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But this is mistaken, and any serious Left critique of the rise of identity studies — a key vector of what came to be known as woke ideas — must reckon with the granular history. In fact, the establishment of the first-ever ethnic studies departments, at the University of California, Berkeley, and San Francisco State University, was engineered by a lifetime FBI informant named Richard Aoki.

This is notable, because the upshot of Aoki’s work, and that of the wider movement he helped incept, was to defuse campus radicalism and turn would-be revolutionaries into credentialed race professionals of the kind who would soon become familiar to anyone who has faced the business end of a university diversity office or corporate HR department.

In his 2012 book, Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals and Ronald Reagan’s Rise to Power, the journalist Seth Rosenfeld used the Freedom of Information Act to extract documents from the FBI about its activities against California militant groups during the Sixties and early Seventies. In the course of his research, he discovered that Aoki, the first Asian member of the Black Panther Party, was recruited by the FBI when he was in the Army during the Fifties to inform on student radicals. Aoki, as it happens, also midwifed the Asian American Studies section of Berkeley’s ethnic-studies department, the first of its kind in the United States.

This origin story sheds a cold light on identity- and grievance-based disciplines, which were designed to emphasise “visibility” and “representation” over critically analysing and attacking capitalism itself. Other American universities would soon follow Berkeley’s path and create ethnic-studies departments to signal their commitment to progressive causes.

Thanks to identity politics, militancy and activism became institutionalised within the academy and, later, the corporation and the security apparatus. Is it possible that Aoki abandoned his early commitment to anti-Communism and had a genuine conversion to the sort of identity politics he would espouse as a chief promoter of ethnic studies? Certainly. And I am not suggesting that identity politics was solely a product of the American security establishment; life is much too complex and contingent to permit such single-cause explanations. Still, there is no denying that university-based ethnic studies came to supply a new “dialect of power”: a way for the likes of the FBI or Goldman Sachs to deflect questions about their decisions by showcasing the “diversity” of the people who make those decisions.

The point is that those of us on the Left need more discussion of the origins of identity politics, the role it has played in creating nominally progressive liberal institutions, and its complicity with defanging actual radicalism.