Before the pandemic, Black Lives Matter and the #MeToo movement turned identity politics from a niche American slogan into a governing cultural logic.
What began as a claim to have ‘woken’ to inequality and the inadequacies of liberal democracy quickly became a demand for radical individual freedom, but only for approved groups.
James Fitzjames Stephen saw the danger in 1873.
In Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, written as a direct rebuttal to Mill’s On Liberty, Stephen warned against the extreme individualism that identity politics has now become.
Men no longer explain, they mansplain. Old white men are dismissed as old, pale, male, and stale. Australia is reduced to a colonial project that must be decolonised, right down to the university curriculum. Some politicians refuse to swear or affirm allegiance to the Crown, keen to overthrow colonisation while still collecting the government’s pay cheque.
Despite the referendum, there is still a movement to grant Indigenous Australians political powers based on their race and a constitutionally enshrined vibe. Where this vibe will take Australia is anybody’s guess.
The LGBTI community, which would otherwise be harmed if they were ever in Gaza, flies the Palestinian flag next to the Pride flag and the Aboriginal flag.
Since Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, police appeared to do nothing while protesters allegedly chanted open threats against Jews and other antisemitic insults on the steps of the Sydney Opera House.
In Victoria, the response to violence was to create a Parliamentary Secretary for Men’s Behaviour Change, a bureaucratic solution to toxic masculinity that treats half the population as a problem to be managed.
These patterns of selective blindness and institutional capture are not accidental. Identity politics has used the very freedoms created by the Enlightenment and the Great Conversation inherent in a liberal education to attack the West.
The Judeo-Christian, liberal democratic tradition that was attacked by armed terrorists on October 7, 2023, did not prevent the Australian government continuing to fund UNRWA, the UN’s refugee agency, even after several of its workers allegedly participated in the terrorist attacks.
Many complained that the Labor government has gone soft on terror by refusing to properly support Israel, Australia’s liberal democratic ally, and overseeing an unprecedented reversal of foreign policy. The Greens, for their part, have doubled down on their anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian stances.
A culmination of national security inaction occurred on 14 December 2025. Two alleged gunmen, Indian national Sajid Akram and his Australian-born son Naveed Akram, opened fire on a peaceful Hanukkah celebration at Archer Park on Bondi Beach. Fifteen people were killed, including a ten-year-old girl, a Holocaust survivor, and several members of Sydney’s Jewish community. More than forty others were also wounded in Australia’s deadliest terrorist attack.
The Bondi Beach terror attack was declared an ISIS-inspired antisemitic massacre. It exposed glaring failures in intelligence sharing, counter terrorism monitoring, and firearms licensing, despite prior warnings.
Rather than a robust defence of the common good through impartial law enforcement and decisive action against rising threats, the incident highlighted how identity politics and reluctance to confront Islamist extremism has left citizens vulnerable, allowing contradiction to accelerate toward catastrophe and underscoring the urgent need to reprioritise shared security over divisive tropes.
Every aspect of post-pandemic policy has become dominated by identity politics. The question is where this leads.
Key to identity politics is the right of individuals to identify however they choose, even if that means grammatically incorrect pronouns or irreversible medical interventions on minors. What is missing is any serious concept of the common good.
Ordinarily, if A identifies in a way that B rejects, B can still accept A’s right to choose. But when refusal to affirm that identity becomes a social, professional, or criminal offence, the purpose is no longer liberty. It is the enforced subordination of shared reality to private will.
Identity politics does not merely expand freedom. It systematically dismantles the shared understandings that make a free society possible.
Identity politics represents the acceleration of contradiction and therefore the manifestation of modern communism. It is destroying our liberal democratic traditions, and it is undoing the very fabric of Enlightenment thinking. Not only is it destroying the West from within, but it is making excuses for otherwise abhorrent human rights abuses elsewhere. It is hypocrisy in the extreme.
There is still time. Identity politics can be stopped. Civil society can be restored. But only if we name the thing correctly: this is modern communism. The most effective way to defeat modern communism is the same method that defeated the old form, by defending individual liberty within the constraints of the common good.
Anarchists have tried unsuccessfully to ‘smash the state’. Identity politics has changed tack and is pursuing anarchy by using the state to smash society.
There is a middle path between the two extremes of anarchy. Recovering that path is essential if liberal democracy is to endure. Western Civilisation will need to reassert a shared sense of the common good, or it will lack the social cohesion required for the inevitable security challenges ahead.
Dr Michael de Percy @FlaneurPolitiq is the Spectator Australia’s Canberra Press Gallery Correspondent. If you would like to support his writing, or read more of Michael, please visit his website.
The post Identity politics is modern communism appeared first on The Spectator Australia.
