In recent years, a new kind of narrative has been visible in public debate, one which did not exist twenty or thirty years ago. As Douglas Murray (2020: 2) comments: ‘The interpretation of the world through the lens of “social justice”, “identity group politics” and “intersectionalism” is probably the most audacious and comprehensive effort since the end of the Cold War at creating a new ideology’. In this piece, the constituent elements of this new ideology are described.
A snapshot of news stories from the latter part of 2022 and the beginning of 2023, when I first started to think and write about this illustrates the extent to which political and social debate has changed. Since then, the examples have proliferated including, most recently, the police response to the murder of Henry Nowak in Southampton in 2026.
These examples represent practical manifestations of the influence of a new ideology. Along with traditional news stories involving inflation, the cost of living, the state of public services and strikes – various events involving issues of identity, discrimination and social justice were prominent in the UK at the end of 2022 and beginning of 2023. In November, the footballer Beth Mead was taken to task for saying in an interview that the lack of diversity in the England squad was a ‘coincidence’. Meanwhile, in the men’s game, English footballers continued to ‘take the knee’ at the start of matches in support of Black Lives Matter – the idea if not the organisation – and, before and during the World Cup in Qatar, European football organisations, players and pundits were vocal in their condemnation of the forbidding of same sex relationships in the host nation. December saw the broadcasting of the Netflix documentary in which Meghan Markle and the King’s youngest son Harry repeated their allegation that racism is rife in the British media and maybe even in the Royal Family itself. A few weeks before, an elderly royal aide – Lady Susan Hussey – resigned after widespread publicity was given to a claim byNgozi Fulani, the head of a domestic abuse charity, that she was subject to racism at a Buckingham Palace function.
In December too, the transgender issue hit the headlines when a judge in Scotland ruled that transgender women with a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) can legally be defined as women when it comes to representation on public bodies. Very soon afterwards, the Scottish Parliament passed legislation that introduced a system of self-declaration for obtaining a GRC replacing the need for a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria and reducing the qualifying age from 18 to 16. In the early part of 2023, the UK Government blocked the bill (the first time they had intervened in Scottish legislation since devolution was introduced in the late 1990s) on the grounds that it was in conflict with other UK-wide legislation. The controversy over the bill was then further heightened when it became mixed up with the case of a man who, having been charged with rape, changed gender and attended the trial as a woman.
These type of news stories, centring on race, gender and sexual orientation, are now common currency. They reflect the social and political influence a new ideology has had over the past decade or so. Although it began life in universities, this ideology has spread into the wider population as graduates, particularly from social science and humanities disciplines, have gone on to occupy key positions within the private and public sectors and most notably the media and television more generally. This new ideology is much easier to grasp than the ideology of postmodernism – from which, as we shall see, the new ideology extensively draws – which was difficult to grasp and offered no goal to aim for.
There is a case for saying that this new ideology now provides, sometimes in a diluted form perhaps, the dominant ideology in many countries in the West. Activism based on its principles, whether virtually through social media or through more conventional means – for instance, the toppling of the statutes of those linked with the slave trade to the protests of the Black Lives Matter movement which became particularly prevalent following the events of May 2020 when an African American George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis – has had a considerable impact on political debate in the UK and elsewhere. Concepts deriving from the ideology – such as ‘white privilege’, ‘unconscious bias, ‘toxic masculinity’, ‘trigger warnings’, ‘decolonising the curriculum’ and, most common of all, ‘diversity, inclusion and equality’– have become mainstream and yet were virtually unheard of as little as a decade ago.
What Should We Call It?
This new ideology has been defined in a variety of ways. It should be noted that this labelling has been undertaken predominantly by those who are hostile to the ideology. The dominance of negative voices in definitional terms is mainly a product of the fact that adherents of the new ideology do not seek to defend the general abstract principles they utilise – which they, perhaps invisibly, accept as given (McHale, 2015: 172) – but rather focus on applying them to particular jurisdictions such as critical race theory, queer theory or postcolonialism and so on. As a totality, the body of thought espoused has been labelled as ‘social justice’ (Murray, 2020; Pluckrose and Lindsay, 2020), or ‘woke’ (Retanwald, 2020; Williams, 2022), or ‘left liberal’ (Cobley, 2018) or just ‘identity politics’ (Fukuyama, 2018).
