Photo © Maryam T Ordoubadi  Norman G. Finkelstein received his doctorate from the Department of Politics at Princeton University. For many years he taught political theory and the Israel-Palestine conflict. He is the author of a number of books, among them Gaza: An Inquest Into Its Martyrdom; Method and Madness: The Hidden Story of Israel's Assaults on Gaza; Knowing Too Much: Why the American Jewish Romance with Israel is Coming to an End; What Gandhi Says: About Nonviolence, Resistance and Courage; “This Time We Went Too Far”: Truth and Consequences of the Gaza Invasion; Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History; and The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering.

Identity politics is as old as the White Cliffs of Dover and the Black Hills of Kentucky. Woke politics is political correctness 2.0. Cancel culture is the civic form of McCarthyism. Still, something has changed. It’s the enhanced salience of wokeness on the social landscape. Until recently, these cultural fads played out on the margins of society. They were pretty much confined to the college campus and the political left. Even on campus their influence can be exaggerated. No doubt, they affected the tenor of university life as multiculturalism and thought-policing became fixtures. The results could be bizarre. At Brooklyn College (City University of New York), where I taught from 1988 to 1992, the Multicultural Action Committee wouldn’t allow my Mother to speak about her experiences during the Nazi holocaust as her remarks might “hurt the feelings” of Jewish students. (Although firm in her belief in the necessity for a Jewish place of refuge, she had few kind words to spare for Israel.)

At DePaul University, where I taught from 2001 to 2007, it seemed as if every other month a new poster went up announcing a symposium on The Black Body. Leaving aside the creepy voyeurism, it wouldn’t have hurt if the university offered a few minority scholarships. The student body was whiter than. . . the White Cliffs of Dover. Flaky degree programs sprung up to propitiate the Gods of p.c. But the hard core of the higher education curriculum was left mostly unscathed. Postmodernism contaminated English Literature, Comparative Literature, Foreign Languages and Anthropology, but History proved immune to the contagion, while Economics and Political Science moved in the opposite direction as they became, for better or worse (probably worse), increasingly quantitative. Although lower-tier philosophy departments reduced course offerings to Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault and Derrida (taught by professors weaned on Philosophy for Dummies), the curriculum in serious departments stayed redoubtably austere, as befitted the discipline. Mathematics and science were off-limits.

But woke politics and cancel culture are now ubiquitous. Overflowing the walls of the ivory tower, they have saturated the airwaves and social media. What’s going on? The short answer is the Democratic Party is now wide a-woke. Its mass base was once the trade union movement. The stirring keynote speech at the 1984 Democratic National Convention was delivered by Mario Cuomo, father of former Left-bashing New York State governor Andrew Cuomo. Invoking the theme “A Tale of Two Cities,” Cuomo sounded like a prefiguration of Bernie Sanders as he excoriated, to repeated tumultuous applause, class privilege—“the royalty and the rabble”—and spoke in the name of “those people who work for a living because they have to, not because some psychiatrist told them it’s a convenient way to fill the interval between birth and eternity.”

However, the Party has since metamorphosed, or degenerated, into a stronghold of identity politics as, on the one hand, the industrial heartland hollowed out and an ever-decreasing fraction of American workers belonged to trade unions (down from one-third of the labor force in the 1960s to one-tenth today) while, on the other hand, the party more deeply embraced the rich and super-rich as the demands of the impotent working class. could be safely ignored. But every mass political party needs a mass base. The Democratic Party substituted “oppressed minorities” of every imaginable ilk—ethnic, sexual, whatever. The badge of progressive politics has ceased to be solidarity with the working class. Indeed, workers have been largely written off as 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton deposited them in the “basket of deplorables.” (A chunk of the white working class eventually found a new home in Donald Trump’s ostensibly more welcoming Republican Party.) In effect, the Democratic Party has thrown its formidable institutional weight behind the once-marginal identity politics movement. From a silly sideshow, it has entered center stage in American political life. The identity politics of the left has converged and overlapped, if imperfectly, with the identity politics of the Democratic Party. Hitherto vacuum-packed in an empty tin can, the hollowness of identity politics now echoes across a vast political abyss.

