MAIN IDEA:

This is the book of a leftist professor who is nevertheless disgusted with identity politics, especially with its racist implementation, such as the segregation of children at school into different groups by race, preferential medical treatment by race, and so on. The author does not like the term “identity politics,” so he suggests a new one:” This body of ideas draws on a broad variety of intellectual traditions and is centrally concerned with the role that identity categories like race, gender, and sexual orientation play in the world. So I will, for the most part, refer to it as the “identity synthesis.” The author generally accepts the narrative of oppressors and victims but has serious concerns: “But sadly, the identity synthesis will ultimately prove counterproductive. Despite the good intentions of its proponents, it undermines progress toward genuine equality between members of different groups. In the process, it also subverts other goals we all have reasons to care about, like the stability of diverse democracies. Despite its allure, the identity synthesis turns out to be a trap.”

The author reviews the history of the development of identity ideology and its road to dominance in leftist thinking and, consequently, in all institutions controlled by the left: education, the legal profession, and government bureaucracies. He then analyses many flaws of this ideology, problems, and grievances it causes to the majority of the population that does not belong to the preferred identities and does not like to be inferior and discriminated against. The author understands that this could lead to an explosion, which could wipe out the existing bureaucratic state together with all the parasitic milieu that feeds off it: pseudo-educators, pseudo-scientists, and pseudo-intellectuals. So, the author offers a detailed plan for how to escape the identity trap without becoming “reactionary.”

MY TAKE ON IT:

It is interesting to observe the author who understands the dangers of identity ideology and its implementation in identity politics for the overall project of the Left to remove the independence of individuals by eliminating private property and placing everybody into some kind of governmental or quasi-governmental structure where their lives will be defined by decisions made by “intellectual” elite. The author obviously has difficulty understanding that it necessarily requires a totalitarian society and identity ideology, without which such a society cannot function. It does not really matter whether the identity is based on race, ethnicity, class, or education; the point is to divide the population into superior and inferior groups that will be too busy fighting for resource leftovers to notice that the lack of resources caused by elite’s waste of resources on multiple meaningless projects and elite’s preventing creation of resources by eliminating incentives for productive individuals. I guess the author, like many others before him, is on the road from left to right when he understands that individual freedom and society’s prosperity are possible only on the foundation of private property when resources are distributed, and their successful application provides a huge incentive for everybody capable of making such an application effectively and efficiently.