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In addition to the man himself, Finkelstein also examines the memoirs of a ‘supporting cast’ that includes two of Obama’s chief speech writers; his senior adviser, Valerie Jarrett; his gofer, Reggie Love; and White House deputy chief of staff Alyssa Mastromonaco. As Finkelstein explains in the foreword, the book had its origins in the ‘Letter on Justice and Open Debate’, decrying the excesses of ‘cancel culture’, that appeared in Harper’s magazine in 2020. Kendi is the author of the self- proclaimed ‘definitive history of racist ideas in America’, Stamped from the Beginning, which won a National Book Award. This was followed by his 2019 book: How to Be an Antiracist. Four historical cases are considered, the best-known of which are those involving Bertrand Russell (who was prevented from teaching mathematical logic at the College of the City of New York in 1940, because of his publicly-stated attitudes towards sex and marriage) and Angela Davis (who was briefly suspended from a teaching post at UCLA because of her membership of the Communist party).
This is also, undeniably, a book of digressions, as well as a book that is (in Finkelstein’s own words) ‘laced with vitriol’. Probably the shortest chapter and the most boring. The reason for both these things is that Coates's reparations article - the subject of the chapter - is very timid and doesn't actually end up calling for anything. Since the article itself is wishy-washy and therefore cannot be satisfactorily critiqued (standing, as it does, for nothing in particular), Norm instead focuses on one analogy Coates makes: the reparations demanded by the World Jewish Congress at the turn of the century. Of course Norm would hone in on this, because it was partially his exposure of the corruption surrounding this event that got him cancelled. He basically says, "reparations on that scale would never happen. It only exists as a tool the woke left invokes to put people like Bernie Sanders in a bad spot." Bernie Sanders, in fact, is the common thread throughout this book. Coates's tepid article also exposes the political bankruptcy of the woke left. According to Finkelstein, ‘a huge political opportunity’ was squandered during the George Floyd protests in 2020: ‘If the “Jobs and Freedom” slogan of the 1963 March on Washington had been tweaked so that the demand “Justice and Jobs” seized the moment, the nascent coalition in the streets between an antiracist and anti-capitalist politics could have consolidated around concrete political demands.... Instead the demonstrations petered out amidst radical posturing and vacuous identity politics’.
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While the material in this section is interesting, the precise conclusions to be drawn are (to my mind) murkier, as befits the topic. Finkelstein is furious that this ‘has distracted from and, when need be, outright sabotaged a class-based movement that promised profound social change’ – namely the mass grassroots movement supporting Bernie Sanders’ presidential bids in 2016 and 2020.
Once again, Finkelstein exposes the yawning chasm between public reputation and sordid reality, detailing Power’s ‘maniacal support for military intervention in Libya that destroyed the country; her feverish advocacy of armed intervention in Syria... that could only have exacerbated the humanitarian catastrophe there; [and] her silence in the face of, or aggressive complicity in, human rights crimes committed by the US and its allies’. On the other hand, to cross that bridge when you get to it has a positive connotation. Collins Dictionary, again, defines the phrase as dealing with a problem or a difficult situation when it comes up and “not to anticipate difficulties”. The core thesis of this big and baggy book is that, while previously a marginal affair ‘pretty much confined to the college campus and the political left’, a certain damaging brand of identity politics (‘woke politics’) has now become ‘ubiquitous’ in US politics – and that it has done so as a consequence of the Democratic party substituting ‘“oppressed minorities” of every imaginable ilk’ for what used to be its mass base: the trade union movement. Perhaps most interesting for PN readers is Finkelstein’s devastating take-down of Obama’s ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power. That makes Part 2, which is entirely about cancel culture - specifically cancel culture in academia - feel so incongruous. There are only two core chapters: "Who's Afraid of Holocaust Denial?" and "Do Pervs, Pinkos, Ravers and Rabble-Rousers Have a Right to Teach?"The first chapter is, of course, about Norm and his own experiences with cancel culture from Zionists and academics who viewed him as antisemitic. The second recounts famous people who got cancelled: Betrand Russell (perv), Leo F. Koch (perv pinko?), Angela Davis (pinko rabble-rouser?), and Steven Salaita (rabble-rouser?). All four, he argues, were cancelled for incivility, whether moral (Russell, Koch) or political (Davis, Salaita). The crux of Norm's point in this chapter is this: (Norm is paraphrasing J.S. Mill) "The charge of incivility . . . is often directed at the weak by the strong, even as the strong are just as prone to incivility - the difference being, the weak get ostracized for their crassness, the strong lauded for their righteous indignation." Indeed, as Olúfémi O Táíwò notes in his recent book, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics and Everything Else, for the CRC, identity politics was supposed to be about ‘fostering solidarity and collaboration... they were in favor of diverse, coalitional organizing, an approach that [co-founder Barbara] Smith later saw exemplified’ in the Sanders campaign, which she endorsed. Throughout, as readers of his earlier books would expect, Finkelstein brings his famously forensic approach to bear on the issues at hand. He’s put the hours in and done his homework, displaying impressive command over a vast range of material. The first, which comprises roughly fourth-fifths of the book, focuses mainly on identity politics. The second on questions to do with academic freedom. For example, Kendi ‘den[ies] that the Civil Rights Movement was the prime mover in extirpating the deeply entrenched Jim Crow system’ in the American South, which he instead depicts as ‘wholly the work of white people oblivious to, insulated from, and untouched by the mass protests’.
