Identitarianism

MAU-MAUING THE VERSE CATCHERS:

The Wrong Kind of Black Poet (Ernest Jesuyemi, May 04, 2026, Compact)

But something about the current drift of things is concerning. In 1946, George Orwell articulated some of the reasons in his essay “The Prevention of Literature.” “But what is sinister,” Orwell says, “is that the conscious enemies of liberty are those to whom liberty ought to mean most . . . The direct, conscious attack on intellectual decency comes from the intellectuals themselves.”

It is sinister, especially, when looked at through poetry. Orwell believed that even under a climate of censorship, poets can thrive: “The destruction of intellectual liberty cripples the journalist, the sociological writer, the historian, the novelist, the critic, and the poet, in that order.” The poet is last on the list because tyrants do not have the sense to get what he is saying (or to care).

The dynamics have changed. Today, poets don’t only consider it their job to scream at “tyrants”; they not only make demands like thugs; more than that, they act like the Stasi, going around with tiny torchlights looking for racism and sexism in works of art.

Responding to a poem I shared with him, an American poet told me it was musically sound, but also added (parenthetically), “you’d have a hard time publishing a poem in the US with the word ‘whore’ in it. ‘Sex worker’ is what you have to say now, which of course is absurd and immediately ruins the poem.” (The “whore” is myself.) I have hawked the poem around and no one has taken it. Certain words can so trigger people now that choosing a word for how it rings next to another word has become a political act.

As Geoffrey Hill said of Shakespeare, the true poet knows what is justly and unjustly demanded of him, and finds his way around it. Every such challenge tasks his inventiveness; if he succeeds, his triumph is greater because of it. But if the eccentricity of a phrase, in the context of a poem, if the use of a word like “Negress” without the quotes in Dickman’s poem, is deemed too offensive to be read—what is to become of John Stuart Mill’s much-cherished “eccentricity of action,” which is fundamental to a liberal society? How are we to live if we cannot risk offense in a poem?

BREAKING THE BANTUSTANS IS DEMOCRATIC:

Poll: Democrats would give up Black voting power to beat the GOP (Erin Doherty, Andrew Howard and Riley Rogerson, 05/14/2026, Politico)

It’s a stunning admission from a Black lawmaker who represents a majority-Hispanic Los Angeles district: Defeating Republicans might be more important than protecting districts like hers.

And it’s a real possibility the party would have to deploy the tactic if it hopes to stand a chance against the most aggressive Republican gerrymandering possible. To draw House seats with the best margins for the party — especially in states like Illinois and New York — district lines would likely need to be altered in a way that packs large numbers of Black voters into red-leaning areas in order to make them bluer.

It’s not just a few Democrats switching their minds. Consider the Harris voters who initially say they would protect majority-minority districts: When asked about countering the GOP, they split roughly evenly, with 46 percent saying it’s more important to draw more blue seats and 41 percent saying the majority-minority districts should be kept together.

MOURNING THE BANTUSTANS:

How Minority Districts Fueled the G.O.P.’s Southern Ascendancy in Congress (Carl Hulse, 5/08/26, NY Times)

The G.O.P. may find it more difficult to win in more diverse districts of the kind that existed before the reshuffling of maps prompted by the Voting Rights Act. […]

In the late 1980s, Republicans had been deep in the House minority for nearly 40 years. But growing dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party had begun moving white Southern conservatives into the Republican ranks, as illustrated by high-profile party switches in Washington. Then the redistricting initiated under a series of court decisions aimed at fostering more minority representation provided yet another opening that might have seemed counterintuitive at first glance.

Architects of the maps realized that if they could maximize Black and Hispanic representation in the new districts, they would simultaneously dilute Democratic strength in surrounding jurisdictions where coalitions of white and Black voters had elected white Democrats for decades. The shift would ultimately create dozens of openings for Republican candidates in what had formerly been known as Democrats’ “Solid South.”