Photo © Maryam T Ordoubadi  Norman G. Finkelstein received his doctorate from the Department of Politics at Princeton University. For many years he taught political theory and the Israel-Palestine conflict. He is the author of a number of books, among them Gaza: An Inquest Into Its Martyrdom; Method and Madness: The Hidden Story of Israel's Assaults on Gaza; Knowing Too Much: Why the American Jewish Romance with Israel is Coming to an End; What Gandhi Says: About Nonviolence, Resistance and Courage; “This Time We Went Too Far”: Truth and Consequences of the Gaza Invasion; Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History; and The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering.

Identity politics is as old as the White Cliffs of Dover and the Black Hills of Kentucky. Woke politics is political correctness 2.0. Cancel culture is the civic form of McCarthyism. Still, something has changed. It’s the enhanced salience of wokeness on the social landscape. Until recently, these cultural fads played out on the margins of society. They were pretty much confined to the college campus and the political left. Even on campus their influence can be exaggerated. No doubt, they affected the tenor of university life as multiculturalism and thought-policing became fixtures. The results could be bizarre. At Brooklyn College (City University of New York), where I taught from 1988 to 1992, the Multicultural Action Committee wouldn’t allow my Mother to speak about her experiences during the Nazi holocaust as her remarks might “hurt the feelings” of Jewish students. (Although firm in her belief in the necessity for a Jewish place of refuge, she had few kind words to spare for Israel.)

At DePaul University, where I taught from 2001 to 2007, it seemed as if every other month a new poster went up announcing a symposium on The Black Body. Leaving aside the creepy voyeurism, it wouldn’t have hurt if the university offered a few minority scholarships. The student body was whiter than. . . the White Cliffs of Dover. Flaky degree programs sprung up to propitiate the Gods of p.c. But the hard core of the higher education curriculum was left mostly unscathed. Postmodernism contaminated English Literature, Comparative Literature, Foreign Languages and Anthropology, but History proved immune to the contagion, while Economics and Political Science moved in the opposite direction as they became, for better or worse (probably worse), increasingly quantitative. Although lower-tier philosophy departments reduced course offerings to Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault and Derrida (taught by professors weaned on Philosophy for Dummies), the curriculum in serious departments stayed redoubtably austere, as befitted the discipline. Mathematics and science were off-limits.

But woke politics and cancel culture are now ubiquitous. Overflowing the walls of the ivory tower, they have saturated the airwaves and social media. What’s going on? The short answer is the Democratic Party is now wide a-woke. Its mass base was once the trade union movement. The stirring keynote speech at the 1984 Democratic National Convention was delivered by Mario Cuomo, father of former Left-bashing New York State governor Andrew Cuomo. Invoking the theme “A Tale of Two Cities,” Cuomo sounded like a prefiguration of Bernie Sanders as he excoriated, to repeated tumultuous applause, class privilege—“the royalty and the rabble”—and spoke in the name of “those people who work for a living because they have to, not because some psychiatrist told them it’s a convenient way to fill the interval between birth and eternity.”

However, the Party has since metamorphosed, or degenerated, into a stronghold of identity politics as, on the one hand, the industrial heartland hollowed out and an ever-decreasing fraction of American workers belonged to trade unions (down from one-third of the labor force in the 1960s to one-tenth today) while, on the other hand, the party more deeply embraced the rich and super-rich as the demands of the impotent working class. could be safely ignored. But every mass political party needs a mass base. The Democratic Party substituted “oppressed minorities” of every imaginable ilk—ethnic, sexual, whatever. The badge of progressive politics has ceased to be solidarity with the working class. Indeed, workers have been largely written off as 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton deposited them in the “basket of deplorables.” (A chunk of the white working class eventually found a new home in Donald Trump’s ostensibly more welcoming Republican Party.) In effect, the Democratic Party has thrown its formidable institutional weight behind the once-marginal identity politics movement. From a silly sideshow, it has entered center stage in American political life. The identity politics of the left has converged and overlapped, if imperfectly, with the identity politics of the Democratic Party. Hitherto vacuum-packed in an empty tin can, the hollowness of identity politics now echoes across a vast political abyss.