Morality Plays

Across the West, the far right represents a fully transformative ambition: the desire to profoundly change the social, political, and cultural dimensions of European and North American societies. Any approach to countering it must be informed by this far-reaching ambition. The far right is now an entrenched aspect of Western politics, and its power is relatively independent of electoral cycles. Democracy seems to be in a “doom spiral.”¹

The rise of the far right reflects, axiomatically, the failures of the political left, especially its political parties but also the institutional left represented by NGOs and the liberal public and corporate sector. Some of these failures are structural: the political terrain is formidably hostile, the right has vast institutional and financial resources, and right-wing politics is empowered by social media platforms and insurmountable forms of disinformation. At the same time, centrist parties have purged their left but are unwilling to challenge the far right, as in Keir Starmer’s Labour Party.

But the failures of the left—from the inability of mass movements to build durable institutions to the fissiparousness of identitarianism and political sectarianism—are not solely the result of external aggression. Indeed, these identitarian and sectarian tendencies are implicated in the rise of the political forces the left now finds itself struggling to oppose.

These tendencies indicate a fraying of historic associations between morality, knowledge, and emancipation that informed much of the postwar Western left. Those associations have been insufficiently examined to the detriment of the left as a whole. But thinking about how the left exercises morality, and how its moral judgments rely on certain understandings of knowledge, may give a perspective on its state and why it seems incapable of meeting the challenge it currently faces.

Morality is an uneasy idea for the Western left. It is entangled with conservative moralizing that the left abhors, especially about sex, sexuality, abortion, migration, and guns. Or it is associated with the lethal combination of “moral clarity” and military aggression advocated by neoconservatives who simplistically divided the world into good and evil.² Or it invokes the “moral virtues” that Tony Blair used to legitimize illegal war and the occupation of Iraq, virtues that now appear to underpin visions of transforming Gaza, after its genocidal destruction, into a Trumpian riviera.³

In the light of this shameful history, why should the left even consider morality and moral questions? While the left typically does not use the language of morality, it continually makes moral judgments that emphasize equality, justice, or the protection of minority groups. Its moral orientation is often tied to minority identities, which are not only to be defended but also to be treated as sources of political authority or cultural legitimation. Moral imperatives inform every aspect of the left’s activities: how priorities are set, campaigns chosen, slogans used, alliances formed, even how its methods of organization are selected. These, in turn, strongly influence the kinds of knowledge that left-wing organizations, movements, and campaigns produce, including what counts as legitimate knowledge, what is dismissed, and how truth itself is understood.

My argument is not for a renewed moral theory but for a modest call for a deeper critical examination of the moral assumptions that underpin the left’s beliefs and agency. Given the urgency of the present moment, and the reconstructive project that is essential for a left still mired in 1990s thinking, the moral assumptions, moral reasoning, and moral theories that lie beneath much of the Western left’s activism are important to examine.

The democratic left’s moral orientations have historically arisen from principles of universal human equality that lead to opposing exploitation and domination. The idea of solidarity is based on deep moral intuitions, including empathy towards near and distant suffering strangers. That empathy is, at least partly, a natural outcome of a belief in universal equality. Similarly, ideas of emancipation are guided by moral commitments to dignity, autonomy, and freedom from coercion. It follows that the immoral includes engineered inequality, the naturalization of hierarchy, attacks on minorities, and the violence that results from these. These moral intuitions often distinguish the left from conservative or religious moralities grounded in the stability of tradition, the maintenance of hierarchies, the cultivation of character, and the commands of scripture. They are different again from the “moral” principles that underlie fascism: purity, authority, loyalty, hierarchy, and violence.

What also makes the left distinctive is the effort to relate morality to knowledge. Historically, the left prided itself on a commitment to objective knowledge, evidence, and open-ended science (a direct outcome of its origins in the Enlightenment). This commitment informed moral orientations towards social and political issues, including the facts of inequality, discrimination, and power. This orientation tended to be different from that of conservatism, where the basis for morality was not necessarily knowledge but inherited opinion.

