What Comes After Identity Politics?

If you want to know what will come after identity politics, the White Feather Movement is exactly where to look.

For the past few days, I’ve been haunted by a particularly strange political movement in history I’d learned about years ago and then unconsciously buried. Perhaps you’ve heard about it?

It was this strange time, before, during, and a little after World War I, where women would hunt down men in crowded public spaces to shame them in front of as many people as possible. But no, this wasn’t some early #MeToo activism, though it was absolutely linked overtly to (and led by) early feminists. In fact, it was spearheaded by the same women who won for all women in the western world the right to vote.

It was called the White Feather Movement. And I’ll tell your more about it later in this essay, and why it’s been haunting me. But there’s a lot of other stuff I have to tell you first.

As you likely know already, I was a leftist “activist” for most of the previous two decades in the United States. Especially during the middle half of the previous decade, especially in the years between 2014 and 2016, I also considered myself “Antifa,” meaning I was not just against fascism (like every other reasonable person in the world is), but also that I felt I had a sacred duty to “fight” fascism through writing, protests, and sometimes doing my damn best to force anyone I considered a fascist to shut up.

I’m not proud of this. In fact, the only thing I feel I can take pride in from that experience is that I started realizing there was something wrong with what I was doing and what I believed a little earlier than many of my friends and fellow activists. Also, without that personal experience of evangelical zeal against a nebulous enemy, I don’t think I’d have the same kinds of insights about the relationship between politics and the self as I do now. Still, I really wish I hadn’t been so swept up.

In one of the sections of my recent Sundry Notes, I wrote about the recent drying-up of organisational and grant funding for social justice groups and activists, and a reader asked a really good question in the comments that I tried to address. Before I get to that comment, though, I’ll tell you an odd anecdote from my activist years as background.

Sometime, I think it was in 2015, there started to be a joke going around among us activists about our “Soros checks.” Sometimes these were in the form of social media posts depicting ourselves in front of a bank with the caption, “Just cashing my Soros check;” or, a photo in front of a mailbox with the caption, “Still waiting for my Soros check.”

The “joke” here was in reference to right-aligned commentators and politicians who claimed that Antifa and social justice activists were all being paid by the Open Societies Foundation, the funding mechanism set up by billionaire liberal capitalist George Soros to channel money into liberal and progressive causes throughout the world and especially the presidential campaign (through Political Action Committees, or PACs) of Hillary Clinton.

It felt fun to mock the idea. I mean, sure, it would be pretty sweet to get a check to go protest, but no check was ever forthcoming. Most of us laughing about it barely even knew who George Soros was, which made the idea even more absurd. Getting some cash from a random Hungarian billionaire because we were trying to fight racism and white supremacy? Sure, man. Whatever.

Imagine my complete and utter shock upon finding out a few years after I’d left the United States that some Antifa activists actually were getting Soros checks. No, they weren’t literally getting checks in the mailboxes that were made out to them, of course. But many of them had set up non-profit activist and journalist groups with themselves as employees, and the money to pay those salaries came from OSF grants. In other cases, activists took jobs and “research fellow”1 positions at think tanks and similar groups that were funded through OSF.

It wasn’t just Antifa activists, either. In fact, the money they were getting was a pittance compared to what anti-racist, trans-rights, and intersectional social justice activists were getting through a complex web of direct and secondary grant channels funded by Soros’s foundation and other large foundations.2 And without going into too much detail about whether or not the causes being funded were worthwhile (some definitely are, some definitely not), it’s crucial to focus on the really strange fact that the money is coming from billionaire capitalists.

And that begs a question: why the fuck were billionaires funding social justice and antifa groups?