When identity politics becomes a parody of itself

Politics born of liberation has come to echo the very hatreds it once sought to overcome

It was once a movement about dignity. The original charge of identity politics was to insist, rightly, that people be seen, not through the fog of inherited prejudice, but in the light of their actual lives. To name the harms that were previously unnameable; to redress centuries of silence. Feminism, civil rights, anti-racism — these were not ideologies of narcissism, but solidarities forged in suffering. But something has changed.

On Easter Saturday, in Britain, two very different protests took place — one in Westcliff-on-Sea, the other in Edinburgh. And though they were ostensibly about separate causes — Palestinian solidarity and trans rights — they shared something grimly primal. In Essex, demonstrators marched through a Jewish neighbourhood on Passover, carrying dolls smeared in fake blood and chanting accusations of child murder. In Edinburgh, placards called for witch-burning — the target, J.K. Rowling, guilty of believing in the biological reality of sex.

One needn’t be a cynic to see that something is broken here. That the animating spirit of these protests — their visceral contempt for Jews and women — cannot be squared with any notion of progressive politics. And that in their zeal to dramatise oppression, some corners of the identitarian left have wandered into territory that is anything but liberatory.

Let’s not dance around this. The blood libel — the grotesque medieval fantasy that Jews ritually murder children — is not some distant artefact of the past. It is, as anyone familiar with Jewish history knows, one of the most resilient instruments of antisemitism ever devised. To invoke it, knowingly or not, is to conjure a ghost that has never quite been exorcised. That this should happen in Britain, in 2025, under the banner of ‘solidarity’, is not just shocking — it is a moral catastrophe.

So too with the misogyny dressed up as trans advocacy. Of course, trans people deserve rights, dignity, and protection from harm. But what are we to make of slogans that revel in the humiliation and violent erasure of women who dissent? To say “I piss where I want” while marching on women’s spaces is not a statement of freedom. It is a declaration of dominion. When activists suggest Rowling should be burned alive — even in jest — it is no longer about inclusion. It is about enforcing a creed.

This is what happens when identity becomes untethered from ethics. When politics collapses into performance. When victimhood, rather than a condition to be alleviated, becomes a currency to be hoarded, flaunted, and used to silence others. The result is not progress but parody — a tragic inversion in which the powerful pose as powerless, and the powerless are told to shut up.

What’s most alarming is that these aren’t fringe behaviours anymore. They occur not in back alleys but on university campuses, on social media feeds, at mainstream rallies. And they are too often indulged — or excused — by those who should know better. In the name of justice, we tolerate injustice. In the name of progress, we allow regression.

Some will say this is not the real left. And perhaps they’re right. But it is a movement that emerged from it, from the idea that every grievance must be believed, every identity valorised, every dissent pathologised. The irony is sharp: a politics that began by challenging essentialism now reifies it at every turn.

There is a better way. One that affirms identity but does not idolise it. That recognises the wounds of history without reopening them in others. That restores solidarity not through purity tests, but through shared humanity. The dream of justice is not dead. But it must be disentangled from the wreckage of its own making.

For Jews in Essex and women in Edinburgh, that work cannot come soon enough.

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Further reading

The Identity Trap by Yascha Mounk — A sharp and accessible account of how a noble impulse for inclusion devolved into a dogmatic worldview, and how we might find our way back.

Cynical Theories by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay — An incisive critique of how critical theory morphed into orthodoxy, eroding liberalism and corroding solidarity in the name of social justice.

The Madness of Crowds by Douglas Murray — A polemical yet thoughtful exploration of identity, gender, and race politics in the modern West, and how moral clarity has been replaced by moral panic.