The association between knowledge and morality is represented by a tradition in which knowledge, secular morality, and emancipation were understood as mutually constitutive. This lineage links many suffragettes, feminists, abolitionists, and anticolonial thinkers, among them W. E. B. Du Bois, Aimé Césaire, C. L. R. James, Ella Baker, the Frankfurt School, and anti-authoritarians such as George Orwell. For Du Bois and James, knowledge was itself liberatory in that it saw through the “veil” or grasped the inner logics of modern capitalism, both issues with moral import. More generally, projects of radical democracy combined morality, knowledge, and emancipation in ways that were attuned to historical circumstances and institutional forces.

The synthesis of morality, knowledge, and emancipation has weakened in significant parts of the Western left. It has been displaced by approaches in which moral thinking and deeper questions of empirical knowledge and method are decoupled. Shorn of its links with knowledge, history, and context, morality becomes unthinking and romanticizing, and leads to untruths. It is reduced to signals and slogans that cannot guide beyond feelings of righteousness and sanctimony. Detached from truth, morality becomes whatever the dominant voice (NGO, campaign, activist) defines it to be—in Orwell’s sense, the performance of obedient loyalty to the compelling slogan.

Knowledge—seen here as open-ended, robust, objective, and subject to the mobilization of the entire critical intellectual process—is inseparable from questions of morality. If morality determines what counts as knowledge or truth, then empirical facts, science, and historical depth can be dismissed when they don’t align with prevailing moral passion; in this way, the idea of robust knowledge as a whole is delegitimized. If morality severs its connection to rigorous, contestable knowledge, then politics becomes eristics and left-wing morality collapses into highly conservative illiberalism (as with the censorious incantation, “Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences”, this should not represent a left-wing value, and its brutal effects can be seen in the actions of the authoritarian right in the United States). Separated from knowledge, what counts as moral is what is determined from a group’s standpoint, thus undermining moral solidarities across groups. Consequently, morality becomes a question of appearance, recognition, the correct form of honoring—a narcissistic exhibition in which moral self-regard displaces genuine moral concerns.

Conversely, divorced from genuine morality, knowledge can become elitist and authoritarian, reduced to technocratic instrumentality concerned with efficiency, calculation, and utility in ways that can be dominating, inhumane and even genocidal.⁴ When left-wing morality is decoupled from fallible knowledge of the grounded world, it risks becoming confined to a binary and dogmatic universe of understanding, one that is indifferent to real conditions. Emancipation unlinked from knowledge and genuine moral orientation devolves into pure opposition and pure critique that are unable to build new institutions that the Western left urgently needs in the face of visible fascism.

Moral posturing

A seemingly minor—indeed, trivial—example can illuminate key problems about morality and knowledge across the left. In 2019, the independent UK organization Citizens Advice (CA) was accused of racism in its professional training. CA is a nationwide organization that provides advice and support on welfare benefits, legal issues, immigration and asylum, personal debt, and family issues. Its training on working with Black and minority ethnic communities included a slide claiming that these communities had: “an intrinsically cash-centric culture,” ”a society that revolves around religious belief,”  “a distrust of British authorities,” “evidence of gender bias and discrimination,” “low levels of literacy,” “very close-knit, extended families,” “early marriage and large families,” “a cultural focus on honour and shame.” This was deemed by some on the identitarian left to be racist. CA was publicly shamed.⁵ The organization apologized, removed the offending training material and stated it was striving for inclusion.⁶ The public apology and the agreement to “do better” are ubiquitous routines among left-wing organizations and campaigns.⁷

However, CA, though on the receiving end of much moral opprobrium, hadn’t actually committed a moral wrong. Nor was it necessarily misguided in its empirical claims. Many vulnerable working-class communities in the UK are cash-centric, especially among the elderly.⁸ Virtually all minority groups in the UK report much higher levels of religious belief than whites. Many minority communities contain close-knit extended families, as do some white communities. Some minority groups and some white communities have comparatively low levels of literacy.⁹ “Honor” and “shame” inform some members of some ethnic minority groups and negatively affect women from those groups.¹⁰ Age of first marriage does vary consistently among different white, Black, and South Asian groups. Whatever may be the generalizations or perceived stereotyping contained in the CA training, the accusation of racism prevented discussion of real issues. The moral charge of racism diminished our knowledge about the groups affected by racism.

