In concert with the war against immigrants and critics of Israel, the Trump Administration has announced sweeping measures against “leftists”. The attacks are driven by the dystopian national security directive–NSPM-7 , which tasks federal law enforcement with rooting out domestic terrorists like Antifa, while also instructed the Treasury Department to look into nonprofit groups that might be funding them.

What caught my eye is that in addition to groups, NSPS-7 targets individuals by their identities, including: anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, extremism on migration, on race and on gender, hostility towards traditional American values on family, on religion and on morality.

So basically everyone.

It also occurred to me that the Trump Administration’s actions are identity-politics (id-pol) with a fascist flavor.

You’re probably going what-the-fuck, but hear me out.

I’ve long described id-pol as a stealth movement, that has worked brilliantly to promote division, polarizing America on the basis of race, gender and sexual orientation, obliterating the basis of New Deal prosperity, while allowing the Democrats to pretend to be in opposition to capital. It’s fitting that Trump is going after the policies created by the Democrats to cover up their betrayal.

Id-pol disguises objectively right-wing, neoliberal ideology with superficially “progressive” Kente cloth. Americans have been increasingly told that their religious, familial, and personal identity hang on choosing a “side.” But identity politics has a history most are unfamiliar with that is an one of those ah hah! moments, where everything slides into focus.

During the cold war there was a calculated American effort to reorient the Western left from class struggle to cultural critique, from the collective to the individual, from socialism to liberal moralism. Covertly the CIA, through the Congress for Cultural Freedom, secretly funded writers, philosophers, and artists to promote anti-communist but left-leaning egalitarian ideals while subtly manipulating cultural narratives. Their outrage needed to be harnessed and corralled into politically safe directions. The goal was non-communist liberals who would become productive members of a capitalist system.

 Identity politics was the result.

In Le Capitalisme de la séduction (1981), Michel Clouscard, describes a Washington project to construct a non-communist, liberal left, through the capitalism of seduction. He argued that “once capitalism had secured material abundance under U.S. hegemony, it no longer needed to repress desire; it could instead commodify it.” Identity politics supplanted class issues of capital and labor with the politics of desire, sexuality, and identity, and became the perfect ideological vehicle for the new consumer society. In Clouscard’s terms, the political form of capitalism’s cultural evolution–“rebellion repurposed as consumption.”

The true victor of the Cold War, Clouscard insisted, was not freedom but capitalism’s power to absorb freedom into its own reproduction. By shifting politics from production to pleasure, from class to identity, the liberal West achieved what repression never could: the consent of the exploited. “Freedom becomes the ideology of dependence. The postwar world thus mistook market expansion for self-expansion, mistaking the seductions of liberty for emancipation itself.”

The cold war origination and history since points to the purpose of identity politics. It’s the perfect solvent for social unity, while providing individuals the feeling of rebellion and protest. Id-pol doesn’t offer freedom or liberation but seeks to reallocate capital such that it enriches the billionaires and their corporations, transmutes their wealth into even more political power that imposes constraints on any countervailing political forces.

The right plays the identity politics game too. The Republicans use it to otherize Americans, so they can be demonized and attacked. Like I said, it’s fascist id-pol. This should not be a surprise. The cold war Congress of Cultural Freedom soft power was accompanied by the hard power fist of Operation Gladio, and the liberals identity politics is accompanied by Trump’s attack on the demonized others.

Solidarity is the key to political movements, especially when they practice populism that seeks to confront the concentrated power of capital. The inverse is keep the masses divided and fighting themselves.

The establishment very much wants to stuff people back into their partisan boxes and to eviscerate any notion that people on the left and right might build a consensus for true reform. Meanwhile, a sophisticated propaganda system keeps the American people in the dark, for if the truth were known, it would become immediately apparent that the public has a very different view of its “interests” than U.S. elites have.

The biggest trick the oligarchs have ever played on us was promoting the idea that we can solve political problems with individual choices instead of neutering them.

The result is that divided we fall, for identity politics obviated the class-war that the rich have won.