None of these labels capture accurately enough what this new ideology is about. To use the label ‘social justice’ is misleading because that is a concept, like many in political philosophy, which is ‘essentially contested’ (Gallie, 1955/6). At a simplistic level, of course, everyone is in favour of social justice. No one would want to argue for social injustice. What matters is what is meant by social justice, how it is constituted. And what constitutes justice is a matter of some dispute. One can, for instance, subscribe to a left or a right leaning account of social justice, as the American political philosophers John Rawls and Robert Nozick did, memorably, in the 1970s (Rawls, 1971; Nozick, 1974). Nozick seeks to justify, in response to Rawls, inequality (clearly at odds with the emphasis on equality in the new ideology being defined here) and even Rawls’s left-leaning egalitarian theory of justice makes little reference to identity groups. As a result, Rawls is not a thinker who is much mentioned as an ally by contemporary left-leaning identitarians. In other words, in order to properly examine the new ideology, we need some content to be able to indicate, even at a basic level, what kind of social justice we are talking about. Pluckrose and Lindsay (2020) get round this problem by capitalising Social Justice to distinguish the account of it provided by the new ideology from the concept in general. This is sensible, but a little confusing and does not hint at the content.
To use the label ‘woke’, similarly, is not an optimum option. It is true that woke does have a neutral meaning denoting someone who, in the words of the Oxford English Dictionary, is ‘alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice’. To be woke is to be regarded, in this interpretation, as having a special skill, not possessed by everyone, of recognising and articulating (of being awake to) the, often hidden, relationships of oppression that bedevil society. Rectenwald (2020: 2) equates it with the Christian notion of being saved so that ‘being woke involves redressing transgressions through repentance and reformation’, although he also recognises that being woke is about personal salvation at the level of the individual but also involves a ‘collateral commitment to make reparations for social and political injustice – to help make a better (more just) world’, where justice is defined in terms of group identity.
Using the label ‘woke’ as a definitional fiat, however, remains problematic. For one thing, it is a term that has often been used in a derogatory sense by its opponents, to describe ‘hectoring’ and ‘moral grandstanding’ by a pretentious cultural elite and is now, because of its negative connotations, not a label that most adherents of the ideology would accept (Williams, 2022: 15, 26-8). Instead, it is often presented as a right-wing invention (Hirsch, 2019) – although, as this post will argue, it is not necessary to be right wing to be ‘anti-woke’. For another, the word woke has a more specific historical usage as a rallying call, first made in the 1920s, for black people, particularly in the United States, to be aware of racial injustice and threats from white people. It was not, in other words, unlike the twenty first century version, a label that is encouraged in white culture and which has a much wider coverage including many different forms of social discrimination (Williams, 2022: 23-5).
It is common, particularly amongst political commentators, to describe the new ideology as liberal left. It is easy to see why this label is used by some. In the first place, the new ideology is associated with social liberalism (in contrast to social conservatism) in the sense that it espouses a number of what it sees as progressive causes such as racial justice, transgender and gay rights and gender equality. Second, to complicate things even further, in the political vernacular used in the United States, ‘liberal’ has left-wing connotations not present elsewhere, and particularly in Europe.
To use the ‘liberal’ label in describing the new ideology is, however, misleading because some of its major themes are antithetical to principles which, in the lexicon of political philosophy, are fundamental to liberal political theory. In the first place, liberals value the objective rationalism of the Enlightenment and the capacity of science and reason to discover objective truths. This optimism, however, is at odds with the new ideology’s – postmodern inspired – scepticism of universal objective truth. For the liberal, too, the individual is sovereign, and the identity of individuals – their race, gender or sexual orientation – should be irrelevant. In other words, for the liberal, a universal approach is mandated where people should be treated equally regardless of their identity. This was the central argument of the liberal-inspired Civil Rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s and is illustrated by Martin Luther King’s famous speech in which he said, ‘I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character’.