The accusation of racism in this case rendered minority communities as homogeneous, unitary victims whose agency and self-activity can only be discerned by credentialed activists. Because CA staff had attempted to describe real issues relevant to members of those communities, this was considered a moral transgression. The accusation of racism, therefore, also functioned to eradicate the specificity of the knowledges and social complexity that may be pertinent for poorer communities and reflect the real (rather than intersectionally conjured) social lives of some groups. In its place, identitarian antiracism proposed simplistic heuristics that generated dogma, but also great imprecision regarding the knowledge needed to inform effective action. In this moral universe, minorities can only be spoken about as victims of and resisters to systemic oppression; the density of their real social and economic lives is irrelevant unless these can be articulated within those registers. The intersectional lens is fogged by design, and it clouds our political vision.

In the wake of this episode, the hashtag #CharitySoWhite appeared on social media and an eponymous organization was formed. Charity So White (CSW) stated its call to action to all charity-sector leaders: “prioritise candid and honest conversations about racism,” “publicly acknowledge racism within the sector and within their organisations,” “commit to tackling institutional racism within their organisations and in the sector.”¹¹ Its political orientation was intersectionally antiracist and it was attuned to the manifestations of misogynoir. It prioritized personal experience, the latter somehow believed to reflect the social totality, thus removing the need for objective knowledge.

Within about a year and a half, CSW had become inactive through internal disagreements and the inability to make significant changes within the UK charity sector. A long statement from its team¹² elaborated on white supremacy and burnout as having caused its decline (white supremacy manifesting as the idea of a “working group” that some members saw as enforcing hierarchy).

The statement speaks hyperbolically of “personal trauma” when describing meetings about charities (which tend to be liberal), and the performance of trauma constitutes much of the moral ground for the claims made. It contains seemingly open and honest confession, the expression of contrition, and the need for renewal—yet these are expressed in the familiar scripted language of many younger people working in NGOs. The discourse of “brave space” is self-aggrandizement—bravery referring to the fortitude that needs to be mustered to meet with liberal charities. The statement dramatizes exhaustion, another recurring theme among many left campaigns and NGOs. It similarly speaks of accountability, not to black and ethnic minority communities but to activist peers—democratic accountability here degraded to proximate interaction and accountability to one’s immediate peers. Aside from dismissals of white saviorism (which could only logically be remedied by abolishing the NGO sector), there is little evidenced discussion of racism and discrimination in the charity sector. If the approach is accusatory, it is unclear what actions are recommended other than to acknowledge, talk about, and “tackle” racism.

The demands of CSW articulate familiar themes of recognition, representation, and appropriate honoring. The principal mode of political agency is the elevation of “voices” and the expression of joy, both common discourses on the left. Its sphere of knowledge comprises the anecdote or self-selecting surveys whose intention is self-interested ideological advocacy, like much NGO-produced research. The political targets are liberal individuals and organizations—not the right or the far right. The object of denunciation is a pragmatic, bureaucratic organization that derives its moral legitimacy through “innocent,” “universal” service provision to largely poor communities across the UK. CA is often a lifeline and the only available local resource for the most disadvantaged and poorest in the UK, including migrants and asylum seekers. But in the moral universe of the identitarian left, what organizations say is more important than what they do.

In this example, where was the space for making the moral judgment that an intervention from the left would result not in improved services but in wariness about any future work with Black and ethnic minority communities? A disposition towards purity, denunciation, and accusation on one side results in unmaking, withdrawal, and retreat on the other. The space of political (and ultimately moral) judgement is about the ability to distinguish the weight, scale, and consequences of political interventions. But this is an impossibility if everything is conceived as political, if power is perceived to be everywhere, and if discursive structures (whiteness) rather than real institutions (the state) are viewed as the primary sites of oppression.