Groups bankrolled by wealthy conservatives joined with liberal organizations to school minority advocacy groups in state capitals and in Washington about how to shape new districts to meet court tests and best guarantee the election of minority representatives for minority communities — an outcome that many on the left argued was long overdue. Republican groups even provided free access to expensive computer software that could craft the new districts. Democrats eagerly accepted the help.

Some civil rights figures such as Representative John Lewis, the Georgia Democrat, warned at the time that the new maps could empower Republicans by weakening the partnership of progressive white and Black voters in the South. But others said the new districts were the only way to overcome centuries of institutional discrimination against minorities in the region.

“Gerrymandering was done to keep Black folks out,” Mr. Clyburn said. “If you gerrymander to keep them out, you’ve got to gerrymander to bring them in.”

It’s not racism when you ghettoize the vote?

“MY PERSONAL FAILURE MUST BE THE RESULT OF A CONSPIRACY!”:

The Serpent in the Garden: A.J.A. Woods’s history of the ‘cultural Marxism conspiracy’ (Matt McManus, May 4, 2026, Commonweal)

Woods, an intellectual historian, is interested in the role that conspiracy theories about cultural Marxism play on the right. He isn’t concerned about “refut[ing] all the claims that every critic of Cultural Marxism has made.” This is partly because so many of those claims are obviously not made in good faith. The people making them are not interested in accurately describing Marxism, cultural or otherwise. Even when critics of cultural Marxism are earnest, their theories are rarely intellectually substantive. What’s interesting is not the theories themselves but their strangely pervasive influence.

Woods shows how conservatives and far-right influencers like Paul Weyrich criticized the older American right for being “more interested in being right than winning power.” At a 2020 conference, William S. Lind, who effectively coined and popularized the term “cultural Marxism” in an American context, described its value to the right in affective rather than analytical terms. He argued that “cultural Marxism” works as a “delegitimizing tool in the United States, because many Americans regard anything even remotely Marxist as illegitimate.” As Woods writes, there was therefore no need to “quibble over definitions of Marxism or prove that political correctness is genuinely Marxist, because, as Lind claims, the American public does not generally care about these academic debates. Do not waste your time on research, Lind counsels.” The term “cultural Marxism” is best understood as a floating signifier under which the right lumps a vast array of disparate phenomena to undermine their credibility. Woods puts it well early in the book: “The elements of cultural Marxism/s have been deconstructed and reconfigured time and time again as reactionary political forces across the world search for new ways to justify their opposition to equality, democracy, and justice.”

DARWINISM IS THE LIFE OF FEAR:

Zero-Sum Thinking and the Roots of US Political Differences (Sahil Chinoy, Nathan Nunn, Sandra Sequeira, and Stefanie Stantcheva, 2026, American Economic Review)

We investigate the origins and implications of zero-sum thinking: the belief that gains for one individual or group tend to come at the cost of others. Using a new survey of 20,400 US residents, we measure zero-sum thinking, political preferences, policy views, and a rich array of ancestral information spanning four generations. We find that a more zero-sum mindset is strongly associated with more support for government redistribution, race- and gender-based affirmative action, and more restrictive immigration policies. Zero-sum thinking can be traced back to the experiences of both the individual and their ancestors, encompassing factors such as the degree of intergenerational upward mobility they experienced, whether they immigrated to the United States or lived in a location with more immigrants, and whether they were enslaved or lived in a location with more enslavement.

WHAT ANTI-WOKE SEEKS TO DENY:

Body-Worn Cameras, Prosecutors, and Racial Differences in Criminal Justice Outcomes (Jeffrey Miron, 4/28/26, Cat0)

How do body-worn cameras affect the actions of police and prosecutors? A recent study of data from North Carolina suggests that introduction of these cameras

reduced incarceration rates for black people by 10.5 percent .… Similar reductions in disparities occurred for other outcomes, including conviction rates and jail time. … These findings suggest that prosecutors had previously misinterpreted information from police, either because they held biased beliefs or treated police reports as definitive accounts.