7.3 Roots of the New Identity Politics

The Democrats, the longer they talk about identity politics, I got ’em. … If the left is focused on race and identity … we can crush the Democrats.

—Steve Bannon, former Trump strategist

The Wachowski sisters were brothers back when they wrote and directed their cult film, The Matrix. So it may not surprise you that their latest project, the TV series Sense8, has been described by one reviewer as a “no holds barred exploration of identity politics.”

Now this is going to sound as spooky as the plot of The Matrix, but what’s cool is that it’s true. The Wachowski brothers hid the key to identity politics in that movie. Where? The hero, Neo, hides his computer disks in a book—Simulacra and Simulation—the pages of which have been hollowed out just as reality has been hollowed out by a computer simulation called The Matrix.

Now comes the strange part. Simulacra and Simulation is a real postmodern philosophy book from 1981, and the Wachowski brothers saw it as central to their worldview. It was so important to them that they tried to get its author to appear in the film, and forced Keanu Reeves, who plays Neo, to read the actual book! That must have been painful.

Now, I don’t expect you to believe that proves anything, so I’ll take a factual approach. But here’s where we’re headed. Postmodernism is the primary root of both the new identity politics and the Matrix view of reality that’s been adopted by the alt-right wing of Trump’s base. I’ll begin by showing how postmodernism underpins identity politics. Then I’ll let Michiko Kakutani, the former chief book critic at The New York Times, explain why “some Trump allies invoke the iconography of the movie The Matrix.”

Let me show how to track down the source of the new identity politics, which unexpectedly lies in Europe—in the German and Italian neo-Marxism of the 1920s and some French “philosophers” of the 1960s.

Finding the Roots

Dr. Derald Wing Sue, the popularizer of microaggression theory, published a textbook in 2015, Multicultural Social Work Practice, covering microaggressions and related topics. In Chapter 2, he states:

Critical race theory (CRT) … began as a movement in law departments during the 1970s and 1980s and has spread to … political science, ethnic studies, postcolonial studies, education, and social work … with specific influence from Antonio Gramsci, Jacques Derrida …

He is absolutely correct. Microaggression theory grew out of critical race theory (CRT) and the two main godfathers of CRT are Gramsci and Derrida. Antonio Gramsci was a founder of the Italian Communist Party in 1921. Jacques Derrida is the father of deconstructionism, the original core of postmodernism, a French “philosophy” that was brought to America in 1968.

But just because Dr. Sue writes about CRT in his book, does that make it the root of his microaggression theory? It’s good evidence, but conclusive evidence comes from his 2007 paper, which provided the foundation of microaggression theory and related identity politics. That paper cites only one actual study of microaggressions, and the name of that paper is, you guessed it, “Critical Race Theory, Racial Microaggressions, and Campus Racial Climate.”

 CRT led to microaggression theory, and Dr. Sue tells us that CRT is based on neo-Marxist Gramsci and on Derrida, the godfather of postmodernism. Gramsci saw that Marx had made fundamental mistakes so he developed a new version of Marxism, a neo-Marxism, to correct them. Microaggression theory comes from CRT which has one root in Gramsci’s Italian neo-Marxism.

Similarly, note that German neo-Marxism flows through postmodernist Derrida and then into CRT and on to microaggressions and identity politics. In Frankfurt in 2001, Derrida received the Adorno Prize. Adorno is one of the two leading proponents of “Critical Theory” and a leader of the “Frankfurt School” of German neo-Marxists, founded in 1923. And by the way, Critical Race Theory is a type Frankfurt-School Critical Theory. Here are the main roots of identity politics:

The new identity politics

•   Critical Race Theory

○  Italian Neo-Marxist Antonio Gramsci

○  Jacques Derrida

• The neo-Marxist Frankfurt School

○  Kimberlé Crenshaw

• Gramsci and the Postmodernist, Michel Foucault
•   Third-wave feminism

○  Judith Butler

• Postmodernists Derrida and Foucault
• the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School

○  Kimberlé Crenshaw

We will meet Kimberlé Crenshaw and Judith Butler soon and meet Butler again in Chapter 35. As Dr. Sue points out, Critical Race Theory, a major component of the new identity politics, has spread to law, political science, education and social work departments—and to ethnic studies and postcolonial studies—at most American universities. And all of these have roots in campus-based postmodernism, which itself is rooted in European neo-Marxism.

Double-Checking the Roots

Many try to deny these roots, so to double-check this, I turned to JSTOR, a huge, searchable collection of academic articles.

