I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It!: Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom

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The vacuousness of contemporary identity politics is best exposed by considering its "great minds," the Crenshaws, Coateses, Kendis, and DiAngelos. 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.

Critiquing everyone from Robin DiAngelo to Barack Obama, Finkelstein delivers a rigorous argument for free expression along with a death blow to leftist hypocrisy.The last chapter of I'll Burn That Bridge delves into a specific dimension of cancel culture: when is it appropriate for a professor to be disciplined for his public behavior and statements, whether on social media or in some other context?

The vacuousness of contemporary identity politics is best expos When teaching, should professors strive for "balance"—presenting with equal force all sides of an issue so that students can make up their own minds—or should they teach only their own perspective?

He has the highest regard for the Civil Rights Movement, after all—although he would deny that that was identity politics. 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. He considers it, or dominant tendencies within it, to have degenerated from soaring moral and intellectual heights with Rosa Luxemburg, W.

S. history from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and is the author of Worker Cooperatives and Revolution and Popular Radicalism and the Unemployed in Chicago during the Great Depression. It disturbs her that white feminists are presumptuous enough to speak for black women, but she "seems less concerned or, for that matter, even conscious that a high-achieving Black woman speaking for Black working-class women might also be problematic. This week, however, we have chosen a more unconventional expression to show you: “ I’ll burn that bridge when I get to it. It's ironic that many self-styled anarchists advocate increasing the power of unaccountable bureaucrats to control what is said and what isn't. 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.Nor would I even try, because I couldn't possibly reproduce the distinctive Finkelsteinian humor—and most of this very long chapter consists of (factually grounded) ridicule, directed at nearly everyone in Obama's presidential coterie, a "revolting retinue of bootlickers. 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. 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. As Finkelstein translates, "if you want to rationally hug your certainty, you must first meet the challenge of every naysayer. It is likely they couldn't have had such a destructive impact had the FCC's Fairness Doctrine not been repealed in 1987.