Peterson said it's not possible to understand our current society without considering the role postmodernism plays within it, "because postmodernism, in many ways—especially as it's played out politically—is the new skin that the old Marxism now inhabits."
"Even the French intellectuals had to admit that communism was a bad deal by the end of the 1960s," he said. From there, the communists played a "sleight of hand game, in some sense," and rebranded their ideology "under a postmodern guise."
"That's where identity politics came from," he said. And from there, it "spread like wildfire" from France, to the United States through the English department at Yale University, "and then everywhere."Marxism preached that the natural and economic landscape is a battle between the so-called proletariat and the bourgeois. It claimed that economic systems were going to enslave people and keep them down, Peterson said.
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Rather than do away with the ideology, however, they merely gave it a new face and a new name. "They were all Marxists. But they couldn't be Marxists anymore, because you couldn't be a Marxist and claim you were a human being by the end of the 1960s," said Peterson.
The postmodernists built on the Marxist ideology, Peterson said. "They started to play a sleight of hand, and instead of pitting the proletariat, the working class, against the bourgeois, they started to pit the oppressed against the oppressor. That opened up the avenue to identifying any number of groups as oppressed and oppressor and to continue the same narrative under a different name."
"It was no longer specifically about economics," he said. "It was about power. And everything to the postmodernists is about power. And that's actually why they're so dangerous, because if you're engaged in a discussion with someone who believes in nothing but power, all they are motivated to do is to accrue all the power to them, because what else is there?" he said. "There's no logic, there's no investigation, there's no negotiation, there's no dialogue, there's no discussion, there's no meeting of minds and consensus. There's power."
"And so since the 1970s, under the guise of postmodernism, we've seen the rapid expansion of identity politics throughout the universities," he said. "It's come to dominate all of the humanities—which are dead as far as I can tell—and a huge proportion of the social sciences."
