IDENTITY POLITICS : HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE CAPITALISM

Journalist Batya Ungar-Sargon has been described both as a 'vulgar Marxist' and a 'right wing reactionary' by a liberal left intent on discrediting her. 

'Once a tool to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable, today American journalism comforts the comfortable, speaks power to truth, and insists on an orthodoxy that protects the interests of the elites in the language of a culture war whose burden is given to the working class to bear.' Batya Ungar-Sargon, Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy

BATYA UNGAR-SARGON has found herself being described both as a 'vulgar Marxist' and a 'right wing reactionary' - and both by the liberal left. She has drawn fire from woke liberals for arguing that an obsession with race issues only serves 'to flatter affluent liberals at the expense of working class people of all races.' She hasn't yet been 'cancelled' for not falling obediently in line behind 'identity politics' but its an indictment of the confused age we are living in that a socialist like Ungar-Sargon should be criticised for giving comfort to the right. As far as the woke left is concerned, you are either for us or against us. This is a politics, sadly, we're not unfamiliar with in New Zealand.

There has been much work done to explain how capitalism legitimises the inequality it causes but a lot less said about how the mainstream media has helped to provide a smokescreen for that inequality. In her book Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy, the  deputy opinion editor for Newsweek argues that 'the identity culture war has allowed journalists to cast the United States as hopelessly divided among partisan and racial lines as a smokescreen for the actual and devastating division that's happening along class lines.'

Although its a viewpoint that won't garner her many, if any, fans in New Zealand's increasingly woke newsrooms, Ungar-Sargon says that the mainstream media has been overwhelmed by the ideology of identity politics and a consequent disconnection from the perspectives and values of the working class. In the United States, she says, this has coincided with journalism's change in status.

'The story of 20th century American journalism is essentially the story of a status revolution. Journalism used to be a blue collar trade; it was a working class job that you didn't go to college in order to learn how to do. You picked it up on the job, and it was considered a sort of low status job. And journalists very much saw themselves as being  outside the system, fighting for the little guy. But then journalists started to increasingly go to universities and climbed up the status ladder. Essentially today's journalists have become part of the system. They are part of the American elite. Journalism is now produced for and by elites as opposed to a journalism once produced by and for the working class.'

The 'professionalisation' of journalism has also led to the downplaying of traditional ideas about class in favour of a focus on issues surrounding race and gender. For Ungar-Sargon this has a straightforward economic explanation:

'Well, put simply, its because liberals have benefited from the class divide in a very real economic, material way. So, what we have in America is a huge chasm that separates the college educated from those without a college degree. The economy is working very well for the highly educated and very poorly for labour. Quite simply, liberals have benefited from that inequality. Highly educated Americans are on the right side of the great class divide.' 

In Bad News she writes: 'Wokeness perpetuates the economic interests of affluent white liberals. It allows them to preserve their own and their children's status while still allowing them to feel like the heroes of a story about social justice...vastly superior to their conservative and even slightly less radical friends.'

And for the woke journalists that populate the likes of RNZ and TVNZ the obsession with identity politics allows them to delude themselves into thinking they are giving truth to power even when what they are actually doing is merely bolstering the status quo.

Ungar-Sargon has said that she would normally call herself 'a lefty' except that 'today's left has by and large abandoned the working class to fight a culture war around issues of identity.'

She may well agree with Catherine Liu, author of Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class, that at the heart of identity politics lies a secret contempt for the working class. Liu argues that an elite liberal class has positioned itself as society's cultural and moral vanguards and prioritises identity politics while ignoring the deepening economic plight of the working class.

Ungar-Sargon is amused that her liberals critics have actually attempt to portray her as card-carrying member of the  reactionary right:

'I sometimes call myself a left wing populist. Sometimes I say socialist, but then I look at what other so-called socialists are doing, and that's not what I mean by it. I just mean our economic agenda should be focused on the working class. When people say to me that your points are just right wing talking points, I'm always sort of tickled by that. Like, okay, you're ceding the question of economic inequality to the right; you're now saying that's its a right wing concern?  I mean, so it's not really an insult to be called conservative, right? If according to you the conservatives are the ones who care about class, which is like my whole message, like, I don't see how that's offensive to me.' 

She observes that the 'culture war' is actually a class war - but a class war directed not against capitalism but against the working class. Contemporary journalism, she says, is at the forefront of the war, its obsession with race papering over a truer chasm in capitalist societies like the United States - economic inequality.