Moreover, the very idea of being "proud" of what group one happens to belong to—proud of being black or a woman or gay or trans—is puzzling. That such a person can be widely considered to be more or less on the left is a crushing indictment of the state of the left. His "economic reductionism," according to Angela Davis, prevented him from "developing a vocabulary that allows him to speak…about the persistence of racism, racist violence, state violence.

Many or most of them one would likely personally despise—just as, on the other hand, one would "love" many people belonging to a "different group. As Finkelstein says, Kendi embraces the woke conceit that, over four hundred years, "African-Americans haven't registered any progress in the struggle against racism. In an adaptation of Emma Goldman's "If I can't dance, I don't want your Revolution," Finkelstein declares: "If I can't laugh, I don't want your Revolution. Doesn't it conclusively demonstrate the inanity of a standard commanding restrained and temperate language? He situates his personal story within broader debates on academic freedom and poignantly concludes that, although occasionally bitter, he harbors no regrets about the choices he made.But if the likes of Marx wouldn't qualify for a tenured appointment at a first-rank university, isn't that a reductio ad absurdum? On the widespread fascination with transgender people: "the first day of a graduate seminar, students used to describe their intellectual interests. As Finkelstein translates, "if you want to rationally hug your certainty, you must first meet the challenge of every naysayer. It's not a "polished" work, but in an academic and literary environment that sometimes seems to value polish above all else, including moral and intellectual substance, one appreciates something a little more raw. At its core, however, beneath the variegated surface, the book is an anguished cri de coeur against pervasive cultural, political, and intellectual rot—an unapologetic defense and exegesis of the heavily maligned "Western canon" (John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, Bertrand Russell, Kant, DuBois, Frederick Douglass, and the like), a sustained lamentation over how far the left has fallen, a furious denunciation of rampant philistinism and pusillanimous groupthink (quoting Mill: "That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time"), and a proudly unfashionable celebration of such quaint notions as Truth, Reason, and Justice (which Finkelstein capitalizes, in a consciously anti-postmodernist flourish).

This phrase is what is sometimes known as a malaphor or a mixed idiom, which is a phrase that blends two similar figures of speech to create a new one, that may or may not make much sense.

It consists of two parts: in the first, Finkelstein "deconstructs" identity politics and the cancel culture it has given rise to, focusing on five figures whom he eviscerates: Kimberlé Crenshaw, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robin DiAngelo, Ibram X.

Shouldn't one aspire to transcend the 'inevitable' part—the color of one's skin—so as to be judged by the 'free part'—the content of one's character? If "woke" liberals embraced him, it was because, beneath his hip veneer, Obama was a sure bet to prop up the corrupt status quo. Too much identification with some imposed identity such as race is exactly what leads to irrational racial hostility (including against whites), sexist hostility (also against men), and other divisive social forces. Unsurprisingly, in her seminal 1989 article on intersectionality " Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex," "she conspicuously omits class in her dissection of oppression. This week, however, we have chosen a more unconventional expression to show you: “ I’ll burn that bridge when I get to it.Unfortunately, there is no prospect of their ending as long as identity politics and woke culture remain dominant on the left and in the Democratic Party—as they surely do today, at the expense of a class politics.

That unshakeable commitment, that willingness not to conform, combined with intellectual power, is chiefly what has set Finkelstein apart from most of his peers. The vacuousness of contemporary identity politics is best exposed by considering its "great minds," the Crenshaws, Coateses, Kendis, and DiAngelos. Human dignity is not possible without the ability to pay for a roof over one's head, clothes on one's back, and food on one's table. I might also note that giving authorities the right to suppress or punish certain kinds of speech, and even encouraging them to do so, will soon lead to their suppressing speech you like. One might connect Finkelstein's lengthy discussion of academic civility with his book's focus on woke politics by pointing to something his targets have in common: a preoccupation with policing language and thought at the expense of more substantive concerns.It's ironic that many self-styled anarchists advocate increasing the power of unaccountable bureaucrats to control what is said and what isn't. On Amy Goodman (whom he doesn't name): "Goddess of Wokeness…a woke machine, churning out insipid clichés as her mental faculty degenerates to mush. Wokeness is what happens when the destruction of the labor movement proceeds so far, and social atomization becomes so all-consuming, that even the "left" adopts an individualistic, moralistic, psychologistic, censorious, self-righteous, performative approach to making social change. To make (some) sense of what blending these two expressions might mean, let us first look at what they mean on their own. Aside from Obama himself, the most satisfying skewering, I found, was of Samantha Power, the "Battleaxe from Hell…downright evil…[whose] conscience only bestirs at the suffering of victims of official U.