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

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When it comes to curbing speech," Finkelstein says, "experience thus confirms the general rule in human affairs: humility is to be preferred over arrogance. But the analogy with Emanuel fails, because in fact one Rahm Emanuel is far too many whereas one Finkelstein is not nearly enough. Not for the race; not for color, but for man and manhood alone, they labored, fought and died… It is better to be a member of the great human family, than a member of any particular variety of the human family… I put my foot upon the effort to draw lines between the white and the black…or to draw race lines anywhere in the domain of liberty. Moreover, if the "harmful" speech is socially marginal such that hardly anyone believes it, what's the great danger in letting someone say it now and then? Although racism is real and you should always be at the ready to fight it whenever it rears its ugly head, you all, Black and white, have a helluva lot more in common.

On the widespread fascination with transgender people: "the first day of a graduate seminar, students used to describe their intellectual interests. Academia insists on politeness, decorum, "neutral" language, which often serves to enforce conventions, emasculate dissent, and uphold power structures; wokeness insists on ceaselessly monitoring your own and others' language, in fact making that a priority, allowing people to feel "radical" by doing nothing that remotely challenges real power structures. That unshakeable commitment, that willingness not to conform, combined with intellectual power, is chiefly what has set Finkelstein apart from most of his peers. This issue bears, of course, on Finkelstein's own career, but he is hardly the only academic to have been disciplined in recent decades for alleged "incivility" or taking unpopular political stands.Woke cancel culture cooperated with the establishment media's cancel culture to stop the Sanders juggernaut. One might object that he's painting with too broad a brush here, that advocacy of the interests of minorities and women can, depending on the context and the cause, indeed be an essential political program, but he wouldn't deny this. The first Black president rose to power by having, in Obama's own cynical words, "pulled off a neat trick" by standing for nothing except his skin color. It should be clear from what has been said here that I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It is an unusual book.

Aside from Obama himself, the most satisfying skewering, I found, was of Samantha Power, the "Battleaxe from Hell…downright evil…[whose] conscience only bestirs at the suffering of victims of official U. DuBois, and Paul Robeson into a censorious, narcissistic, morbidly navel-gazing culture preoccupied with subjectivist trivialities like personal pronouns at the expense of solidaristic struggle for a better world. It is likely they couldn't have had such a destructive impact had the FCC's Fairness Doctrine not been repealed in 1987. The chapter is tightly argued and has a more disciplined structure than others, consisting of analyses of four academic freedom cases (Bertrand Russell in 1940, Leo Koch in 1960, Angela Davis in 1969, and Steven Salaita in 2014) and then general reflections that conclude in a discussion of his own case. On Amy Goodman (whom he doesn't name): "Goddess of Wokeness…a woke machine, churning out insipid clichés as her mental faculty degenerates to mush.Norman Finkelstein first made his name while still in graduate school when he exposed an acclaimed national bestseller as a hoax. If "woke" liberals embraced him, it was because, beneath his hip veneer, Obama was a sure bet to prop up the corrupt status quo.