Identity Politics and Labor’s Forgotten People

Peter Baldwin delivered this speech in April to launch Labor’s Forgotten People: The Triumph of Identity Politics, by Michael Thompson (Connor Court, 2019, $29.95).

I first got to know the author of this book, Michael Thompson, in the late 1980s, when I was the federal MP for the seat of Sydney, which includes the central part of the city—the CBD and adjoining suburbs.

For a time, Michael worked for me as a research officer focusing on proposals for union-based industry superannuation funds. We both saw this as a priority since it seemed to offer the potential to mobilise an immense pool of funds to pursue both social and economic goals.

Michael’s background was highly unusual for someone working in an MP’s office. Even then, the great majority of people in jobs like that followed a familiar trajectory: university, in some social science or humanities course, maybe economics, typically an involvement in the student politics sandpit, then maybe on to a research or organiser position in a union, or a progressive NGO, or straight into a political job with an MP or in the party organisation—a process of being thoroughly inculcated into what nowadays is often termed the “political class”.

Michael’s prior background was as a construction worker, actually a member of the famous, or notorious, Builders Labourers Federation—now absorbed into the CFMEU. He undertook the demanding and dangerous working on large building projects, getting up on the scaffolding, doing the rigging. Only later did he take on tertiary studies, graduating in economics and law, and more recently, doing a masters degree in political science.

I want to stress how unusual this was then—and even more so now. What—a union official, or a Labor political operative—coming straight “off the tools”? How extraordinary!

We see a related phenomenon in the Labor Party’s grass-roots structures, the local party branches, especially in areas like my old bailiwick, the inner city, where working-class people have been largely displaced by middle-class activists, due in no small part, I have to admit, to the efforts of people like me and my old parliamentary colleague Peter Crawford, who I see here today.

Given this background, it is not surprising that Michael takes a somewhat different, and far less benign, attitude in this important book to the embrace by the Labor Party, and Left-liberal forces more generally, of the ideology that we term “identity politics”.

With the collapse of socialism as any sort of viable or credible project, identity politics has become the essence, and central priority, of what is generally seen as contemporary progressive ideology. As someone who was consistently affiliated with the Labor Left over a long political career, I see this as a tragic misdirection.

What is identity politics? In my view it is an unfortunate mutation of what in earlier years were thoroughly worthwhile and noble movements to achieve racial equality and women’s rights and to end discrimination based on sexual orientation.

It involves an insistence that we all must be seen, first and foremost, as members of an ever-growing set of intersecting categories based on race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, “fatness”, or whatever. This contrasts starkly with the universalist progressive view, born in the Radical Enlightenment, that stressed our common humanity and was seen as constitutive of progressive politics when I first got involved in the early 1970s.

All of these identities are either fixed, such as skin colour, or quasi-fixed. By quasi-fixed, I mean things like gender, which the ideologues distinguish from biological sex, which is obviously fixed, whereas this thing called gender is much more fluid, as they like to say: what we identify as, what we think we are.

Whether fixed or quasi-fixed, these features define who we are, most importantly, as oppressor or oppressed. Some identities are inherently oppressive, especially what the ideologues in the universities have taken to calling “whiteness”, or being “heteronormative” (don’t you love the terminology!); while others are inevitably oppressed, such as non-whiteness, or being a “person of colour”, transgender, gay, and so on.

Closely linked to identity politics is the system of thought control we have come to term “political correctness”, which polices the boundaries of what is sayable whenever it cuts across questions of identity. I think of the PC mindset as the compliance and enforcement arm of identity politics.

In the universities especially, you can get into serious trouble for using the wrong gender pronoun. In America, even some liberal academics are feeling intimidated. I recently read an article titled “I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Students Terrify Me”.

This is spreading out beyond the universities into the media, especially social media, all levels of the education system, the public sector and politics, and even the corporate sector including, most disturbingly, the big social media companies who have become increasingly active policing what can be said in the digital “public square”.

Those who transgress are vilified for a variety of “phobias” or “isms”. Career destruction can occur overnight, irrespective of achievement and prestige. A stunning example is the case of Sir Tim Hunt, a British molecular biologist awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine, who was stripped of all his academic and research posts within days after a twitterstorm based on a misreport of an innocent self-deprecating joke that was deemed anti-woman, in a speech where he actually strongly affirmed the importance of women in science.

One aspect of this intellectual culture that I find particularly sickening is the renewed obsession with race. The old Left, for all its faults, had this essentially right. Race was something we should aspire to transcend, to move to a state where people are judged, as Martin Luther King said, by the content of their character, not the colour of their skin. Well, forget about that. Contemporary progressivism is absolutely obsessed about race, determined to perpetuate racial distinctions and racial grievances.

