We Need New Stories: Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our Age of Discontent

by Nesrine Malik

If there is a criticism to be made of the left and how it has pursued identity politics, it is that it has done so, in the United States at least, in a tokenistic manner since the big electoral conversions of the 1960s. The loyalty of blacks and other people of colour to the left is taken for granted and gestured towards without there being any substantive engagement. Hillary Clinton’s buzzwords of ‘intersectionality’ and ‘privilege’ may have turned off some voters, but they failed to win over others. This has enabled the ‘All Lives Matter’ tactic of invoking universalism – which always means one thing, passiveness. And it is something which the right, the centre and the left agree on because identity is so subjective – you cannot hold on to it, you cannot achieve traction with it, it is too atomised for an ideology, whether that ideology is nationalism or socialism.