For many American leftists, the 2016 presidential election brought questions about the political significance of identity front and center. But these debates predate Twitter fights between @maobaby69 and @marxistbutwoke. As the political fortunes of socialists have fallen over the last four decades, leftists have argued about what role, if any, the abandonment or embrace of identity has played in its years of defeat.

Simply put, the question is whether identity politics is the friend or foe of socialist politics. In Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump, Asad Haider, a graduate student at the University of California-Santa Cruz and an editor at Viewpoint, takes up the question. He argues that socialists can and should recognize the deficiencies of liberal identitarianism without rejecting a more radical approach to identity politics.

But while Mistaken Identity is able to demonstrate how the ideology and rhetoric of “identity” has been used as a weapon against the working class, it falls short of making a plausible case that it could ever be a boon to socialist politics.