Identity politics is modern communism

Communism failed to smash the state, so identity politics tries to smash the society.

How progressive politics unpicked Western Enlightenment one dangerous idea at a time

Every aspect of post-pandemic policy has become dominated by identity politics. The question is where this leads.

Key to identity politics is the right of individuals to identify however they choose, even if that means grammatically incorrect pronouns or irreversible medical interventions on minors. What is missing is any serious concept of the common good.

Ordinarily, if A identifies in a way that B rejects, B can still accept A’s right to choose. But when refusal to affirm that identity becomes a social, professional, or criminal offence, the purpose is no longer liberty. It is the enforced subordination of shared reality to private will.

Identity politics does not merely expand freedom. It systematically dismantles the shared understandings that make a free society possible.

Identity politics represents the acceleration of contradiction and therefore the manifestation of modern communism. It is destroying our liberal democratic traditions, and it is undoing the very fabric of Enlightenment thinking. Not only is it destroying the West from within, but it is making excuses for otherwise abhorrent human rights abuses elsewhere. It is hypocrisy in the extreme.

My latest in The Spectator Australia, Identity politics is modern communism.