Is a radical politics rooted in identity and desiring transgression?

Left-liberal social projects that otherwise lack a political 'thing' to define them by are now frequently organized around topics of gender and sexuality the broad theme of which appears to be something like:

Identity is desire determined by transgression.

This is because:
What you should do is determined by (how you understand) who you are, and that is up for grabs now.
This accords with the broad preference or insistence of modern liberal culture on openness rather than closure.
And maybe modern capitalism's functional "ambivalence" between expansion and contraction.

And the political is thought of as transgression.
The personal is the 'true' or real political. Another way to put this is to say: We care about the justice and happiness of the social world and the lack of these things, but we can only approach them, as moderns, through deep authenticity.
Which is a demand that developed along with capitalist consumer society and nationalism.
Nationalism politicized identities, and made them very important. People live and die for them.
Consumer society made them marketable, plastic and fungible, and subject to changing demand. Your own demands on yourself might change.
Transgression is absolute change. Mutability reigns and so does polemos, conflict. Transgression challenges static orders, which no one likes anymore. Except fundamentalists.

Medieval society enforced distinctions and separations of not just things but persons into well defined and bounded categories, the articulation of which was one possibility among others in antiquity.
This is not a possibility of the modern world except in nostalgic projects, which are political and not merely religious, and whose motives in the present as well as references from the past need to be asked about.
So much for Jewish ultra-orthodoxy. What about its absolute reversal or 'abstract negation'?
Its interest is exaggerated.
What is the not fully recognized (yet, as always) historical context of this?

Isn't the need moderns have, and here at least we are still modern, for plasticity, novelty, and to transform worlds and be transformed as they are (or so that they can be), something that a radical left politics, being or wanting to be avant-garde while affirming equal liberty, takes for granted?

"Liberation" may well be the principal theme of the Jewish holiday of Passover (it is, indeed), but it is not the, or even a, central theme of most of modern Judaism. It is a central theme of modern political thought, particularly in the Continental European tradition. One recent philosopher (Jean-Francois Lyotard) suggested that liberation is the central theme of modern French philosophy.

Liberty, the great American value, is not liberation. Liberty is based on property right and it forms an alternative to oppression not temporally as much as spatially. That's why American society remains both ultra-liberal ideologically (it is an American tendency to want to be bound by no constraints) and remarkably authoritarian, including when someone is enforcing their liberty, by asserting their property right which authorizes them to do so, as it authorizes and gives expression and form to their identity. Liberty is something you can have. Liberation is a project. It suits Jewish theology insofar as Jews believe the world is still being created and we are all obligated to work at that somehow.

After the Vietnam war ended, so many American liberals were determined that they had to "be political," only they were not sure how or what that meant. This is one of the most fascinating facts about the culture of the US in the 1970's. Queer politics is one of the things that emerged at that time. Though I am not part of it, I appreciate the achievements of many people just questioning and changing their sense of who they are and looking for the most interesting and fruitful ways to criticize and transform what was then still a very conservative society. I also watched as these people were viciously hated by an emerging political extremism that can only be called fascist and is still with us. They were hated and told that they should just disappear by dying, since the pandemic of that era was transmitted largely by sex and drug use, and the "conservatives" had no use or compassion to be wasted on people who violated "Biblical" (archaic, preceding antiquity, though also made the subject of hysterical murderous purges in the early modern period by people whose political ambitions were cloaked in religious language, and in the context of an aggressive colonial project). I watched as people were expected to just die and liberals looked the other way while they promoted speech codes to punish transgressions of norms of social propriety, especially if someone might feel insulted. It was not ok to insult anyone (in a Protestant country where most people expect flattery), but it's ok if they jut die. In the early 90's, I briefly worked as an office clerk at the American Red Cross. This philanthropic organization was led by a former Senator who was a conservative, and it was staffed, then, by conservatives who talked about God and defending "the family." The Senator gave speeches promoting young women professionals transgressively crossing the "glass ceiling" to become CEO's like herself, and she proudly identified herself with the Biblical Esther. American Protestants often like Biblical stories, and they love Jews because of Israel, though they don't care much for radicals, whether they are Jewish or whatever.

By the 80s, politics in America was often about personal matters like gender and sexuality, and the right and the left agreed about that.

I would like to think that many of these battles have been won and are faits accompli. Of course, that's not entirely true. It largely is among left-liberals, while large parts of America are another world.

The right also took over much of religious discourse in America, with protestant evangelicals in the lead. They form a hard core of those who want to defend "the [patriarchal] family," and also of Zionists, most of whom are Christian evangelicals who don't like Jews very much at all but have these notions about Israel because it figures in their ideology. These people mostly belong to organizations that followed funding that came from people whose concerns were more with foreign policy. They also are heavily centered in the American south. Much anti-gay and anti-abortion politics is white southern. Should we wonder if this has anything to do with slavery?

It does. Slavery was associated with an extreme authoritarianism that was legitimated through patriarchal ideologies referencing religious texts. The family, and their ideas about it, were central to slavery. The sad thing about American Black culture that is why I find it so difficult to appreciate (and I know I must try) is that it's almost obvious how deeply that culture is affected by slavery and its persistent consequences not only in the reactive formations on the left that are manifestly opposed to it, but also in ways, subtle and unsubtle, that seem to continue aspects of it. Including its remarkable authoritarianism. Little in the modern European culture that I grew up finding attractive, taking its appeal and hold on us for granted (my mother was a connoisseur of it by necessity, as a teacher of classical music, my father a German-American who went to Yale well before it became common to suppose that then still hegemonic European-American culture he was educated in even could be considered by any sane person an object of possible repudiation; not that that possibility was opposed by reactionaries so much as it did not exist) could render the more extreme forms and expression of that authoritarianism intelligible. But I had to come to realize that many black Americans grew up in a society that takes that for granted; freedom is then a great idea, but its complete absence comes as no surprise. When I did see expressions of brutal authoritarianism, including by a stepfather whose susceptibility to it apparently was driven by his own religious convictions as much as north American provincialism, I knew enough to see it as an exception to some rule, even if it is one awaiting formulation, since that parents should not abuse children on the assumption that their authority over them is not a good in itself and obedience not in itself a moral demand, this would not have occurred to this man who held the precisely contrary beliefs.