We normally think of PC as a set of restrictions on what can be said when it conflicts with the ever-changing identity politics ideology. However, it is also remarkably permissive when it comes to “oppressor” identities.

Here is a stunning example, from “our” ABC, a program I happened to hear on Radio National titled “Wrong to be White” that featured two academics, Alana Lentin from Western Sydney University and Joanna Cruickshank from Deakin, who specialise in a new academic field called “Critical Race Studies”, with a sub-field known as—I kid you not—“Whiteness Studies”. The moderator was Scott Stephens, who runs the ABC’s religion and ethics website. Halfway through the broadcast Scott Stephens said this:

The great moral debility about being white is that people have wilfully chosen the trinkets and accoutrements of the accretions of power and privilege over a much more fundamental bondedness with other human beings … I mean that is, if we were speaking in a theological register we would call that a tremendous or even radical sin.

So, you see, white people are just plain bad, just miserable sinners according to these Calvinist fundamentalists of identity politics, though at least the Calvinists allow the possibility of sincere repentance and redemption.

What are these people thinking? They certainly don’t seem to aspire to a future of racial harmony. This kind of “scholarship” has effectively licensed a torrent of denunciation of “white people” on social media that, in contrast to the treatment of such solecisms as using a wrong gender pronoun, has no consequences for the perpetrator.

Among the more bizarre effects of the progressive embrace of identity politics has been the emergence of an effective alliance between the Left and radical Islam across the Western world. To take one egregious example, the British Labour Party is now headed by Jeremy Corbyn, who is happy to talk about his “friends” in the terrorist organisations Hamas and Hezbollah, both of which have openly expressed genocidal intentions towards the Jewish race, explicitly in Article 7 of the Hamas Charter.

Progressives used to typically support secularism, in some cases aggressively so. Religions were treated as belief systems whose tenets could be freely debated. Now, religion is treated as an aspect of identity, with oppressor religions and oppressed religions. Oppressed religions, especially Islam, must be protected, and not just by the justified protection of their adherents against harassment or discrimination, but by increasing restrictions on frank criticism of the religion itself, labelled as “Islamophobia”. The European Court of Human Rights just issued an extraordinary ruling to this effect.

Then there is the treatment by progressives of those born into Islamic cultures who defect from Islam. Take a look at a video on YouTube of a speech to the American Humanist Association by the young Pakistani-American Sarah Haider, who founded the American Association of Ex-Muslims. She describes how she expected vilification from Muslim groups for her apostasy, but was astonished to receive equally strident criticism from her erstwhile colleagues on the progressive Left. She was denounced as a “house Arab”, an “Uncle Tom”, and most sinister, a “native informant”, a term cropping up in academia lately.

I find all this incredibly retrograde. The Left I got involved with fifty years ago certainly had its faults, but it had a genuinely universalist vision, to whom the idea of balkanising societies along identitarian lines would have been anathema. The late Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm made exactly this point in a speech in 1992.

And, except for the admittedly significant communist and pro-communist element, it was resolutely in favour of free speech, including the freedom to debate religion. The idea that a religious affiliation was an aspect of identity, and therefore off limits for criticism, would have seemed utterly strange.

What about the working class, the focus of this book and also of Michael’s earlier book Labor Without Class? The ideologues of identity politics occasionally make a perfunctory gesture to it, as when they add “classism” to the standard litany of isms and phobias. And, of course, the Labor Party here and other social-democratic parties around the world generally retain a close affiliation to the trade unions and depend heavily on them for funds and organisational support in elections.

There is clear evidence, especially from Europe, of a growing alienation between working people and these parties. In one country after another—France, Germany, Italy, Austria and others—we see the traditional working-class base of social-democratic parties haemorrhage to the emerging parties of the nationalist-populist Right.

In an important book, National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy, published in late 2018, the political scientists Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin report on research that provides important insights into what is bothering ordinary people throughout Europe and explains the rapid emergence of what they term “national populist” parties in one country after another.

In a nutshell, the research shows that in all the surveyed countries high proportions of the non-elite population believe that none of the mainstream parties reflect their concerns. In an Ipsos-MORI poll conducted in 2017 that asked whether traditional politicians “do not care about people like me”, the proportions agreeing ranged from 45 per cent in Sweden to an extraordinary 78 per cent in France (and 67 per cent in the US).

Michael Thompson states that, in the longer term, and given the right sort of challenger, we could see a similar development here—that the Labor Party could face an existential threat. A sobering, if somewhat counter-intuitive, thought on the eve of a likely Labor federal election victory.

Peter Baldwin was Minister for Employment and Education Services in the Hawke government, and Minister for Social Security in the Keating government.