Recently I had occasion to remark the irony of the view widespread on the right that Star Wars had "turned left." This is because, apart from the too little made argument that identity politics is not really "left" (my reading of the matter has long been that the prevailing version comes from the anti-left postmoderns, and their embrace by the
center), but the fact that the Star Wars movies were left at the very start (and may actually be less left-wing now).
With the James Bond series it is different. Ian Fleming's
personal views could be idiosyncratic, with his literary idols--people like Maugham and Hammett and Greene--often politically of the left rather than the right with which he so identified. And every now and then he might do something in his writing less than fully consistent with the view of him as a reactionary right-wing figure. Still, reading books like
Goldfinger one can hardly deny that he was a reactionary, and as a reactionary threw himself into the culture war with gusto--while the films of more recent years, within the framework of today's mainstream (where identity politics are paramount), has tended to do the opposite, throwing itself into the culture war from the opposite, identity politics end of the spectrum.
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My understanding is that the left has split into "class left" and "identity left", and many people I know who are anti-identity politics see themselves as centrists, as they see identity politics as part of the left.
It's definitely the way almost everyone talks about these things, especially in the mainstream—but to me at least it's more confusing than helpful. This is partly because what we call "identity politics" (with its focus on difference rather than universalism, subjectivity rather than objectivity, suspicion of or hostility to reason and especially its application to society, disbelief in history and progress), as opposed to, for example, the old left anti-racism (which is universalist, objectively-oriented, rationalistic, progress-minded, etc.), is rooted in postmodernism. People call postmodernism "left," in part because there is ways in which it genuinely offends many on the right, but it is still extremely anti-left philosophically, and had its purpose in being that. (It's not for nothing that postmodernists rely on people like Nietzsche, Heidegger, etc. so much; they sound like they're coming from the de Maistre-type Counter-Enlightenment because they really do belong to that tradition—as my description hopefully indicates—even if some of them think of themselves as left, and call themselves left, and especially on "culture war" issues take stances the generally acknowledged right doesn't like.)
A lot of people have pointed all this out over and over and over again, almost ad nauseam in fact, long before I ever made the observation myself—but they have had absolutely no effect whatsoever on the way the mainstream conversation goes.
Incidentally I'm using the term "centrism" here in a very specific and American sense rather than just using it to mean being "in the middle"—the tradition of the "center" as it developed in the U.S. in the mid-twentieth century with people like Schlesinger, Bell, etc.. (Alas, the way different people use that word is a whole other source of confusion.) I'm less conversant with the term's use in Britain, so I hesitate to say more about that.
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