I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It!: Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom

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The university's purpose is to search for truth, not the imposition of 'correct' ideas. It's also nearly impossible to physically stamp out an 'incorrect' idea, while, once gaining traction, it will spread with ease among a population ignorant of the arguments against it and consequently mentally disarmed to counter it" (421). In 2020, his then-publisher proposed that he ‘join the debate with a short book’. What emerged was obviously not what had been expected. This phrase is what is sometimes known as a malaphor or a mixed idiom, which is a phrase that blends two similar figures of speech to create a new one, that may or may not make much sense. In the malaphor we have chosen this week, there are two conventional idioms at play- “to burn one’s bridges” and “I’ll/we’ll cross that bridge when I/we get to it”. To make (some) sense of what blending these two expressions might mean, let us first look at what they mean on their own. So, when someone says that they will “burn that bridge when [they] get to it”, they expect to deal with an upcoming difficulty badly which will result in permanently cutting ties or alienating other people involved. In a nutshell, you are setting yourself up to fail in dealing with a future problem. On the other hand, to cross that bridge when you get to it has a positive connotation. Collins Dictionary, again, defines the phrase as dealing with a problem or a difficult situation when it comes up and “not to anticipate difficulties”.

However, the book’s two longest critiques – comprising roughly two-fifths of its total length – are devoted to Ibram X Kendi and the Obama administration. The irrefragable fact remains that "woke" politics are intellectually vacuous and politically pernicious. I endeavor to demonstrate this in Part I by parsing the ur-texts of "woke" politics, and then by dispelling the dense mist that surrounds that ultimate "woke" product: the Obama cult. In Part II, I critically assess what's become an article of faith in "woke" culture: that in the classroom a professor should teach only his own and not contending viewpoints on the controverted question; that he shouldn't strive for balance." According to Finkelstein, ‘a huge political opportunity’ was squandered during the George Floyd protests in 2020: ‘If the “Jobs and Freedom” slogan of the 1963 March on Washington had been tweaked so that the demand “Justice and Jobs” seized the moment, the nascent coalition in the streets between an antiracist and anti-capitalist politics could have consolidated around concrete political demands.... Instead the demonstrations petered out amidst radical posturing and vacuous identity politics’. Information about the book I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It!, written by Norman G. Finkelstein About the book The core thesis of this big and baggy book is that, while previously a marginal affair ‘pretty much confined to the college campus and the political left’, a certain damaging brand of identity politics (‘woke politics’) has now become ‘ubiquitous’ in US politics – and that it has done so as a consequence of the Democratic party substituting ‘“oppressed minorities” of every imaginable ilk’ for what used to be its mass base: the trade union movement.However, it would be a shame if this were to deprive the book of the wide audience that it deserves.

Here are my thoughts on our favorite academic with a Kermit voice who got cancelled and hates woke politics. No, not that one.

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To be fair, Finkelstein does define what he means by ‘identity politics’: ‘At its core it’s about representation: a competition within the group as to who best exemplifies it, and a competition between the group and the broader community as to the former’s legitimate claims for greater representation in the latter’. If Kendi is currently feted in charmed circles,’ Finkelstein notes ‘it’s because, for all his fire and brimstone rhetoric, his hip and hyped public persona, his militant preening and macho posturing, the only substantial demand he makes on the one percent – reconfigure the exploiting class to include a fair percentage of us – they’re already prepared to concede’. In reality, Finkelstein notes, even the chief strategist for Obama’s presidential campaigns, David Axelrod, concedes that ‘neither he nor Obama nor anyone else in Obama’s entourage ever contemplated a decisive rupture with the past’. The first, which comprises roughly fourth-fifths of the book, focuses mainly on identity politics. The second on questions to do with academic freedom. Here's what Norm says in his introduction, which is much more quotable than the conclusion (it ends not with a bang, but with a whimper).

I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It! : Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom This material is often fascinating, but at the same time one can understand why a senior vice president at publisher Henry Holt returned the book’s manuscript with the comment that: ‘there’s altogether too much of everything’. Holocaust denial is serving here as a placeholder for any ‘politically toxic’ factual claim. Finkelstein is himself the son of Holocaust survivors.On radical-sounding slogans divorced from reality, Finkelstein memorably quotes Trotsky: ‘“if you have not even a bridge to them, not even a road to the bridge, nor a footpath to the road” then they amount to a “fetish... a religious myth. Mythology serves people as a cover for their own weakness or at best as a consolation.” Finkelstein is furious that this ‘has distracted from and, when need be, outright sabotaged a class-based movement that promised profound social change’ – namely the mass grassroots movement supporting Bernie Sanders’ presidential bids in 2016 and 2020. Once again, Finkelstein exposes the yawning chasm between public reputation and sordid reality, detailing Power’s ‘maniacal support for military intervention in Libya that destroyed the country; her feverish advocacy of armed intervention in Syria... that could only have exacerbated the humanitarian catastrophe there; [and] her silence in the face of, or aggressive complicity in, human rights crimes committed by the US and its allies’.