The left keeps getting identity politics wrong – and the right is benefiting from that | Ash Sarkar

There are many things to be grateful to the musician Sam Fender for: reviving socially conscious songwriting, highlighting the brutality of austerity and calling for a ceasefire in Gaza before it was politically convenient. But, selfishly, the most important thing he’s done is take my spot of being yelled at on the internet. In a recent interview with the Sunday Times, Fender took aim at the prominence of identity politics compared to class.

“We are very good at talking about privileges – white, male or straight privilege. We rarely talk about class, though,” he said. “And that’s a lot of the reason that all the young lads are seduced by demagogues and psychos like Andrew Tate … People preach to some kid in a pit town in Durham who’s got f*** all and tell him he’s privileged? Then Tate tells him he’s worth something? It’s seductive.”

Why, for some people, has this proved controversial? Online backlash has included accusations that Fender is wrongly pitting minorities against the working class, that he’s justifying misogyny as a response to deprivation, and that he’s arguing against a phantom – no one is actually preaching to kids in pit towns that they’ve got white privilege. Some of these criticisms are fair: it’s not just white working-class boys from the north who are drawn to Tate, but kids of colour in inner-city London as well. But Fender has identified something true. We’ve witnessed the rise of a kind of identity politics that sidelines class. And the far right is benefiting from it.

Though the working class is not homogenous (shocker – it includes all kinds of ethnic and gender minorities!), identity politics has somehow been peeled off as a separate concern. Representing the interests of one is often seen as in conflict with doing the same for the other. The polling is stark – research from the Financial Times shows that at the same time that there was an increase in people thinking that the Democrats stand up for marginalised people (ie identity minorities), there was a plummet in those who thought they stand up for the working class.

In no small part, this is down to the right mobilising a kind of identity politics of their own: in talking about the white working class, anger about economic inequalities is redirected into racial grievance. It’s not wealth taxes, investment in education, or strengthening collective bargaining that will help the white working class: it’s getting minorities to shut up about injustice. But it’s also the case that the language of straight/white/male/cisgender privilege makes little room for the experiences of white men from working-class backgrounds. It sometimes seems like the only visibility for those who happen to be white, male and straight in the world of modern identity politics is as villains (see, the “men are trash” brand of Instagram feminism), or “allies” in political movements led by identity minorities. It’s not like these discourses come with an asterisk to signal that they don’t mean working-class men.

It’s worth pointing out that you’re much less likely to encounter privilege preaching, of the kind Fender identifies, in trade unions, housing and renters’ campaigns or the Palestine solidarity movement – where people are a) organised, b) focused on material harms, and c) not interacting with each other through the distorting prism of social media. . But we live in a time when membership of political parties and trade unions has been in decline for decades. What we encounter on the internet is, for most people, the main way we engage with politics. The weakening of collective politics is no accident; it’s by design.

As Margaret Thatcher once said: “Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul.” Our economic circumstances profoundly alter how we think and feel about ourselves. Tories never had a problem with class inequality. It was class consciousness that they wanted to destroy. Forty five years of aggressive neoliberal policymaking – breaking the back of the trade union movement, selling off council housing, and smashing industrial labour to bits – was intended to take a sledgehammer to the societal engines of collective action and solidarity. What’s been left behind is a patchwork of disconnected identities, unmoored from any sense of shared material conditions.

These disconnected groups now compete for validation of their struggles, which is often expressed through online animosity. Attention has always been a psychological wage; to be recognised by other people is to be told that you matter. But social media has turned that natural, human need for attention into a trap. Silicon Valley created a literal attention economy, whereby eyeballs are converted into ad revenue and delicious data ripe for harvesting. Feeling insecure and lonely drives us on to Instagram, TikTok and dating apps; such platforms intensify those emotions to keep us there for as long as possible.

Other users are our rivals. We’re competing with each other for followers, clout, status and a central position in the public conversation. What does this mean for politics? It means that, rather than looking at people who aren’t like us as potential opportunities for coalition-building, we perceive them as threats.

There has been a tendency to spend too much time ruminating on our own feelings. Whether it’s claiming all-white yoga classes are “traumatising” for people of colour, or insisting that a climate activist doing a choice bit of swearing brings “violence” into a space, or David Baddiel accusing an Arab-Australian poet of having erased and trampled on Jesus’ Jewishness for saying he looks like family, modern identity politics has set a comically low threshold for harm.

Competing in the attention economy incentivises us to turn molehills into mountains, and the cult of lived experience makes it hard to question proclamations of victimhood. The “I” has taken over identity politics: instead of striving for liberation from discrimination and material oppression, we just want to inflate the visibility value that’s attached to suffering. The retreat into subjective experience primes us for the politics of resentment, competitive grievance and weaponised victimhood. While the personal is political, the self is a dead-end if what you want is social change. It’s worth remembering the lesson of Narcissus: being too interested in your own reflection will kill you.

• Ash Sarkar is the author of Minority Rule: Adventures in the Culture War

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