This example also illustrates an embedded disposition on the left that arises from the idea of politics as pure critique: fissiparousness. Identitarian discourses are inherently schismatic. An outcome of the disposition towards fragmentation is that the left unites in reactive mode against a common adversary but is otherwise preoccupied with fighting itself rather than building itself. In this vein, identitarianism is the newer form of an older left, sectarian tendencies such as Trotskyism or Stalinism that chronically plague most leftist projects, and like these, it displays a deeply undemocratic moral orientation. This essential fractiousness has already seriously affected the nascent Your Party that the MPs Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn have founded in the UK.¹³

The CSW-CA dispute also represents the performance of the moral excellence of the self, which is tied to the moral excellence of the minority group with which the self is allied. Moral excellence is used here to refer to the non-reflexive self-belief on the identitarian left that, because the left is claiming to be on the side of the oppressed, it is innately “good” and nothing that it does can be other than “good.” Similarly, those it claims to support are also innately “good.” These are hazardous moral orientations for any political tendency to have.

Moral excellence also extends to the world outside the West which is rendered a place of immaculate victimhood that is without history or agency. But the claims are not about real minority communities or the Global South; they are about the claimant and their public assertions that they are “standing with” the oppressed, assertions that need not be based on concrete engagements or actions. Thus, Jeremy Corbyn, who has undertaken decades of work in support of Palestinian national liberation, is currently being reprimanded because he did not state publicly that he is an anti-Zionist.¹⁴

I’ve argued elsewhere¹⁵ that identitarianism draws heavily from conservative virtue ethics.¹⁶ Several modern moral approaches to political action are available: in deontological ethics, morality comes from universal rules typically based on human equality. It doesn’t matter who, what, or where you are, you possess inherent rights arising from your equality with everyone else. But in virtue ethics, abstract moral rules are rejected in deciding how to live. Instead, your character matters and ideally it should be a morally excellent character: that of a “good” person, not a “bad” person. These inner qualities arise from upbringing and tradition. For communitarians, similarly, morality comes from belonging to a community, and the community’s well-being can outweigh the freedom of the individual. Traditionally, the left has drawn on deontology (among other approaches, including utilitarianism and Marxism), while conservatives favor virtue ethics. But the moral orientation of today’s identitarian left reflects an unusual amalgamation of communitarian virtue ethics with extreme individualism that rejects universal principles and historical grounding. It results in the logic of condemnatory, punitive sectarianism of which identity politics is the most recent example.

Moral disorientation

The example of alleged racism in the charity sector illustrated the excesses of a belief in one’s moral excellence arising from rejecting universal ideas and fetishizing identitarian particularity. This instinctive belief in the moral excellence of a valorized identity group can have disastrous political consequences.

In Britain, there was terrible abuse of mainly white working-class girls over many decades from the 1980s to the 2010s by groups of mostly South Asian men in several towns, including Rotherham and Rochdale. The abuse was horrific and systematic, targeting around 1,400 girls who came from a background of poverty and neglect. The moral response from the antiracist and South Asian left should have been to immediately offer support and assistance to the girls and the families, work with white and South Asian communities to isolate the abusers, and make common cause against the far right that had started mobilizing in Rotherham and elsewhere. These actions would have exemplified the gender, class, and race solidarity about which the left often speaks.

Yet the overwhelming response of the antiracist left in the UK was to object to the racist and Islamophobic stereotyping of Pakistani Muslim men. There were over a dozen far-right mobilizations in Rotherham, one of which resulted in the brutal murder of an elderly South Asian man. Local South Asian and Muslim organizations, as well as many mosques across the UK, forcefully condemned the abuse. The key point, though, is that the antiracist left focused solely on the consequences of racism for the men.