For the liberal, then, identities are seen as a tool of oppression as indeed they were so used by many racist colonialists in the past who sought to label people of colour as somehow inferior to white people. For the new ideology, on the other hand, identities are put back on the agenda and are seen as a tool of liberation and not as an impediment to it. According to the new ideology, not to mention the skin colour of a person – to adopt a position of ‘colour blindness’ – is now tantamount to racism. This means that, in the new ideology, there is a tendency to judge people by their characteristics and not, as the liberal would have it, the content of their character (see, for example, Applebaum, 2010).
Finally, some seek to describe the new ideology by using the catch all term ‘identity politics’. This label does capture something of great importance in the new ideology. Group identities are regarded as central to understanding societal dynamics, whether they be based on race, gender or sexual orientation as well as disability and size. Within this group framework, the individual is subsumed. A fundamental feature of the new ideology is therefore a belief in the centrality of identity politics.
However, defining the new ideology merely in terms of ‘identity politics’ is not optimum. This is because identity politics is not the exclusive property of the new ideology. It is possible to conceive, for instance, of a very different form of identity politics – centring, for instance, on national or community identity or on white identity – which is completely at odds with the new ideology’s focus on groups – based on race, gender and sexual orientation. To illustrate this, note that the so-called Identitarian movement is a contemporary far-right nationalist organisation championing white European peoples and culture (Mudde, 2019).
It is tempting to equate the ideological promotion of identity politics with advocacy, or at least acceptance, of a pluralist theory of the state. This is an empirical theory (describing the state as it actually is rather than how it is deemed it ought to be) associated above all with the work of the American political scientist Robert Dahl (1963, 1971). The pluralist theory of the state, which is probably still the dominant position within political science, holds that the existence of, often competing, groups is a natural feature of all societies. The state’s role is to mediate between these groups and government outputs are the result of group pressure. What governments do will be a mirror image of the balance of power of groups within society. In pluralist theory, the power structure in Western liberal democracies is diffuse and fragmented. All groups will be able to get their voices heard and most groups will be able to influence public policy outcomes at least to some extent. It is this openness to group pressure that, for the pluralists, provides the democratic character of Western states.
The advent of identity politics has certainly created an extremely adversarial form of hyper-pluralism. However, the pluralist model of the state is not the one subscribed to by the new ideology we are seeking to define. Rather, the Marxist or elitist theory of the state, in which power is concentrated, is a more accurate representation (see Dryzek and Dunleavy, 2009). This is because the new ideology postulates the existence of a number of dominant and subordinate, or marginalised, groups based on characteristics such as race, gender, sexual orientation and body size (Bernstein, 2005). These power hierarchies are maintained by systems of oppression whether centring on white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity (a concept which assumes that there are only two genders and that sexual and marital relationships ought to be between people from opposite genders) or cisnormativity (a belief that people whose gender matches the body they were born with is a desirable and normal state of affairs).
According to the identitarian approach adopted by the new ideology, an individual’s life chances are determined largely by the possession of a particular characteristic or characteristics with people of colour, women, gays, and transexuals destined to be subordinated to, and oppressed by, people who are white, straight and male. The commonly heard conversational preface – ‘speaking as a gay man’ or ‘speaking as a black person’ and so on – is a reflection of the central importance that identity has for advocates of the ideology. Justice for the oppressed can be achieved by genuine equality but this can only come about as a result of radical, and perhaps even revolutionary, action that challenges and overthrows existing power structures and the dominant language used to reinforce them.
