Berlin and the Contradictions of Identity Politics

On July 25, twenty-one-year-old Abdul Ballout drove a van into a crowd at Berlin’s Pride festival before stabbing attendees with a machete. One woman was killed and twenty-nine people were injured. German authorities described the incident as a suspected Islamist terrorist attack; Ballout was shot dead in a confrontation with police the following day. 

The response to the attack is the latest example of how identity politics is beginning to break down under its own contradictions. For instead of anger, there were anxious appeals not to let the attack “divide us,” as though divisiveness lay in the public’s reaction rather than in the murderer’s motives. Identity politics only condemns violence when the attacker belongs to a “privileged” group and the victim belongs to a “protected” one. When those roles flip, as they did in Berlin, the outrage goes quiet. This double standard is now so obvious that it is destroying the public’s ability to have honest, serious debate about real problems. 

Back at the very start of my academic career, in the early 1990s, a colleague once remarked that “method is the net designed to catch the fish it is designed to catch.” It was, of course, the heyday of postmodernism, and such mantic utterances were a staple of those seeking membership of the academic club. Yet there is a kernel of truth there, especially when applied to identity politics, the practical fruit of postmodernism in public life. Identity politics is a net designed to catch the villains it is designed to catch. More than that, it is also designed to delegitimize discussion of their villainy in any terms other than those the identity politicians choose to allow. 

The last few years have presented us with the bizarre phenomenon of members of the LGBTQ movement donning keffiyehs and campaigning for Hamas. In a world where considering the concept of “woman” to be connected to biology renders one subject to threats of rape and even death, it seems odd to have supporters of LGBTQ rights expressing support for an organization for which homosexual acts are death penalty offenses. But such is the spirit of negation that defines this present age. It is what the ideological family of critical theories does: dismantle what is, with little or no concern for what will replace it. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, even when said enemy’s vision of the future involves stoning me to death rather than merely refusing to use my preferred pronouns.

Similarly, the responses of British politicians to the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis—a long way geographically and politically from Westminster—and that of Henry Nowak—a British man who was fatally injured, handcuffed by police, and falsely accused of racism by his killer—reveal a dramatic contrast. The former, despite being none of the U.K. government’s business, was swiftly politicized, with knee-taking being as de rigueur in Chelsea as in Manhattan. When JD Vance commented on Nowak’s murder, the Labour government was indignant about foreign interference. The difference? The details of the Nowak case did not conform to the tastes of identity politics. 

And what would happen when radicalized Islamic fundamentalists and Pride celebrations meet in the real Western world, rather than online or in the imaginations of those anti-Western poseurs who promote that most Western of phenomena, the sexual revolution? Well, now we know. 

To be clear, none of this is meant to relativize the horror of any of these situations, nor to deny that the categories with which identity politics operates—race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity—have relevance to understanding how human beings interact with each other. But it is one thing to allow these categories a descriptive role; it is quite another to make them selectively prescriptive and thereby instrumental in a larger political game.

To do the latter is to make the necessary and thoughtful debates about issues such as immigration and racism impossible, for to raise certain questions, however respectfully, is to be subject to immediate demonization. And when any discussion of such issues is denied, it is no surprise that the darker corners of the political world start to appear attractive.

It was therefore somewhat ironic that Kate Osborne, a Labour MP, did politicize the Berlin atrocity, accusing Reform UK of “escalating hate.” In doing so she herself represents precisely the kind of politics that has stifled intelligent and thoughtful debate and led to the kind of polarized political culture that she seeks to blame exclusively on those whose politics she finds distasteful. When identity politics applies only where reality conforms to its moral imperatives—imagine the pearl-clutching headlines had the murderer been a white skinhead shouting “Heil Hitler!”—and never where reality contradicts them, the ability of societies to have informed discussion about serious issues swiftly disappears—to everyone’s cost.

European and American elites would do well to understand that identity politics is not a game that can be played indefinitely. Perhaps it will not be like other radical revolutions and devour its own children. But if the Berlin Pride attack is a portent of things to come, it will leave its children defenseless in the face of determined and driven enemies.