Gee’s Reviews > American Awakening: Identity Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Time > Status Update

Our understanding of management society—what, after 1989, we call globalism—is for the most part economic and cultural. We speak of global markets; and of the overwhelming power of Western culture, which corrodes then dissolves local, regional, and national cultures everywhere

Only a privileged hegemonic civilization that has cheated death dare dream that it has no duty to reproduce itself. False humility always rests on monstrous pride

National elections cannot be won without the support of white voters, and yet for Democrats, whites as a group are stained. White Democrats must declare their hatred of President Trump and those who voted for him. At home, at parties, in public gatherings, in the media, in our universities, white Democrats must offer evidence of their hatred. A word, a glance, a sentence of scorn and derision—these are required

Because in the democratic age nearly everyone will taste enough of the goods of life to know what it means to enjoy them, but almost no one will be secure enough in their possession of them that they will not fear losing what they have, anxiety is the great disease of our day.

However energetically society in general may strive to make all citizens equal and alike, the personal pride of each individual will always make him try to escape the common level, and he will form some inequality somewhere to his own profit.

The liberal politics of competence requires our never-ending difficult labor in a mixed world of purity and stain; the identity politics of innocence asks only that we cover ourselves with the fig leaf of innocence, and leave it to the state to allocate resources to the innocents and their causes.

In the quasi-religious world of identity politics, innocent victims alone are hallowed; they alone receive what could be called debt-point recognition, by which I mean credits in the invisible economy of transgression and innocence. The rest of us—however much our legal, economic, or social status might otherwise indicate—have no legitimate voice.