Taking on board the problems associated with the definitions suggested in this chapter, I would label the new ideology under review as the social justice left (SJL). This, albeit quite simplistic, label, has a number of advantages over its rivals. First, it provides some content to the social justice claims being made. Although not, as we shall see, without some problems, the content of the ideology owes more to Marx than to liberalism. Second, using the label SJL avoids reference to the value-laden term woke. Thirdly, our preferred definition rules out some forms of identity politics associated with the political right.
There are two additional factors that need to be explored in this definitional exercise. First, what the label SJL doesn’t convey is the, considerable, extent to which the ideology draws upon postmodern principles. Second, there is some dispute in the literature about the influence of Marxism on the new ideology. Since the new ideology has been defined here as the social justice left, establishing its Marxist credentials is important.
The Postmodern Origins
Postmodernism is a label given to a body of thought that emerged mainly in the 1960s. It contains a wide variety of (initially mainly French) theorists in a wide variety of disciplines, not just in the social sciences but in art, architecture, and cultural studies too (see, for instance, McHale, 2015; Colgan and Hicks, 2020; Harvey, 2000). Central figures were Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Francois Lyotard. Postmodernism is difficult to define – because of the multidisciplinary homes of its exponents and because various different strands of thought have been placed under the postmodern umbrella – but, at its heart, the postmodern attitude, as defined by its French exponents at least, points out the necessary limitations in the project to master the nature of reality. It is therefore a direct challenge to the modernist approach.
The modernist approach, influenced by the Enlightenment, is essentially a belief in the omnipotence of universal reason; a confidence in the ability of reason to penetrate to the essential truth of things and to achieve progress; and a foundationalist ontology which argues ‘that a real world exists independently of our knowledge of it’ (Marsh and Stoker, 2002: 11). Postmodernism therefore represents a challenge to the confidence exhibited by Enlightenment ideologies such as liberalism and socialism.
Postmodernism, then, suggests that the search for ultimate answers is a futile exercise as the world is too fractured, too diverse and too arbitrary to be understood by the grand explanatory schemes or metanarratives so loved in modernist thought. Instead, difference and variety are celebrated. Moreover, an anti-foundationalist ontology is promoted whereby the world cannot be objectively observed but is socially constructed in a variety of ways. That is, postmodernism denies the modernist claim that there is a distinction between the objectively true and the subjective experience of individuals.
The postmodern age is therefore equated with the end of a theory of knowledge; that is, postmodernists adopt a relativistic attitude arguing that all knowledge claims, all political and moral commitments, are as good as any other. Moreover, in an argument particularly associated with Foucault (2002), the dominant knowledge claims, or discourses, in any society are a product of power in that they serve the interests of a dominant group or groups and act against an oppressed group, or groups. Significantly for the development of SJL ideology, this means that the categories and distinctions we make serve the interests of the powerful creating a hierarchy in which there is an oppressed and an oppressor. Peterson (2019: 310) explains this outlook: ‘There are “women” only because men gain by excluding them. There are “males” and “females” only because members of that more heterogeneous group benefit by excluding the tiny minority of people whose biological sexuality is amorphous’.
One reading of postmodernism is as a politics of despair. As such, it has been criticized for being overly destructive. As Hay (2002: 217) points out, ‘by confining itself to deconstruction postmodernism never risks exposing itself to a similar critique by putting something in place of that it deconstructs’. In other words, postmodernism is criticized for its oppositional nature. In Gamble’s words (2000: 116), it offers ‘no guidance as to what should be done about all the modernist processes which are in full flow’. Dowding (2016: 23) puts it in even more strident terms commenting that: ‘I consider postmodernists to be hypocrites who make verbal claims, but make no attempt to live their lives by them, preferring the comforts provided by the Enlightenment and its canons of reasoning’.
It is not surprising that the scepticism enshrined in postmodernism occurred when it did, in the second half of a century in which confidence in progress had been shattered by two world wars and the rise of murderous totalitarian regimes in Germany and the Soviet Union. Not insignificantly, the role of science – the gold standard of Enlightenment thinking – in facilitating twentieth century atrocities – the use of the atomic bomb against Japan being the prime example – was increasingly being questioned.
