6 May

When populism strips away all existing social hierarchies, including hierarchies of expertise, it leaves people without any way of belonging to a society. You have to then ‘perform’ your identity yourself, to have any status and therefore identity. That’s what ‘identity politics’ like this is. People inventing new identities for themselves, to fill the void left by populism. We do nothing to fix actual problems in society, we spend all day creating and fighting for identities, in our social teams. So we can be somebody, rather than nobody, in a culture that has no social roles left attached to material adult responsibilities.