The Lit Bros Rediscover Identity Politics

Racing Back to the Past

It’s amazing how consumed the literary world is by gendered identity politics — masculinity not least.

The better to keep from focusing on class issues that crush people across the entire spectrum.

The better to keep people from focusing on the police state that points more guns than ever at the most vulnerable.

The better to keep people from focusing on the ongoing US-Israeli genocide of Palestinians.

The better to keep people from focusing on the world-ending threats of climate collapse and militarism.

The better to keep people from focusing on the plutarchy — militarized capitalism — aka fascism — a militant financial tyranny that pillages and preys like the ultimate predator on the most vulnerable and on the guts of the planet itself.

In the literary world it’s a lot of identity fixation and ego stroking and relationship navel gazing, not least to your own self.

Meanwhile, the world burns, and the most vulnerable are cut down and cut up and thrown as logs onto the terminal fire.

In “The Rage of the Literary Man,” fiction writer and cultural critic Alex Perez asks:

Why are American literary men so angry lately? They’ve been angry for years, but in recent months, the rage has reached insufferable levels. Something is deeply wrong with these literary men. It’s distressing. I don’t like to see my American brothers enraged and flailing. I think a couple of things are going on, but it starts with the last decade of “masculinity” discourse that’s dominated elite media. The Trump era ushered in this conversation, with talk of “toxic masculinity” bombarding the hyper-online literary man. This has resulted in a literary man who is extremely aware of his masculinity, even if he is opposed to the word and doesn’t consider himself traditionally masculine. The literary man is constantly haunted by the specter of masculinity.

Perez adds:

The American literary man is consumed with shame and rage, obsessed with projecting his brand of online masculinity, so I’ve put together a reading list for him. If there is to be a future for the literary man, he needs to get healthy first. This reading list will start the healing process.

The reading list is all male and ends with Hemingway — of whom Perez notes:

It all starts with him.

Does it though?

Alex Perez is persona non grata in many literary circles given his particular reactionary type of cultural critique, which is how he “makes a living now.” He states the following in a 2022 interview in Hobart literary journal that upended the magazine — the staff resigned:

My take is the only take and the one everyone knows to be true but only admits in private: the literary world only accepts work that aligns with the progressive/woke point of view of rich coastal liberals. This is a mindset that views “whiteness” and America as inherently problematic, if not evil, and this sensibility animates every decision made by publishers/editors/agents. White people bad. Brown people good. America bad. Men bad. White women, I think, bad…unless they don a pussy hat. This explains why nearly every book is about some rich fuck from Brooklyn confronting his white guilt or some poor black girl who’s been fighting “whiteness” and “patriarchy” all her life. All this stuff is ideologically-driven horseshit propagated by some of the most artless people on the planet. We know who they are.

Setting aside the lobotomized invective and the race and gender denigrations and the lucrative political swiping, here we can see that the Lit Bro mentality perversely mirrors the identity politics mentality that it fights. This is Lit Bro mentality as white identity politics, and often white male identity politics, and often even white straight male identity politics — the oldest and by far the most powerful form of identity politics in America and Europe continuing through today.

The establishment loves identity politics. Especially when it’s used to cut the People to pieces — to divide and conquer. And while the literary establishment may not love the identity obloquy of Perez, the political establishment feeds it and uses it to break people apart to keep them from uniting and turning on the financial elite, who rule the world, and who gut the world to their enormous profit.

Biden and Trump, establishment Democrats and Republicans, the plutarchy burns the world and entire Peoples to a crisp who bear identities of all kinds but especially people of color and women and children. There’s gold to be had in having identities for enemies.

The “earliest memory of the power of storytelling” to Alex Perez “came from my grandfather drunkenly telling stories about his days in Cuba and hating the dirty, rotten communists. Typical Miami shit.” Those “dirty, rotten communists” led by Fidel Castro liberated Cuba from the brutal US-Cuban plutocrat rule and military dictatorship of Batista. Just so, ostensibly in the name of “art,” Perez defends his chosen literary identity cohort and castigates against the identities of those who supposedly perpetrate against it.

As a 2009 graduate of the highly esteemed Iowa Writer’s MFA Workshop, Perez adds after the interview blowup:

Today, I will attempt to do the impossible: Explain to my Miami friends why I am now the “Iowa Pariah.” I will have to explain what the Iowa Writers’ Workshop is. I will probably also need to define “pariah,” since most of my bros barely speak English. I might get my ass kicked.

So the bros go, the traditional gendered identity warriors of masculinity bravely skirmishing the traditionally oppressed while sitting out the big wars for the survival, let alone the prosperity, of humankind.

The “Trump era” did not start the “masculinity discourse” that Perez obsesses about, nor the “toxic masculinity discourse.” Ask Norman Mailer.

