Another interestingly provocative e-mail from longtime reader S. Wallerstein, regarding the identity politics "left":

They've been very successful at imposing their hegemony on the left, especially in the U.S., so that they are the only "queer" people, so that they are always victims and that of course coincides with the rise of neoliberalism and the bourgeois offensive against the working class.  It just suits Wall St.  fine that the paradigm of oppression is no longer the guy or woman working for the minimum wage, but a disabled lesbian philosopher who didn't get tenure at an elite university.   And most of us,  myself included, feel very uncomfortable not being on the side of the victims, but there are victims and there are victims.   I don't want to sound  cynical, but if I were Wall St., I'd fund all leftwing identity politics groups to distract leftwing attention from class politics, just as the CIA during the cold war funded all groups defending "cultural freedom" behind the Iron Curtain.​