The assumption of morally pristine minorities can create moral corruption of the left that is obvious to anyone. Characterizing minority identities as morally unassailable and defending, implicitly or otherwise, morally indefensible actions, leads to political adversaries not only seeing through the moral corruption but using it as the ground for their racist mobilizations. If identitarianism generated a moral blindness, it should have nevertheless been possible for antiracist coalitions to have intervened in a way that squarely faced the abuse suffered by the young women without fueling racism. The major far-right mobilizations currently taking place across the UK, fueled by Trump, Vance, and Musk, frequently use the Rotherham events as their key focal point. Subsequently, their ideas have expanded into an international far-right discourse, accompanied by potent, relentless disinformation, about the alleged threat that all migrants and Muslim men represent for all white women and children.

For much of the left, the most marginalized have an unimpeachable moral virtue, and in allying with them, speaking for them, and about them, the left generates for itself an entire moral universe through its claims to be advocating for the most oppressed. This area is thoroughly imbricated with the question of knowledge: in representing minority groups solely through the axis of oppression and resistance to it, their political histories are deleted rather than understood in their full complexity. This is not at all to say minorities are not victims of brutal oppression. But it is to say that the full humans that they are, with histories, knowledge, and political agency they have created, are turned into ventriloquized entities by the identitarian left. This is dehumanization, reducing people and their capacities for moral belief, judgement, and action to ahistorical tokens.

An objective, expansive analysis of the condition of the poorest people in a society will tell us a great deal about the social institutions, powers, and forces that created that condition and how it can be transformed. Extending this, it may even tell us about the state of emancipation for everyone else in that society. What it cannot necessarily tell us is the phenomenological experience of those people, their histories, and their political agency—which may not necessarily be progressive.¹⁷ Thus, the left has been unprepared for the rise and influence of what has been called “the multiracial far-right,” a phenomenon that is strongly shaping far-right politics in the UK and the US.¹⁸ Moral excellence on the left has prevented it from apprehending far-right and fascistic groups arising in minority communities, many of which form a significant obstacle for the left to organize in those communities.

A different set of moral and epistemic issues emerge in the left’s common characterization of Indigenous people. This is the figuring of the Indigenous person as one imbued with perennial wisdom and ecological knowledge, peacefully integrated into nature about which they are wholly cognizant, and possessing the necessary knowledge to sustainably maintain it. The United Nations Development Programme’s characterization is typical:

Indigenous Peoples are custodians of unique knowledge systems, innovations and practices that have been passed down through generations and have allowed different cultures and communities in many parts of the world to live sustainably, emphasizing the balance between humans and the natural world. Many Indigenous traditional practices are rooted in a deep understanding of and respect for ecological systems and promote sustainable resource use. These practices have a minimal impact on the environment and are highly adaptive to ecological changes, fostering healthy and resilient ecosystems.¹⁹

The identitarian left valorizes Indigenous knowledge but without affording it the specificity, detailed attention, and assessment other knowledges might elicit. This places an immense burden of responsibility upon traditional Indigenous populations who do not possess the knowledge, capacity, or resources to resolve the global climate emergency produced by international capitalism—one that cannot be resolved by appeals to the mystical interconnectedness of all things. In this case, moral excellence allows the left to assert things that are manifestly untrue.

There is a deeper moral issue arising from this example. Beyond cultural mystification, the left has generally evaded the dire social conditions of Indigenous groups arising from dispossession and severe inequality. The situation for most Native American and Native Canadian populations across virtually every social, economic, health, and educational indicator is catastrophic. On reservations, up to 80 percent of Native Americans live below the poverty line. Overcrowding is at extreme levels, and there is very poor access to clean water, food, sanitation, or health services. Compared with any group in the US, Native Americans have the highest levels of poverty, unemployment, suicide rates, deaths from drug overdose or alcohol use, as well as very high rates of infant mortality, hunger, high school dropouts, and poor college completion rates.²⁰ There is a great, often surreal, gulf between the moral excellence that accrues to the cultural cipher that is called “Indigenous,” and real Indigenous people and their lives.

