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If "woke" liberals embraced him, it was because, beneath his hip veneer, Obama was a sure bet to prop up the corrupt status quo. Woke cancel culture cooperated with the establishment media's cancel culture to stop the Sanders juggernaut. It is widely known on the left that Finkelstein is, as it were, a martyr to truth and justice, having been subject to outrageous calumniation and denied an academic career because of his relentless advocacy of the Palestinian cause. With I'll Burn That Bridge, he shows his willingness to burn bridges not only with the establishment but also with the "left" of today, for which he shows scarcely mitigated contempt.
In a long, scathing chapter, Finkelstein analyzes the cult surrounding Barack Obama, which he reveals as the ultimate product of identity politics. 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. A connection that binds will be forged by you, united in the heat of battle facing a common enemy, each marching beside the other, each lifting the other, each protecting the other. But he goes much further and questions whether it should even be seen as a professional obligation that one always use civil language in one's scholarship (which Finkelstein didn't when writing about the Holocaust industry and Alan Dershowitz's lies). Every year we publish a selection of books and pamphlets that address the key issues facing activists and trade unionists.
Although racism is real and you should always be at the ready to fight it whenever it rears its ugly head, you all, Black and white, have a helluva lot more in common. 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. Kendi's book Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, for example, whose "only novelty is to shoehorn the epithets racist or antiracist, segregationist or assimilationist into every other sentence…[is] less a definitive history than an exhaustive, and exhausting, taxonomy that's as supple as a calcified femur and as subtle as an oversized mallet. If you would like to learn more of these unusual idioms, take a look at Mixed Idioms on Twitter and tell us your favorites! Eugenics and forced sterilization were once considered a very enlightened movement, being supported by progressives like Bertrand Russell, Helen Keller, Jane Addams, and Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Norman Finkelstein first made his name while still in graduate school when he exposed an acclaimed national bestseller as a hoax. You must be living an awfully precious life," he goes on, "if, amid the pervasive despair of an economy in free fall, your uppermost concern is clinging to your pronouns. In the malaphor we have chosen this week, there are two conventional idioms at play- “to burn one’s bridges” and “I’ll/we’ll cross that bridge when I/we get to it”.
If you're white, you're a racist—whether you're John Brown or Jefferson Davis, a fascist or an anti-fascist. 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. As Finkelstein translates, "if you want to rationally hug your certainty, you must first meet the challenge of every naysayer. Instead, the real purpose of identity politics is to derail a class-based movement bent on radical change. DuBois, and Paul Robeson into a censorious, narcissistic, morbidly navel-gazing culture preoccupied with subjectivist trivialities like personal pronouns at the expense of solidaristic struggle for a better world.
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. Whatever genuinely emancipatory political impulses exist in identity politics have long been, on the whole, coopted and buried under an avalanche of left-liberal virtue-signaling, preening and posing, careerism, and sabotage of a substantive left. Unsurprisingly, in her seminal 1989 article on intersectionality " Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex," "she conspicuously omits class in her dissection of oppression. The vacuousness of contemporary identity politics is best exposHuman 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. The latter attitudes are more likely to yield calm composure and willingness to give opponents a hearing because you know you're able to refute them.
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. Just consider how the woke mob reacted to the Sanders campaign, the most serious challenge to the establishment in more than a generation: they tried to "cancel" Sanders for his being a "privileged white male" with a supposed blind-spot on race. To what extent should a regime of free speech reign on the university campus, and under what circumstances should an academic's "offensive" speech in the public square result in disciplinary action?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.
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