Democrats, but he is right that they overlap, and that such a politics is more conducive to being neutered into empty symbolism (statues, token representation in the corporate class, electing a vapid con artist like Obama) than a Bernie Sanders-style—or more radical—class politics is. Many or most of them one would likely personally despise—just as, on the other hand, one would "love" many people belonging to a "different group. Every year we publish a selection of books and pamphlets that address the key issues facing activists and trade unionists.

A connection that binds will be forged by you, united in the heat of battle facing a common enemy, each marching beside the other, each lifting the other, each protecting the other.If you're white, you're a racist—whether you're John Brown or Jefferson Davis, a fascist or an anti-fascist. He relates an anecdote from when he was a graduate student at Princeton in 1984: his work exposing a bestselling scholarly hoax on the Israel-Palestine conflict had gotten the favorable attention of the editor of the New York Review of Books and his friend (Arthur Hertzberg) at Columbia University, and he sensed that career possibilities were opening up for him.

Wokeness is what happens when the destruction of the labor movement proceeds so far, and social atomization becomes so all-consuming, that even the "left" adopts an individualistic, moralistic, psychologistic, censorious, self-righteous, performative approach to making social change. Whites," says DiAngelo, "control all major institutions of society and set the policies and practices that others must live by. He has the highest regard for the Civil Rights Movement, after all—although he would deny that that was identity politics. In a long, scathing chapter, Finkelstein analyzes the cult surrounding Barack Obama, which he reveals as the ultimate product of identity politics. It proceeds from the fatuous, almost juvenile, conceit that fastening binary, wooden labels on the actors and ideas incident to Black history will shed light on it.His "economic reductionism," according to Angela Davis, prevented him from "developing a vocabulary that allows him to speak…about the persistence of racism, racist violence, state violence. One might object that he's painting with too broad a brush here, that advocacy of the interests of minorities and women can, depending on the context and the cause, indeed be an essential political program, but he wouldn't deny this. When teaching, should professors strive for "balance"—presenting with equal force all sides of an issue so that students can make up their own minds—or should they teach only their own perspective?