Morality and knowledge

Unlike the right, the left has a reputation for evidenced knowledge. But we now need to reconsider this reputation in a context where much leftist politics and the thinking of liberal NGOs and middle-class activists are informed by identitarian knowledge produced in the arts, humanities, and social sciences.

In the 1990s, the historian Robert Proctor coined the term “agnatology” to refer to the study of socially or culturally induced ignorance, including ignorance generated by his key example of the tobacco industry and the scientists working in its pay.²¹ But today the cultivation of agnosis applies to sections of liberal-left academia that has created for itself intellectual fields and cultural capital in such a way that most forms of knowledge, empirical contestation, or challenge are illegitimate since they are claimed to be associated with historical systems of oppression. Too often objective, quantitative, empirical, and historically grounded, approaches, and methods are rejected for the purely qualitative critical-discourse analysis of texts that deploy poststructuralism and its queer and decolonial offspring to allegedly analyze the operations of power and its production of victim subjects. Often, these are elaborate ways of stating little more than that oppression exists and it is bad.

For some academics, undertaking academic research is considered “extractivist”²²—a purely narcissistic approach that can only lead to knowledge as a form of roaming subjectivity. What becomes established as legitimate knowledge and truth, and what is disallowed, is based on circular, self-referential practices in which disagreement is safe within the bounds of self-styled “fugitive” canons. The latter are themselves products of self-referentially created scripts towards which other work performs loyalty—a form of doctrinal closure. The work produced is insulated from empirical challenge—it is morally excellent—since knowledge and method outside its ordained spaces are imbricated in oppressive power or violent histories.

This can create incontestable work that is purely ideological and identity affirming, largely detached from the social world, and whose primary function is to establish the moral excellence of the academic. This knowledge is driven by the imperatives of elite academic production for the purpose of accruing social and economic capital in which theoretical objects act as brands. This process illustrates not simply the generation of agnosis, but a phenomenon whereby identitarian academics and their institutions produce and enforce ignorance in a reflexively autogenic way that is unable to perceive the extent of their work’s detachment from social and political reality.²³

This self-directed self-ignorance is like a credentialed imbecility of which work in contemporary queer theory and second-generation decolonial theory are the best examples. Western transgender rights activism its most prominent activist outcome, its central—but empirically false²⁴—claims being that everyone has a transcendental gender identity, that biological sex is mutable, and that knowledge of the sex binary was a colonial imposition. Similarly, in critical race theory—the real version,²⁵ not the fiction targeted relentlessly by the political right—as well as in much antiracist literature²⁶ produced in the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd, we are told that we all have or are “assigned” a racial identity. Thus, speaking of “multiracial people,” Robin DiAngelo says, “The dominant society will assign them the racial identity they most physically resemble, but their own internal racial identity may not align with the assigned identity.”²⁷ And for white people:

Exploring our collective racial identity interrupts a key privilege of dominance—the ability to see oneself only as an individual. We need to discuss white people as a group—even if doing so jars us—in order to disrupt our unracialized identities.²⁸

We are here quite far from the idea of realist, evidenced knowledge and its association with morality and human emancipation.

Being, or claiming to be, on the side of the oppressed is not simply a moral stand. It is embedded in complex institutions, social forces and political economies that transform the sociological dimensions of morality.”

For some on the left, this can result in blinkered zealotry that supplants objectivity since it is immune to reason and evidence. The zeal flattens the distinctiveness of histories, societies, and grades of power. Minority identities are sacralized, with some groups rendered morally unimpeachable; dissenting analysis is treated as betrayal, and fanatical misanthropy is marshaled against the heretic or the adversary. The result is a narrowing of moral, intellectual, and emancipatory vision at precisely the moment when authoritarian far-right movements are relentlessly expanding their reach and power. Their relentless assaults on minorities then creates a political bind in which the left finds itself defending obvious falsehoods and morally indefensible actions.

