Gay Nazis (Or Why Liberal Identity Politics Must Die)

This week The Netherlands elected its first gay prime minister, and the youngest in its history.

Mainstream media was full of headlines about this historic milestone.

Liberals on social media and gay rights groups swooned over his youth and sexuality (and history of heart trouble?)

But Robert Jetten isn’t a great guy. A standard-issue rainbow flag centrist, he plans to drastically cut the country’s social security state, immiserating the disabled, homeless and the jobless, while at the same time massively increasing war spending through the imposition of what he calls “a freedom tax.”

In other words, he’s a regressive dickhead.

But all of the headlines, and much of the liberal focus, was on his sexuality and age, not his politics.

Ohana

Amir Ohana is the speaker of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset. Ohana is a Netanyahu loyalist who, as minister of public security under Netanyahu, oversaw Israel’s police state apartheid infrastructure. He did this job so well that Netanyahu promoted him in 2022 to head Israel’s parliament.

This was seen in Israel as a milestone event. Why? Because Ohana, whose parents hail from Morocco, is gay.

Both his origin story and the fact of his sexuality have been a boon for liberal Zionists who’ve paraded him as a symbol of the country’s supposedly tolerant and open values. These “values,” of course, being apartheid and genocide, both of which Ohana, as Knesset speaker, plays a key role in enabling. Yet he, like all gay people in Israel, are a vital rainbow-tinted tool through which Israel’s crimes of apartheid and genocide are laundered.

Mahmood

Shabana Mahmood is Britain’s home secretary. A Muslim who has joined pro-Palestine marches, Mahmood has labelled Israel an occupying power, advocated for the boycott-divest-sanctions movement and joined calls to free Palestine.

Mahmood holding a Free Palestine placard

But this all changed when she sniffed power. As Home Secretary she vociferously supported proscribing Palestine Action as a terrorist group, and in response to the recent High Court ruling that the ban is illegal has vowed to overturn the judgement. A truly detestable person devoid of ethics, values or morals.

But when it comes to British Muslims selling out both Palestine and fellow Muslims, Mahmood has competition.

Yusuf

Zia Yusuf is the home affairs spokesperson for Reform, Britain’s far-right party. A practising Muslim and the son of immigrant parents, he has promised, if elected, to create an ICE-style agency in the UK to round up and deport hundreds of thousands of people similar to his parents every year. Yusuf has repeatedly talked about restoring Britain’s “Christian heritage.”

Javid

Competing for the blessings of white nationalists on the “I’d deport my parents” front is Sajid Javid, the son of Pakistani immigrants and the UK’s former Home Secretary. Javid said recently he wouldn’t let his parents settle in the country today.

Thiel

Peter Thiel, the founder of AI war-tech company Palantir, arguably the most dangerous organisation on the face of the planet, is gay. His co founder, Joe Lonsdale, said recently the whole reason he and Thiel created Palantir was to exterminate communists. Because fascists have loyalty to class, capitalism and empire, not to those who happen to share the same personal identities. Thiel’s goal is to ensure the straight fascist triumphs over the gay anti-fascist.

Bessent

Trump has a number of gay men in his administration, the highest ranking of whom is Scott Bessent, the billionaire treasury secretary who’s overseen the economic warfare campaign to cripple Iran. Activist groups have incredulously asked how a gay man can live with himself serving in an anti-LGBT administration. It’s simple. Bessent’s loyalty is to empire, not to those who happen to share his sexual preferences.

Catz

Safra Catz has regularly been held up as an example of female empowerment. As the CEO of Oracle, one of the biggest companies in the world, she has been described as “shattering the glass ceiling” for women in business. But under her leadership, Oracle provided more material support for the murder of women than arguably any other company on the planet. This support included the donation of seven tonnes of military equipment to IDF units in Gaza, a stream of servers and software to help power the genocide, and the hosting of a hackathon for Israeli military intelligence to develop tech “solutions” to automate the genocide. Catz also authorised the payment of double salaries for all Oracle employees in Israel, including reservists, with a jobs guarantee for those returning from committing genocide. Catz, a billionaire and feminist icon, leaned in to war crimes and the murder of tens of thousands of women.

Catz with Netanyahu

Obama

Then we get to the OG of liberal identity politics: Barack Obama.

The black man who led empire from a house built by slaves.

The black man who put ICE on rocket fuel and effectively built Trump’s deportation machine.

The black man who executed imperialism as brutally and effectively as any white man. Perhaps more so, and without much opposition, precisely because he was black.

A dangerous ideology

Identity politics is a hollow, apolitical ideology devoid of the values it professes to embrace.

But most of all, it is incredibly dangerous.

Identity politics has enabled capitalists and imperialists to sell a fundamentally regressive and imprisoning structure of social relations as an emancipatory ideology. Identity over the material has been a central pillar of neoliberalism’s success: “Look at this gay politician, this gay corporate leader, this CEO businesswoman, this female fighter pilot, this black man president. Look at all this progress!”

Identity sells us a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

It sells us the idea that things must be getting better if historically oppressed groups are now rising to the top of imperialism’s structure of social relations. But it’s all a ruse. A ruse designed to distract us from the only real dividing line that matters—class. Us and them. The elites versus the rest.

It’s been genius really.

Because if you as a gay person or a woman or a black person or an immigrant can be persuaded that what matters is identity rather than class interests or social relations, you can be sold backward, reactionary policies by those with whom you share a personal identity. In turn this helps perpetuate the eternal problem of people voting against their class interests.

Now before someone gets mad: this isn’t to say discrimination based on skin colour, race, gender, or sexual preference isn’t a thing.

It definitely is.

But this discrimination, discrimination which flows directly from structures of class and capital has been weaponised by the interests of class and capital to make us look down, rather than up. It’s been weaponised by the agents of the status quo to twist ideas of justice and to funnel rightful demands for justice into dead ends.

And of course people from historically oppressed groups can, and frequently are, good leaders.

But the failure to interrogate a person’s politics because of their identity, as we’ve seen with Jetten, previously saw with Obama and to an extent are seeing with Mamdani, must end. The reflexive assumption that a person must be on the side of the good because of a group status bestowed on them by colour, gender or sexuality is dangerous. It’s an assumption seeded by class and capital to undermine fights for real justice. Wrapped in the language and appearance of progress, this assumption is how fascist and imperialist politics are smuggled into mainstream thought and discourse.

And this inability to pick our way through identity politics relies on the depoliticisation of the citizenry, a depoliticisiation that neoliberalism has so effectively promoted and managed. Depoliticised social relations are essential to the success of identity politics because they so effectively obscure the fact that class and capital remain the enduring divide.

The end of the fake progress signalled by identity politics, and the re-emergence of a politics focused on class and capital is essential for actual progress to begin and for the oppressed to find real justice.

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