The extremist activism associated with identity politics and sexual/gender politics continues to poison the well. Recently, myself and others made the claim on social media that the ‘moral panic’ cult, backed up by the dubious statistical ‘crime decline’ narrative, has hampered effective research and the struggle against today’s largely hidden traditional and novel crimes, particularly the heinous crime of child sexual abuse. Originally placing itself in opposition to media sensationalism, racism, sexism, homophobia and ‘authoritarian populism’, the cult’s principle of minimal intervention has backfired badly, creating an atmosphere of inertia, ignorance and anxiety in which hidden crime proliferates and hostile, authoritarian reactions are more likely.
The recent child abuse scandal in the UK elicited immediate responses from self-appointed identitarian activists – individuals and small cabals who narcissistically imagine themselves as the intrepid leaders of their cultural constituencies. Rather than argue for the return of universal ethics, intelligent research and rational, effective politics and policies, they claim that hateful ‘white cis-het reactionaries’ – people like me and some other ultra-realist researchers, I suppose, along with gender-critical feminists – are all abusers at heart, care nothing about crime, harm or abused children, and simply want to take advantage of the current outcry to accuse gay, trans and ethnic minority communities of harbouring a disproportionate number of paedophiles. It’s not us lot, it’s you lot! The most infantile, yah-boo, whataboutist discourse imaginable.
Can you see what has happened here? When Kimberlé Crenshaw, with what we must assume was good intention, proposed an intersectional matrix of race, gender, sexuality and class, she hoped we could transcend hostile identity politics to create new solidarities, where each group might develop an empathetic understanding of the others’ modes of subjugation. But no. Paranoid activists, mimicking the zero-sum mindset of ethnonationalists, instead used the intersectional matrix to emphasise what they feel – yes, ‘feel’, not ‘know’ – is the undying, existential hatred felt towards them by the groups on the other ends of the intersectional axes. In an emotivist culture, of course, what people ‘feel’ assumes the elevated position of absolute knowledge beyond question.
The activists’ solution? They demand that we immediately subvert and abandon all traditional identities, institutions – including the family – and moral orders to become like them…. free-floating, undefined individuals, because they are the pioneers of a beautiful, free, progressive future. Now, be honest. Was that ever going to work, or was it the road to intersectional paranoia, the return of reaction and what Simon Winlow and and I once called ‘the society of enemies’ ? A society in which paranoid cultural groups imagine a world full of hostile others who don’t want them to exist, and immediately react with aggressive denunciations that can elicit and affirm precisely that assumption amongst the others they blame? This is the polar opposite of the ‘tolerance’ that liberals claimed to be one of their founding principles. Has post-structuralist identity politics bequeathed us with the most destructive, multipolar self-fulfilling prophecy we have ever known? Is this danger inherent in accelerated cultural progressivism in the midst of declining economies and institutional orders? We need to know.