A check of JSTOR turns up 70 articles that discuss both “cultural appropriation” and the Italian neo-Marxist Gramsci, who died in 1937. That strong a link between problems like Halloween costumes and the founder of the Italian Communist Party can’t be mere coincidence.

Cultural appropriation and Derrida turn up together in 304 articles. “Michael Foucault,” currently the most popular postmodernist, and cultural appropriation turn up together in 370 articles. 

Gramsci is linked with identity politics in 1,247 articles. Derrida is linked with identity politics in 2,601 articles. And “postmodernism” shows up together with “identity politics” in 4,049 articles.

So European postmodernism and neo-Marxism are indeed the root of the new identity politics. Who would have guessed? (Actually quite a few have. I didn’t discover this myself.)

What is Postmodernism?

Because the new identity politics grows out of postmodernism, we need to know a little about that. I will explain quite a bit more in the next two chapters, but for now, this will do. Postmodernism is actually a mishmash of closely related “isms” with no agreement on where the boundary lines are. For convenience, non-devotees usually just lump them together, as I will.

Most importantly, postmodernism rejects the ideas and ideals of the Enlightenment—truth, reason, science, and democracy. I know that sounds hard to believe, but stay with me and in the next two chapters you’ll see that postmodernists are quite open about this. Strangely, these negative ideas were first brought to the U.S. by Derrida and introduced into the literary criticism departments of Cornell, Johns Hopkins, and Yale universities in the late 1960s.

Derrida’s new idea was called “deconstructionism,” and it was based on a concept called “the death of the author.” This meant that when interpreting a literary text, one should ignore the author’s intended meaning. The reason for this is the neo-Marxist idea that everyone (except elite postmodernists) is brainwashed by capitalism, so authors don’t understand their own true intention—their intentions are invisible to them.

As you’ve heard, to someone with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Similarly, to postmodernists, all forms of communication look like literary texts in need of deconstruction. And deconstruction means rejecting the intentions of the author, whether the “author” is a painter of a mural, someone who makes a microaggression or a mother who dresses a little girl in a costume. This is why we find:

1.   Dr. Sue telling us that the flight attendant’s “actions and their meaning were invisible to her.”
2.   Yale telling its students that in “many cases, the student wearing the costume has not intended to offend, but [that’s no excuse].”
3.   The University of California telling students that something is a microaggression if it is perceived as a slight “whether intentional or unintentional.”
4.   Dr. Andrea Quenette being fired for saying something that was perceived as offensive, although she quite clearly had no such intent.
5.   The Madison School District stating that the n-word is grounds for dismissal “no matter the intent.”
6.   Cosmopolitan telling us that if a little girl dresses as Moana, she is “mocking other people’s cultures” no matter what she thinks she’s doing.
7.   In the San Francisco School District’s mural controversy, the artist’s intent is not even considered by those who want to destroy it. One such person said that “intent no longer matters.” 

In every case, the “author”—that is, the speaker, the artist or the little girl dressing up—is judged without any consideration of his/her intentions. That’s like judging someone who trips and accidentally steps on your toe as if they had done so intentionally. It’s like judging someone who sincerely compliments a haircut that you don’t like as if they had deliberately ridiculed you. We might judge them harshly by accident, but none of us would make it our policy to do so.

I’m not saying everyone gets a pass for having “good intentions” no matter what they do. Far from it. But if they are trying to do something that we ourselves think they should be trying to do and they simply fall short or make a mistake, we do not refuse to consider their good intentions.

The only historical exception to this rule that I know of is the treatment of Blacks in the South during the age of lynchings. In that era, a Black person was judged by the offense taken by a White person. The law didn’t matter, and the intention of the Black person counted for nothing. Only the view of the accuser mattered.

Ignoring all intentions comes from postmodernism’s “death of the author” dogma, which is explained in Death of the Author (La mort de l’auteur), by Roland Barthes (1967). 

The Postmodern Matrix

As I have mentioned, the “death of the author” concept springs from the theory that we are all brainwashed by capitalist culture. This neo-Marxist idea—that we’re all brainwashed—is not only the deepest root of the new identity politics, but it also plays a surprising role in Trump’s assault on truth. It’s worth a closer look.

Marx’s economic determinism led to his most famous prediction: Societies would progress from feudalism to capitalism to socialism. But in the 1920s, some more thoughtful Marxists noticed that the first socialist revolution took Russia directly from feudalism to socialism (skipping capitalism) and that Germany and Italy seemed to be heading from capitalism to fascism. Marx’s economic determinism had gone off the rails at the first opportunity.

