Anis Shivani ticks pretty much every box of the SJW ontology of identify, yet refuses to give up his Enlightenment heritage, deploying, reason, argument and merit based analysis to demonstrate that the left has already lost.
Responding to what he perceives as the ‘rise of white nationalism’, Salon writer Anis Shivani has penned a remarkable essay, exploring the fundamental dimensions of identity politics and ‘separatism, or the privileging of biological destiny’. ‘Liberals,’ Shivani writes, ‘have been on a relentless mission to transform people’s souls — to rid them of impure ideas about race and sexuality — for exactly the period of time that neoliberalism has deprived them of actual power to do anything about class inequality’.
The hyperfocus on biology and sexuality has given rise to an ideology that has crippled the left and turned them towards the totalitarian consequences that necessarily arise whenever the state (or its actors) tries to tell people how they must think and feel, rather than how they are required to conduct themselves in public. Calling identity politics ‘pernicious’ and related terms like intersectionality ‘terms of art’, Shivani goes on the detail five ways in which the central philosophy and ethos of the left is failing to quell the cultural dominance of the ‘alt-right’. He is particularly concerned that the younger generation of left-leaning thinkers are incapable of thinking beyond the boundaries of a narrowly defined ideology, which represents danger to the continued existence of the left as a whole.
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