Postmodernism and the Social Justice Left
The anti-Enlightenment ethos of postmodernism has been extremely influential in many contemporary ideologies. Environmentalism, for instance, incorporates the growing scepticism about the human ability to master and control nature. The SJL, too, is to a large extent derived from postmodernism. From postmodernism, it has adopted a scepticism of the existence of objective truth leaning instead to the position that knowledge is socially constructed and must be viewed in the context of power structures. Dominant Enlightenment ideas in the West – such as scientific rationalism – are therefore viewed with scepticism since they are held to serve the interests of dominant groups within society.
Postmodernism is, above all, concerned with deconstructing, problematizing and responding to existing ideas rather than providing a meta-narrative of its own. Such a negative exercise was never likely to be influential beyond the university environment. In the 1980s and 1990s, though, some aspects of it were adapted, initially by academics, to develop a new ideology defined here as the SJL. This new ideology has adapted, or gone beyond, postmodernism and put it in the service of a goal-oriented programme aimed not at deconstructing the world but at creating a better one. Pluckrose and Lindsay (2020) describe this as ‘applied postmodernism’. So, for example, queer theory is based exclusively on postmodern principles (McCann and Monaghan, 2020) and in other theories – postcolonialism (Quayson, 2000), disability and fat studies (Goodley, 2016; Rothblum and Solovay, 2009), gender studies (Richardson and Robinson, 2020) and critical race theory (Delgado and Stenfancic, 2017; McIntosh, 1989) – postmodern principles are dominant.
Central to all these theories is the postmodern derived scepticism of knowledge claims and their role in serving the interests of some groups at the expense of others. The new theories, though, all contain a call to action; that these power structures, benefiting some and disadvantaging others, are objectively true and normatively undesirable, and must be dismantled in order to promote social justice. In other words, a social justice metanarrative was added to replace the negativity and despair inherent in traditional postmodernism.
The legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw (who played a leading role in developing the important SJL concept of intersectionality – see below) sets out this revision (some would say mutation) of traditional postmodernism when she writes that, although the social construction of meaning inherent in postmodernism is ‘generally sound’ this is not to say that ‘a category such as race and gender…has no significance in our world. On the contrary, a large and continuing project for subordinated people – and indeed, one of the projects for which postmodern theories have been very helpful in thinking about – is the way power has clustered around certain categories and is exercised against others’ (Crenshaw, 1991: 1297).
Crucially important aspects of this applied postmodernism relate to language. SJL scholars and activists take on board the importance that traditional postmodernists attach to language as a constructor of reality. This is particularly associated with Derrida (1976) who, to paraphrase, famously said there is no meaning outside of the text. That is, words do not, straightforwardly at least, refer to things in the real world, but are themselves, partly at least, creators of that world. Since, for the SJL, language constructs reality in the service of a dominant group – whether men or Western or white or cisgendered – its use has become a central element of SJL activism. The policing and, if necessary, changing or invention of language as a result of ‘discourse analysis’, then, become an important means of helping to dismantle power structures. The importance for social and political philosophy of the adoption of this approach to language (initially, in the 1990s, described as political correctness) cannot be exaggerated. It is behind the SJL emphasis on ‘discursive’ (or verbal) violence and explains why microaggressions – ‘brief, everyday exchanges that send denigrating messages to certain individuals because of their group membership’ (Sue, 2010: xvi) – and trigger warnings are widely evoked concepts.
To give a specific example, take the classic libertarian account of freedom offered by the nineteenth century British political thinker J.S. Mill. He argues, as liberals have ever since, that freedom of speech should only be restricted when it can be shown to cause harmful actions such as inciting violence against those to whom the speech is directed. Merely causing offence is not enough to justify prohibiting free speech, even if the speech is deemed to be hateful (Mill, 1869). According to the SJL, however, this distinction – between speech and action – does not exist. Rather, hate speech itself is a violent act that has an immediate and harmful impact (Mackinnon, 1993). Any language deemed to be hate speech, as a consequence, should be immediately prohibited without any consideration of its consequences.
