Internal Dialogues: In our new series at this festival, we bring together leading thinkers who find themselves on the same side of a debate - be it in politics, culture, science or philosophy - to discuss the most pressing internal issues and disagreements that are standing in the way of a shared vision forward.
While the Left has campaigned for minority groups since the Civil Rights movements of the 1950s and 60s, it was in the 1990s that identity politics was more explicitly adopted as a central electoral strategy by many on the left. The idea of seeing the Left as a broad coalition of minority groups was further extended by figures like Obama and Corbyn in the 2010s. But many argue the tide has turned. With seemingly popular and ever more explicit anti-woke rhetoric from Trump, Farage, Le Pen and Meloni, and many large corporations including Amazon, Meta and Accenture following their lead by ending some diversity initiatives, there are now claims the era of identity politics is over and it is no longer an election-winning strategy for the Left.
Has identity politics outlived its usefulness, and is it time for the Left to move on from identity politics? Should the Left return to a more traditional focus on economic and class issues? Or does the Left need to find a new contemporary identity altogether if it is to halt the advance of the populist right?