I did arrive at the conviction that families are an important political entity, and problem. I also recognized that many of the people around me would never imagine that the forms of social authority whose benefits they enjoyed, even when subjected to them, was something that could be criticized. They were attached to it, valued their attachments, which had a profound hold on them affectively, and so could only be conservatives. I once asked my father what if anything he ever rebelled against or wanted to. He almost strained himself to understand the question. The answer was no, nothing.

In European culture, politics does often begin in rebellion; it was also a figure of modern revolutions, including in America. This is not true of Jewish culture, and I think it is one thing that distinguishes European and Jewish culture, at least paradigmatically, as models or ideal types. I say that because everyone I have known at all well has been much influenced by the former whether or not they also are by the latter. But I do believe that Jews who do not understand gentiles who are on the political left may mistakenly believe that an attitude is antisemitism when it is not. Merely, the person has a somewhat polemical, or combative, mind. And injustice might be a figure internal, if not or not only, as any rigorous ethics takes as possible, to their own psyche, but to their intimate life, their family and their history in and of it. "Patriarchy" as something to be combatted is the idea of a tyranny, or unjust authority, that is intra-familial: Father is a boss. In Western culture, this idea owes more to Roman than Jewish sources, and in Christianity it is an object of constitutive ambivalence. Christianity is constitutively ambivalent towards the very idea of law and justice, and towards authority and obedience as calling to be affirmed and to be rejected. That an extant social authority within one's own world, including the familial and familiar, may be something to be opposed, as if Being, or your place in it, were infected, as it were, by an Evil, that is a notion that has been very productive politically, but it isn't Jewish, it is Christian and maybe Gnostic. Tellingly, Christianity also had trouble finding an effective way to reject the tempting pull of Gnostic thought, and it can be doubted whether it ever did, in most if not all its forms. There are no plenty of grounds of possibility, including their availability in global discursive spaces, for deciding in favor of a rejection of this whole way of thinking, whether or not that is possible. But whether or not it is premature and exaggerated (it is at least exaggerated) to say that "Western civilization" is over (and much of avant-garde philosophical and cultural thought in Europe and America since 1917 has been about its auto-critique, performed in various ways), the figure of forms of social authority that are both internal to "who" or where "we are" and that must also be combatted, like the enemy in a war, in a society that had frequent wars (Europe after antiquity) or constant overseas wars matched with an internal policing that is much heavier than that of societies like most of postwar Europe (a policing that did have its effects on counterculture reactions, with their mandates of authenticity, including American "gay" culture), that internal polemical attitude was enormously productive. Its destructive effects are now well documented and much remarked, and it is also common in the United States to overstate the attacks on the culture of what amounts to pre-WW1 European culture, while being blind to the fact that it is precisely the success of a somewhat differently articulated American hegemony that did and do render intelligible the overstated hatreds of the culture that reached its height in the Belle Epoque and is now more a memory than a reality, though we still enjoy its artworks, which notably are still more popular than most of the music, painting, and literature that developed after 1900.

Americans tend to be quite political in certain ways, while our culture is anti-political in others. Perhaps this distinction operates similarly to that between secular and sacred; it seems every religion marks and defines this distinction, which is part of what defines it as one, but they all do this in somewhat different ways. By anti-political I partly mean privatizing.

Deconstruction, the great fad in American humanities departments in the 80s, now has begun to seem a bit antiquated, its lessons taken for granted, as they already were then by the mandarins who preached its gospel. It's easy to fight old battles and not realize how much new conditions render them obsolete except when facing the cultural rear-guard, which in America has for half a century now been so powerful while also being incredibly stupid and obnoxious, indeed so much so that one of Trump's innovations may have been to make the stupidity of much media political discourse so banal that it is tempting to just laugh at it, while wondering how these ads are read both by people caught up in the most abject stupidities and canny operatives who can only laugh even at their own remarks, since in a society where everything is for sale there is little use for the honesty in speech that was already largely precluded in the corporate business world and its social analogues.

I think dancing your transgressive sexuality is less politically relevant today than it was in the 1950s, and perhaps even the 70's, that crazy time that is perhaps still too recent to understand well, as I do not.

Though one connection I would make is that during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s conservative elites centered in the United States were asking people whose form of life they disapproved of to die. They actively and enthusiastically promoted policies that had this effect, and were meant to. Today the focus is partly on the people of Palestine, and elsewhere. It is most often now not a question of people with different lifestyles but the world's poor. The world's poor may be expected to die, as they are expendable, and if capital doesn't need them, governments that defend its interests may want them out of the way.

If asked today how I want to explore the limits of my identity, I might decline and say, I'll see a film that does this, because in art it is possible to question everything. I don't know that I want to explore the boundaries of my identity, and if you do and think that's interesting, I agree that it might be, though I'm not sure I see in this an important project right now. And enforce proprieties or transgress them? Aren't these two sides of the same coin? These are artistic projects that are not immediately political ones. I am a political man. Cultivate your garden with authenticity if you want, but know that you can never do this perfectly. Religious people are mostly cultivating their garden. That's nice. It's nice that it's nice, and offensive only when people are content with that, as many are.