By contrast, more conventional justifications for restricting hate speech accept that their case must be based on identifying negative consequences that flow from it. In other words, the speech by itself is not enough to justify prohibition. The obvious justification for prohibiting hate speech is if physical harm is inflicted as a direct and relatively immediate result of something that has been expressed. Such occurrences are – probably – few and far between, and therefore does not provide adequate justification, in most cases, for prohibiting hate speech unless we adopt a looser criterion of causation or look for alternative justifications. Waldron (2012), for instance, argues that the harm caused by hate speech is its threat to societal cohesion and, more importantly, that it undermines the dignity of those who are targeted, their sense of self-worth and status in the eyes of others. Whether this can be adequately distinguished from speech which others find offensive – which Waldron and others want to reject as a justification for prohibiting free expression – is another matter. All that is being suggested here is that if the distinction between speech and action is rejected – as SJL scholars insist – then it is not necessary to get involved in a debate about the consequences of free speech.
A related theme of applied postmodernism is the adoption of standpoint theory, or – to be more accurate, because it is concerned with the generation of knowledge – standpoint epistemology. This is an idea first developed by the Hungarian Marxist scholar Georg Lukács in the 1920s (1923). He argued that the economic position of the working class gave them a unique position, unlike the bourgeoisie, to discern objective truth where they would recognise their exploitation and desire to change society. This served as an interesting contrast with the traditional Marxist distinction between the objective reality of the position of the working class in capitalist society and their subjective awareness of this position, with post-Marxian Marxists such as Lenin arguing that it was necessary for a group of committed and disciplined group of revolutionaries to effect change in the absence of working-class consciousness. Standpoint epistemology was, in turn, adapted by feminists in the 1980s – with the privileged cognitive vantage point accorded to women because of their subservience to men (Harding, 1991) – before being applied more generally to a range of identity groups (see, for instance, Medina, 2013).
Standpoint epistemology proposes that what can be known by an individual is rooted in their social position, in their ‘lived experience’. Now, from a postmodern perspective, the application of standpoint theory turns into epistemological relativism whereby competing truth claims exist without a means of determining their veracity. There is ‘my truth’ and there is ‘your truth’ and no means of determining which ‘truth’ is to be preferred. From the perspective of the SJL, however, this relativism is rejected. It is the voices of the oppressed that are regarded as more authoritative than those of the oppressors who are blinded by their privilege. That is, (following Lukács) membership of a subordinated identity group grants access to particular, and superior, knowledge that is unavailable to members of dominant identity groups.
The Social Justice Left and Marxism
The extent to which SJL ideology is influenced by Marxism has been disputed. If we are to establish the new ideology’s place on the left of the political spectrum then clearly it is important that the link with Marxism is justified. Pluckrose and Lindsay, although accepting that it is left-wing activists and scholars who are the major exponents of the SJL ideology, argue that postmodernism, rather than Marxism, is the key driver of the new ideology. To draw the conclusion that key aspects of the SJL are drawn from Marxism is, they argue, ‘specious’ (Pluckrose and Lindsay, 2020: 270).
It is true that, at one level, Marxism and postmodernism are incompatible. Pluckrose and Lindsay rightly draw attention to the fact that Marxism is one of the metanarratives that postmodernism and the SJL rejects. That is, postmodernism rules out the possibility of developing an ideology which offers a total account of the world based on universal truths and values offering a desired and possible end-goal. In this sense, Marxism is part of the Enlightenment project rejected by postmodernism and the SJL.
