The reduction of politics to a question of good and bad people deeply
afflicts radical political subcultures in the US,
Dan,
I find it difficult to reconcile your historiography of US activism and politics with what I know about both US history and theoretical paradigms more generally. I'm also a bit confused by the definition of "identity politics" as a paradigm of good and bad people.
I mean, I understand your suggestion that "identity politics" is depoliticising, but I also don't understand it at all because the treatment of conflicts "over resources and labour" has always been conducted through more or less tacit assumptions about identity that link to entitlement. And your disappearance of white men's identity politics as a tacit default or "universal" has the effect of yielding a narrative that says (incorrectly in my view) that "identity politics" only began when the former's claim of universality was challenged. I don't see how this could be described as depoliticisiing so much as the very opposite: heightened conflict, including over the use of resources, and labour (which presumably also includes things like enormous pay disparaties, sexual harassment which involves employers and coworkers treating other workers' bodies as their unlimited property, and so on).
As to the separate issue of the way this heightened conflict is handled, I think there are better explanations than Millennials are doing it wrong.
There is a longstanding approach that treats fascism as if it were a variety of sin (the Catholic philosopher Girard, for instance). I could not disagree more with that understanding of fascism, or politics more generally. But with regard to the US, the growing influence of evangelicals and religious conservatism more generally has tended to displace a concept of people doing awful things that people can change with a concept of good and evil. This is hardly down to Millennials. At the same time, evangelicals and conservative Catholics have adopted a pretty selective, exculpatory response to awful things that powerful people (powerful white men) do, which suspends judgement because only God can posthumously judge what is in someone's heart etc. It's obviously highly selective, given the growth of mass incarceration, extra-legal and legitimated violence, that has been directed, in the main, against black people, people of colour (think border violence), and women.
Add to this the way in which a younger generation have been thrown to the wolves as a consequence of increasingly precarious conditions of work and highly restrictive conditions on welfare, I am not surprised that part of the pushback involves an insistence on the powerful being held to account for their actions. In this world. I disagree, strongly with moral economic theories (Catholics like Polanyi and Mouffe peddle this mysticism far more than any Millennial). But I can't bring myself to fault young people for insisting on accountability and change.
best,
Angela