That intellectual crisis led to various neo-Marxisms. The Frankfurt School decided that Marx had missed the “culture industry,” a part of capitalism that blinded workers to their economic self-interest. Gramsci decided that Marx had missed “cultural hegemony,” which is pretty much the same idea as missing the culture industry. 

The postmodernists then took these ideas and sensationalized them to the point where they no longer made any sense. Everything people say and do, they say, is “socially constructed.” That includes your political views, your sexual orientation, and even science. All of that is dictated by capitalistic social pressures, and neither your own thinking nor your own biology has anything to do with it. This has had a strong influence on a new strain of feminism.

Of course, if you’re a postmodernist, you believe neo-Marxism and that frees you from such effects. In non-academic, identity-politics jargon, you’re “woke.” The rest of us are presumably asleep. This metaphor was powerfully embraced by the 1999 sci-fi, cyberpunk action film, The Matrix. As Michiko Kakutani, the author of The Death of Truth, explains:

Some Trump allies invoke the iconography of the movie The Matrix—in which the hero [Neo] is given a choice between two pills, a red one (representing knowledge and the harsh truths of reality) and a blue one (representing soporific illusion and denial).

In the film, the entire population, except for Neo and a small band of (woke) rebels, are completely unaware of reality, and their perceptions are controlled by the artificial intelligence of the Matrix. The Matrix is a perfect metaphor for the postmodern concept that everything is socially constructed or the neo-Marxist concept of a capitalist culture industry.

Far Left and Right Converge. The Matrix can easily be seen as a radical-left critique of capitalism, and Neo can be seen as a neo-Marxist revolutionary hero. In this case, being “red-pilled” would mean the same thing as being “woke.” But that’s not how it turned out. Being “red-pilled” has come to mean just the opposite—being converted to anti-woke (alt-right) crypto-fascism.

In her book, The Death of Truth, Kakutani points out that the red-pill meme has been taken up by “members of the alt-right” and that “some aggrieved men’s rights groups talk about ‘red-pilling the normies.’” This means they’ve slipped a normie (one of us) a red pill (some “facts” we didn’t know), and the normie has their eyes opened. Liberals and progressives, they say, live in a world of delusion—we are asleep in the Matrix.

In this view, The Matrix teaches that Neo is a hero who is waking people to the truths of Trump and the alt-right. Why would the alt-right find a film by the Wachowski brothers (now sisters), who embrace the new identity politics, so compatible with their own worldview? Well, consider the main clue to the film’s philosophical parentage—the hollowed-out book, Simulacra and Simulation. (Another clue is that fact that the Wachowskis even asked its author, Jean Baudrillard, to appear in a sequel to The Matrix.)

Baudrillard started out as a Marxist and then became, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “a major guru of French postmodern theory.” The year after The Matrix was released, Baudrillard informed us: “We must adopt a delirious point of view. We must no longer assume any principle of truth.” His book opens with an unacknowledged fake quote from the Bible: “It is truth that hides the fact that there is none.” In other words, there is no truth. That’s the very essence of Trump’s worldview.

Postmodernism leads to the new identity politics and supports the crypto-fascist right’s denial of facts and truth.

Third-Wave Feminism

Feminism has always been a key part of identity politics. According to Vox.com, third-wave feminism is generally linked with Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined the term “intersectionality,” and with Judith Butler, one of the two founders of “queer theory.” Are they linked to postmodernism?

Crenshaw, a lawyer, was also one of the founders of Critical Race Theory, which Dr. Sue told us was influenced by Gramsci and Derrida. So “yes” as to Crenshaw’s identity-politics connection.

Judith Butler, a professor at both U.C. Berkeley and Harvard, was awarded $1.5 million by the Mellon Foundation in 2008, which she used to fund a Critical Theory Institute at U.C. Berkeley. (Recall that Critical Theory was developed by the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School.)

Butler’s queer-theory book, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), has become a feminist classic, cited in scholarly literature more than 57,000 times. The very first person the book mentions is Michel Foucault, one of the earliest postmodernists and currently the one most in vogue. Third-wave feminism is quite postmodern.

Conclusion

What is now called “identity politics” does not derive from Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement. Instead, it derives from a French pseudo-philosophy called postmodernism, which is largely derived from neo-Marxism.