In answer to the, largely correct, assertion that postmodernism and Marxism are incompatible at a fundamental level, it is important to recognise that the applied postmodernism central to the SJL is almost as far removed from traditional postmodernism as Marxism is. That is, whilst the SJL rules out the kind of Enlightenment-inspired universal truths searched for by ideologies such as Marxism, the applied postmodernism of the SJL also rejects the relativism associated with traditional postmodernism. Rather, although the dominant ideas and values of the age reflect power structures and can be dismissed as universal truths, those who are oppressed do have an authoritative voice and do, in a very real sense, ‘speak truth to power’.
Now, it is certainly true too that many of the key ideas of the SJL that might be accredited to Marxism – for instance, on the hierarchal division between oppressed and oppressors, and the way in which ideas serve the interests of the dominant group – can be found in postmodernism. On the other hand, this is not surprising since many of the key postmodernists had Marxist sympathises. Derrida, for instance, regarded his theory as a radicalized form of Marxism (Peterson, 2019: 306, 310-12). At the very least, postmodernism, on one interpretation, was, to a certain extent, the product of a disillusionment with Marxism, representing a politics of despair at the failure to realise Marxism’s revolutionary predictions in the West and the catastrophic consequences of communism in the East.
So, my contention is that there are important elements within the SJL ideology that bear a close relationship with Marxist themes and the new ideology only makes sense once that is recognised. In particular, SJL ideology derives from Marxism its activist bent, that the point of theory is not, as Hegel had argued in his idealistic theory of history, to understand the world but to change it. It also adopts the Marxist idea that hierarchy is a product of oppression and the exercise of power, and the position that the dominant group in a hierarchy determines the dominant ideational discourse which serve its interests and subjugates the oppressed. The SJL ideology differs from conventional Marxism in the crucial respect that the latter posits a single pyramid with one ruling and one oppressed group, based on economic ownership, whilst the former configures several hierarchical relationships of oppression and subjugation.
Some scholars have explicitly sought to adapt Marxism to take account of the empirical reality of the declining importance of social class (in subjective terms at least) and the emergence of a variety of influential identity groups based on race, gender and sexual orientation. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, for instance, wrote in the 1980s:
‘To what extent has it become necessary to modify the notion of class struggle, in order to be able to deal with the new political subjects – women, national, racial and sexual minorities, anti-nuclear and anti-institutional movements etc – of a clearly anti-capitalist character, but whose identity is not constructed around specific “class interests”? (Laclau and Mouffe, 1981; see also Laclau and Mouffe, 2001).
Marxists such as Laclau and Mouffe are well aware of the disparate nature of these identity groups and the difficulty of bringing them together in a way that was possible with social class. One step is to argue that these marginalised identity groups – racial and sexual minorities, and women – are all subject to dominance in power structures. That is, such marginalised groups have a shared identity of oppression. It is also important to note that the concept of intersectionality helps to bridge the gap between Marxism and the SJL ideology. First developed by the legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw (1991), intersectionality is a term used to denote the existence of interlocking systems of domination and oppression based on gender, race and sexual orientation. Those in more than one oppressed and marginalised category, it is argued, are in a particularly disadvantaged position. Black women, for instance, are likely to face levels and types of discrimination not experienced by white women or black men. So, although those oppressed – by race, gender and sexual orientation – are in different and independent hierarchies, intersectionality provides a unifying frame for those possessing two of more identity characteristics.
Conclusion
What I have done in this post is to describe the new SJL ideology, and – in particular – how it differs from traditional liberalism. I have made no normative claims about the desirability of either ideology. What I think, however, is that the principles of liberalism are rejected at our peril, and any attempt to defend them must understand, and challenge, the ideas of the SJL.
There is growing evidence that, in the UK at least, the political battle lines will be increasingly based on the ideas of the SJL and its opponents. Two responses to it have emerged. The first, associated above all with Reform UK, seeks to challenge the SJL by articulating an alternative form of identity politics, entering on whiteness. The second, associated above all with Kemi Badenoch and the Conservative Party, seeks to challenge the SJL by reiterating key liberal principles of universalism and individualism. The battle lines of future political competition is taking shape.
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Robert Garner 