Hashtag Activism: A Selection from Stephen Marche’s The Unmade Bed (2018)

“The great intellectual advantage of academic identity politics is its simplicity. Panvictimology freezes every group, and every person in those groups, into appointed, unmoving circles of good and evil, defined by structures of privilege and their overthrow by the forces of progress. The development of panvictimology also had an underlying economic motive: its convenience. Rather than having to teach students a methodology or, even more grueling, a body of knowledge, professors merely had to impress an attitude on their students, the attitude of virtue. Then they could cop that attitude and apply it to any situation. Every undergraduate who has taken a course in the humanities understands at least superficially the notion of structures of privilege and understands how to pose correctly when confronted with these structures. . . .

The game is called Check Your Privilege. Another name for it might be Who Is More Righteous Than I? It’s learned in college, but it’s played mostly online. Internet discussion takes the insights found in ‘The Personal Is Political’ and renders them null and void, one by one. The analysis of personal struggle is reduced to stylized masks. The concern for apolitical people, for the lives of those who don’t care about gender politics, vanishes into a vague contempt. Openness and humility toward other modes of life collapse into the opinion echo chamber of like-minded gangs. Meanwhile hope for real change grows less and less relevant. Hashtag activism—utterly impotent—loses sight of everything other than its own brief speechifying.”—Stephen Marche, The Unmade Bed: The Messy Truth about Men and Women in the 21st Century (2018)