Think identity politics is a problem for Labor? Wait ’til you see the Republicans

If there’s one thing right-wing commentatorsare clear on about Fatima Payman, it’s that she represents a case of identity politics — with all the inevitable condemnation that goes with it, because “identity politics” is thrown about with about as much care as “woke”. Indeed, they may as well be synonyms for the right.

According to one right-wing Labor voice, however, the Payman saga illustrates how Labor is the only bulwark between civilization and the chaos of identity politics.

“Progressivism worships at the altar of individualism,” Nick Dyrenfurth wrote for the Financial Review. “It cuts against the grain of Labor’s communitarian belief in a society distinguished by relative material equality, of social solidarity, and opposition to dog-eat-dog neoliberalism. Paradoxically, progressivism also fetishises identity politics by pitting one group against another group in a Hobbesian war against all. Only Labor’s collectivist democracy — on which the pledge to be bound by party decisions is based — can resist its siren song.”

Phew — thank goodness we’ve got plenty of ex-student pollies and factional powerbrokers protecting us.

While blather from News Corp circle jerkers on anything that can be shoehorned into the box marked “identity politics” has barely changed in a decade (are they already using AI for those pieces?), Dyrenfurth’s attempt to define Labor as the last best hope against identity politics is more interesting. He’s correct in contrasting collectivism with individualism in the debate over Payman’s departure from Labor — as I wrote last weekthe applause for Payman among progressives is the triumph of neoliberalism over some of its harshest critics.

But his juxtaposition of Labor’s collectivism with “dog-eat-dog neoliberalism” sits uneasily with Labor’s actual history — and particularly Labor’s status as the pre-eminent party of neoliberalism in Australia. It was Labor in the 1980s that liberalised markets, removed capital controls, reduced protectionism to an industrial footnote, embraced competition policy, and, via compulsory super, locked workers into capital markets and trade unions into capitalism. These were achievements only Labor could have delivered — the Liberal Party, as the party of business rather than competition, could never have delivered competition policy or compulsory super.

Labor did all that, true, while also pursuing the “social wage” of a safety net for all. But it was Labor that brought the core message of neoliberalism to Australia: each of us must maximise our value as producers and consumers, unrestrained by the dead hand of collectivism and unsupported by the inefficiencies of government economic controls — and thus free to take advantage of what we could extract from the market. Traditional social status — the blue-collar male, the breadwinner, the manufacturing worker, the small businessperson, the trade unionist, the primary caregiver — gave way to the only value that meant anything under neoliberalism: economic value.

Identity politics is the inevitable result — it’s what you get when you tell people their only value is economic. Even under good economic conditions at least half the population will be deemed below-average in the neoliberal value system. When the economy fails to deliver (via financial crises, recessions, depressions, wage stagnation, economic precarity, high interest rates), it pushes people to seek alternative forms of identity. Handily, we’ve also given everyone a device in their pockets that enables them to select which identities they want to form a community with. Lacking an identity of economic success, people search online for other forms of identity — and particularly ones that explain why they lack economic success, or which locates them as victims of more powerful groups.

That’s why, contrary to the claims of right-wing commentators, identity politics isn’t a peculiarly progressive phenomenon. The world’s greatest example of identity politics is Donald Trump’s support base of white middle- or working-class Americans who believe they’re the victims of a powerful “liberal” elite that is responsible for all social and economic problems and which aims to subjugate them. If Labor allegedly has a problem with identity politics, it’s nothing compared to what has happened to the Republican Party in the US, where identity politics has taken over the party completely to make it a vehicle for white victimhood.

And compared to white identity politics, other forms look pretty harmless. White supremacist groups are a huge security threat around the world; in the United States they have long since supplanted Islamist terror groups as the single greatest terror threat. And angry white people, hostile to groups they deem to be Other, on whom they pin responsibility for everything they resent, are much more likely to secure political power and enact their victimhood-generated plans of revenge and resentment — whether it’s Donald Trump or, on a more micro-level, the No vote in last year’s Voice referendum here.

Nor is Labor immune to identity politics from within — what is the Albanese government’s grand “Future Made In Australia” strategy but an exercise in identity politics, driven by nostalgia for the world abolished by Hawke and Keating, one of male-dominated blue-collar unionised manufacturing propped up by government support, in an era of an increasingly feminised, service-based and digital workforce?

Labor may retain some vestige of collectivism, but it invited identity politics in. And, as in other countries, once in, it infects everything it touches, no matter how people vote.