The book is split into two parts, which can be read independently according to the reader’s interests.
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Obama: “Obama was almost certainly a beneficiary of affirmative action when Harvard Law School admitted him. His academic performance before Harvard was ‘unremarkable’.” Note that Obama has “withheld his undergraduate transcripts from inquiring biographers” and none of his undergrad teachers (not one) remember him. In a 2004 speech, Baraka Obama said, “I do believe clearly and unequivocally, I’m not in favor of gay marriage.” He also supported the death penalty. Obama “dismissed the agenda of climate activists because “having me paint doomsday scenarios was a bad electoral strategy.” Obama actually boasted that he had run as a “blank canvas upon which supporters across the ideological spectrum could project their own vision of change.” Here's what Norm says in his introduction, which is much more quotable than the conclusion (it ends not with a bang, but with a whimper). I'd love to hear from others who have read this book. I almost feel that Part I should be required reading for people on this sub, since Norm takes down idpol while doing so from a decidedly leftist, class-focused position and never losing sight of the fact that racism, homophobia, sexism, and other things idpol rails against, are real, present, and deserving of opposition. Too many people on this sub are just here for the anti-idpol circlejerk without even trying to maintain a semblance of genuine leftism. Norm divides the book into two parts: "Identity Politics and Cancel Culture" and "Academic Freedom." Identity Politics and Cancel Culture During the Obama presidency, US drones are estimated to have killed over 3,000 people in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, including upwards of 400 civilians. Despite this, Power’s 2019 memoir, The Education of an Idealist, fails to even mention the existence of these silent wars – or the devastating war in Yemen, where US arms and intelligence supplied during Power’s ambassadorship helped to create one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters.
However, it would be a shame if this were to deprive the book of the wide audience that it deserves. Power also has ‘not one word’ to say about Israel’s murderous assaults on Gaza during the Obama presidency, though she ‘worked assiduously behind the scenes after each massacre to shield Israel from accountability’. (In 2014, Operation Protective Edge systematically targeted and destroyed 18,000 Gazan homes, killing 1,500 Gazan civilians, including 550 children.) To be fair, Finkelstein does define what he means by ‘identity politics’: ‘At its core it’s about representation: a competition within the group as to who best exemplifies it, and a competition between the group and the broader community as to the former’s legitimate claims for greater representation in the latter’.In 2020, his then-publisher proposed that he ‘join the debate with a short book’. What emerged was obviously not what had been expected. Perhaps surprisingly, Douglass – who had escaped from slavery, becoming one of the Abolitionist movement’s most effective campaigners – opposed ‘race pride’, asserting: ‘I recognize and adopt no narrow basis for my thoughts, feelings, or modes of action. I would place myself, and I would place you, my young friends, upon grounds vastly higher and broader than any founded on race or color.... Whoever is for equal rights, for equal education, for equal opportunities for all men, of whatever race or color – I hail him as a “countryman, clansman, kinsman and brother beloved”.’ The ‘[s]elf-styled public conscience of the Obama administration’, Power had previously written the 2003 Pulitzer-winning book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. On radical-sounding slogans divorced from reality, Finkelstein memorably quotes Trotsky: ‘“if you have not even a bridge to them, not even a road to the bridge, nor a footpath to the road” then they amount to a “fetish... a religious myth. Mythology serves people as a cover for their own weakness or at best as a consolation.” Collins Dictionary defines the expression to burn one’s bridges as the action of doing something which “forces you to continue with a particular course of action, and makes it impossible for you to return to an earlier situation or relationship.”
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