Mailer and his like skirmished with “Libbies,” as he called feminists, more than a half century ago. And he was very far from the first so engaged.

Mailer wrote some great books. He also said some very stupid things about gender and race and other forms of identity. Stupid things die off in the literary world, when and if they do, for good reason.

More sweepingly, nor did the “Trump era” start the “fascism discourse.” Ask George Bush and Dick Cheney and Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and the military backed plutocrats who opposed FDR and the New Deal. We can ask these people even though they are dead, as history lives on.

And we can ask some of today’s prominent People’s fighters who paid big prices for opposing the totalitarian capitalist police and spy state: Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, and many others. And water protectors Jessica Reznicek and Ruby Montoya. And countless more.

Nor did the current Biden-Trump Era, still more profoundly, start the “genocide discourse.” Ask Native Americans. Ask Black Americans. Ask the Vietnamese and Koreans. Ever wonder why North Korea hates America so intensely? America obliterated North Korea in the 1950s. People remember their own obliteration.

Ask the Jews. And now of course the Palestinians, among others.

These are the problems that we might better obsess about in our literary discourse — the genocidal problems of the day that strike at the fundamental realities of human consciousness and what it means to be fully human, or inhuman — the vast societal problems that threaten the existence of all of us and everything else on this planet.

What we need is a revolutionary art and culture and literature, not a race back through the murk of time to an establishment identity politics that persists in a world lucky still to exist.

Every revolutionary thought, feeling, word, concept, ideology, action, event, people, group, relationship, and so on that one could think of would be worth ambitious novels and stories of the times, needed by the times. Work it up with character, plot, setting, action and go. Any style you like. There are so many vital elements and features of story far beyond the tight box of identity politics.

Be a man about it. Or a woman. Or trans. And so on. Be human above all, under it all, through it all.

Then discuss. And if you don’t discuss — what again are you talking about today in literature? Internecine skirmishes, sometimes life and death on a retail level — while on a macro level the train of humanity and Earth goes unattended to the death camp.

Masculine identity politics “raging” against identities formerly conquered — bravo — you sit grotesquely on the sideline, very far from the great wars for the species and the planet. The final winter is coming — nuclear winter or otherwise, it’s statistically inevitable — if it is not stopped in advance — if conditions are not changed as soon as possible.

Maybe look into that tiny area of human consciousness today rather than to the masculine panorama of the past.

There’s a place for the identity skirmishes, no doubt and absolutely. But when that place becomes the whole, or most or much of the whole, then what goes wanting condemns us.

There’s a reason that establishment ideology bans explicit and direct revolutionary literature — from thought and talk as much as possible let alone from story publication and distribution.

It’s not a great reason.

And there’s a reason the establishment embraces identity politics — gendered and otherwise.

It’s not entirely a great reason either. It’s a kind of concession in place of far more whole solutions.

Give something of value with one hand. Divide the people. Then take the rest.

Identity exploration is of great value because it’s important to correct and to keep correcting malignant consciousness in society, but when reigning ideology pushes all of our identities into civil war against each other rather than against the oppressive class, then all hope for humanity and consciousness is lost.

Identity politics are weaponized at the highest levels by the establishment — the better to smash Bernie and AOC and the progressive populists working to gain power for the people. Progressive populists are gaslit to death by bludgeons of identity smashing class. That’s how Hillary Clinton beat Bernie in the 2016 primary. That’s how Joe Biden beat Bernie in the 2020 primary.

The literary world too is bad about this given its anti-revolutionary fixation at a time when revolutionary changes are needed like never — literally never — before. Even a moderate figure like Bernie Sanders notes that revolution is needed now.

Identity politics. That’s how Trump beat both Clinton and Harris — by using traditional supremacist identity politics — though Trump also faked part of Bernie’s class platform to winning effect.

Identity politics! Used by the establishment to divide the people and to gang up with the big donors, the financial elite, to pillage, profiteer, and plutocrat the planet into oblivion.

We need a literature to fight that oblivion.

If not a revolutionary literature, then what?

If not a revolutionary human consciousness, then what have we become?

What will we become?

What will our literary “policy” be? It’s a choice every bit as real as poverty is a policy choice — set by the plutarchy and enforced by the plutarchy when we fail to determine it ourselves.

Poverty in literature and art is neither a choice we should be willing to make — nor an imposition we should be willing to accept.

Art is not what Lit Bros defend as they rally around a retrograde identity politics, the oldest most destructive form of identity warfare in the culture.

What the retrograde identity warriors defend is division among the people, fake righteousness, and civil war rather than revolution.

Identity politics, in one way and another, continue to pave the way for Trump 3.0 — a militant family and pluto-dictatorship in America, Batista-style.

There is another way for literature and society to go. A revolutionary way. To open the path of life for people and the planet.