Identitarian forms of knowledge and the agnosis they create must be understood not only as intellectual tendencies but also as moral failures of the left as a whole that have had severe political consequences. The institutional left has facilitated these tendencies and bears responsibility for their continuation. They also need to be considered within an international context in which knowledge, evidence, and expertise generated by theories, empirical methods, and philosophical approaches that are considered anathema by identitarian academics and activists are under fierce and sustained attack from the authoritarian right.²⁹ 

This is itself a powerful demonstration of the political and moral importance of knowledge, as well as its fragility. But to confront far-right “disinfocracy” requires more than oppositional denunciation. It requires the left to reinforce the credibility of contestable, rigorous, and open-ended knowledge and historical analysis as indispensable moral resources.

But the crisis the left faces is also about internal morality: in conflating assertion with knowledge, reducing emancipation to representation or oppositional rhetoric alone, and making morality equivalent to excellence, major parts of the Western left have abandoned powerful socialist, feminist, and antiracist realist traditions in which genuine morality, resilient knowledge, and emancipatory ideas depended on one another. In a political period that is moving rapidly from volatile to frenzied, this abandonment risks further disarming the left politically, morally and intellectually, leaving the field wide open for forces that thrive on generating violent maelstroms across societies.

Chetan Bhatt is Anthony Giddens Professor of Social Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). His latest book is The Revolutionary Road to Me: the Western Left and Identity Politics, Polity Press.

