Is there anything left to say about identity politics? Its supporters have crossed every line in pursuit of their demented ideology, attacking black people for not being anti-racist enough, mobbing gay people for being insufficiently exercised about transgender rights, and pursuing leftist icons.
Its critics, for their part, have picked over wokery like vultures tearing the last gobbets of meat from a carcass. They have pointed out its intolerance (“That’s the wrong acronym! Sack her!”), its inconsistency (“We’re all the same! Celebrate diversity!”), its irrationality (“My feelings trump your facts, white-splainer!”) and its impatience (“Who cares if everyone was saying that until the day before yesterday?”).
Yet just when I assume that there are no more columns to be written on the subject, some grisly new precedent is set. This week, an author chosen specifically for her irreverent pen was commissioned to write a book on “cancel culture,” only to have her book canceled.
The aborted book was to have been called Welcome to the Woke Trials: How #Identity Killed Progressive Politics, and its author was the restless genius Julie Burchill.
Burchill, a product and beneficiary of the United Kingdom’s unusual media culture, may need some introduction for Washington Examiner readers. I have given up trying to convince friends from the United States that their country is primmer and politer than mine: Almost nothing can dent Americans’ self-image as a rough frontier people. But the difference is palpable and never more so than when we compare the two sets of media. American papers, by and large, are high-minded, reluctant to print profanities, obsessed with fact-checking, and a touch pompous. British papers, not just the tabloids, are earthy, angry, imaginative, and sweary.
Burchill relished that culture, writing slashing features whose viciousness would be hard to forgive, were she not always so damnably witty. She dropped out of school at 17 to write for the then-unbelievably cool New Musical Express, and she turned her experiences into a sex-filled novel. To the extent that she was interested in politics, she saw herself as a left-wing feminist. But what really drove her was a dislike of being told what to think — a principle that eventually led her to stop lobbing ordnance at stuffy Tories and instead target woke inquisitors — especially after she incurred the fury of some transgender rights campaigners. Just the woman, you might think, to write about the cultural revolution underway within the Left.
So what happened? Essentially, Burchill had a Twitter spat with leftist writer Ash Sarkar, which ended with Burchill accusing Sarkar of worshiping a pedophile — a reference to Muhammad’s third wife, Aisha, who was said to have been 9 years old at their wedding.
Within 24 hours, the book deal had been pulled. “Julie’s comments on Islam are not defensible from a moral or intellectual standpoint,” declared the publisher, Little, Brown, adding that she “crossed a line with regard to race and religion.”
Got that? A provocateur commissioned to write a provocative book was canceled for being too provocative. How suddenly and completely censoriousness has migrated across the spectrum. As a conservative, I don’t like to see religions mocked: It is the height of bad manners. Any belief system can be made to sound absurd if stated in a reductionist way, but conservatives recognize that established creeds have a cultural context, and they generally understand that that context merits a measure of civility.
Then again, mockery is Burchill’s shtick, especially where religion is concerned (except for Judaism, for which she has developed a quixotic fondness). Here she is, for example, on Catholicism: “The Catholic Church is against abortion; it needs an endless stream of innocent young flesh to defile.” No, I didn’t like reading that sentence either, but it didn’t occur to anyone to sack her over it.
Note that the publisher’s phrase “race and religion.” Burchill said nothing about race. But because Islam in the U.K. is generally practiced by people who are not white and because anti-racism trumps everything else at the moment, the principle that religions ought to be open to mockery, once a core belief on the Left, has been sacrificed.
Someone asked me the other day what had been my worst column of 2020. Easy: It was a piece I wrote in March as the lockdowns loomed, arguing that a grown-up crisis would put an end to identity politics. With millions unemployed, no one would care about gender pay disparities. With a race to find a vaccine, no one would count how many of the researchers were white. Boy, did I get that wrong? We are dealing with something that is now unstoppable. The virus will pass, but the infection of our public discourse is permanent.