1. Cas Mudde, “Democracy Is in a Doom Spiral—but It Isn’t Dead Yet,” Prospect, December 4, 2024. https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/democracy/68694/democracy-doom-spiral-elections ↩︎
2. SourceWatch, “Project for the New American Century,” Center for Media and Democracy, not dated, https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Project_for_the_New_American_Century. ↩︎
3. Ben Quinn, “Tony Blair Thinktank Worked with Project Developing ‘Trump Riviera’ Gaza Plan,” The Guardian, July 7, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jul/07/tony-blair-thinktank-worked-with-project-developing-trump-riviera-gaza-plan. ↩︎
4. Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (London: Continuum, 2004 [1947]): 15. ↩︎
5. Fatima Iftikhar [@IftikharFatima], “@CitizensAdvice any explanation for this horribly racist training,“ Twitter, August 9, 2019.  https://x.com/IftikharFatima/status/1159922191745671168. ↩︎
6. Citizens Advice [@CitizensAdvice], “We agree these materials are not acceptable and apologise unreservedly”, Twitter, August 14, 2019. https://x.com/CitizensAdvice/status/1161592607270690822. ↩︎
7. Extinction Rebellion UK, “Statement on Extinction Rebellion’s Relationship with the Police,” Extinction Rebellion UK, July 1, 2020. https://extinctionrebellion.uk/2020/07/01/statement-on-extinction-rebellions-relationship-with-the-police/ ↩︎
8. Financial Conduct Authority, “Understanding Cash Reliance,” Savanta ComRes for the FCA, July 23, 2021. https://www.fca.org.uk/publication/research/understanding-cash-reliance-qualitative-research.pdf. ↩︎
9. UK Government, “Reading Results for 6 to 7 Year Olds,” Ethnicity Facts and Figures (England: Government of the UK, April 20, 2020). https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/education-skills-and-training/5-to-7-years-old/reading-attainments-for-children-aged-5-to-7-key-stage-1/latest/. ↩︎
10. Asian Network Reports, “Culture of Shame and Honour Prevents Women Speaking Out,” BBC Radio Four, February 15, 2017. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04t0k0h. ↩︎
11. Charity So White,  “Our Calls to Action,” Charity So White, not dated. https://charitysowhite.org/our-calls-to-action. ↩︎
12. Charity So White, “Whatever Happened to Charity So White?” not dated. https://charitysowhite.org/blog/whatever-happened-to-charitysowhite ↩︎
13. Ruby Cline and Dominic Penna, “Gender-critical MPs Have No Place in Corbyn’s New Party,” The Telegraph, September 10, 2025, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/09/10/gender-critical-mps-have-no-place-in-corbyns-new-party/; Craig Murray, “It’s Your Party,” Substack, September 13, 2025, https://craigmurrayorg.substack.com/p/its-your-party; Janice Turner, “The Left’s Holy Alliance is Built on a Contradiction,” The Times, September 5, 2025, https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/lefts-holy-alliance-is-built-on-a-contradiction-zhgs57603. ↩︎
14. See, for example, this thread: Adnan Hussain MP [@AdnanHussainMP], “Of all the politicians I’ve ever known,” X, August 28, 2025, https://x.com/AdnanHussainMP/status/1960840706861232609. ↩︎
15. Chetan Bhatt, The Revolutionary Road to Me: Identity Politics and the Western Left (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2025). ↩︎
16. Rosalind Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). ↩︎
17. Adolph Reed. “Race and Class: The Beginnings of an Argument,” The Nation, February 20, 2023. https://www.thenation.com/article/society/race-class-intersectionality-atlanta/. ↩︎
18. Daniel Martinez HoSang, “Understanding the Rise of the Multiracial Right—And Why It Matters,” Political Research Associates, October 30, 2024, https://politicalresearch.org/2024/10/30/understanding-rise-multiracial-right-and-why-it-matters; Cloee Cooper and Daryle Lamont Jenkins, “Culture and Belonging in the USA: Multiracial Organizing on the Contemporary Far Right,” CRWS Working Papers, UC Berkeley, 2019, https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1q86f20p. See also Chetan Bhatt, “Antiracism and the Current Moment,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, forthcoming 2025. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2025.2555562. ↩︎
19. UNDP, “Indigenous knowledge is crucial in the fight against climate change—here’s why,” United Nations Development Programme, July 31, 2024,  https://climatepromise.undp.org/news-and-stories/indigenous-knowledge-crucial-fight-against-climate-change-heres-why ↩︎
20. Native Partnership. “Native American Living Conditions on Reservations.” 2022. http://www.nativepartnership.org/site/PageServer?pagename=naa_livingconditions; Leavitt, R.A. et al. “Suicides Among American Indian/Alaska Natives—National Violent Death Reporting System, 18 States, 2003–2014,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 2018, 67(8), pp. 237–242; Maxim, R., Akee, R., and Sanchez, G.R. “Despite an optimistic jobs report, new data shows Native American unemployment remains staggeringly high,” Brookings, 2022. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/despite-an-optimistic-jobs-report-new-data-shows-native-american-unemployment-remains-staggeringly-high/; Spencer, M.R., Miniño, A.M. and Warner, M. “Drug Overdose Deaths in the United States, 2001–2021,”’ National Center for Health Statistics Data Brief, 2022, (457). https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db457.pdf. Karaye, I.M., Maleki, N., and Yunusa, I. “Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Alcohol-Attributed Deaths in the United States, 1999–2020,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 20(8), 2023, p. 5587. ↩︎
21. Robert N. Proctor and Londa Schiebinger, eds., Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008). ↩︎
22. Melany Cruz and Darcy Luke, “Methodology and Academic Extractivism: The Neo-Colonialism of the British University,” Third World Thematics 5 (1-2), 2020: 154–70. ↩︎
23. Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O’Rourke, eds., Transgender Marxism (London: Pluto Press, 2021); Emerson Cram, “Queer and Trans Ecologies as Care Practice of Indispensability,” Environmental Communication 18, nos. 1–2, February 2024: 21–27. ↩︎
24. Chetan Bhatt, The Revolutionary Road to Me: Identity Politics and the Western Left (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2025). ↩︎
25. Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. (New York: New York University Press, 2017). ↩︎
26. Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018). ↩︎
27. Op cit., page xv. ↩︎
28. Op cit., page 89. ↩︎
29. Elizabeth Finkel, “Trump and Kennedy Are Destroying Global Science,” The Conversation, August 8, 2025, https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-trump-and-kennedy-are-destroying-global-science-even-einstein-questioned-facts-but-theres-a-method-to-it-261568. ↩︎