"People of Color" is a category error.
Democrats need to wise up about identity politics or they will put Trump back into office.
Democrats hope to form an electoral majority with a coalition of people who feel aggrieved over having gotten a raw deal. Groups that are targets of prejudice are part of the coalition: Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Jews, Muslims, women. Every one of them has a legitimate raw deal.
GOP opposition helped define Democrats in a way that preserved the White working class as part of that coalition. The party of Goldwater, Reagan and Romney was a libertarian pro-business party. It was the party of the Chamber of Commerce. GOP messaging said that trickle down would work if taxes on the richest were low enough. It said that regulations protecting workers or the environment were burdensome. The GOP opposed labor unions. They opposed raising the minimum wage. The GOP message kept the White working class on board with Democrats.
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| Politico |
Led by thought leaders in nonprofits and universities and the elite media, Democrats have concluded that identity is destiny. They concluded Martin Luther King's dream, that his children should be judged by the content of their character not the color of their skin was naive and wrong. King's dream was an aspiration. Most Americans acknowledge racism, but their aspiration is a better future of equal opportunity. Democratic thought leaders may think they are realists doing the work of racial justice. They are counterproductive. They are understood as pessimists, as racists themselves, and as oppressive accusers. It is a loser of a message.
In perceiving identity-oppression as central, Democrats are slow to respond to the reality that too many of their supposed beneficiaries disagree. The college admissions lawsuits make clear that the interests of ambitious Asian immigrants is very different from the interests of native-born Blacks. They aren't team-mates. The erosion of votes in predominately Hispanic counties in Texas demonstrate Hispanic team identity is an illusion. Cubans aren't Mexicans aren't Puerto Ricans. Hispanics aren't bonded by common interests. Citizen Hispanics have different interests than newcomers.
Native-born Black Americans have a powerful shaping experiences and memories: Slavery, segregation, back-of-the-bus stigmatization, mortgage red lining, and "driving while Black." Immigrants to America, including ones with dark skin, have a different experience and orientation. America represents opportunity for them. Their glass is half full. They expect hard work and achievements to be rewarded, not resented or confiscated. Immigrant success does not upset the social order.
Democrats are getting the worst of both worlds. Their focus on identity and oppression is failing to unify their coalition because their coalition is not unified. Identity politics does serve to unify opposition. White Americans have heard the message that they are the bad guys.
I expect 2022 to be a disaster for Democrats. It is too late to change their message and leadership. It likely will embolden Trump. Trump may frighten Republicans into even tighter conformity with him, and therefore frighten 2024 voters back into the arms of anyone-but-Trump. Democrats could win by losing.
There is a better future for Democrats, though, than being the party that survives by not being Trump. That would be a Democratic candidate in an open primary who pushes reset by openly saying he or she disagrees with the identity notion of Democrats and substitutes an optimistic opportunity message. Such a candidate does not need to create something brand new. It could be a return to the politics of aspiration. It would say that Martin Luther King was right. Race and identity are not central. Equality and economic opportunity are.
Such a spokesperson will hurt some feelings. Democratic thought leaders want desperately to believe that Blacks, Asians, Jews, LGBTQ, Hispanics, women, and every other group wants diversity, inclusion, and equity. There is something condescending and glass-half-empty about particularizing victimhood and doing overt government action to adjust for equity. I suspect that voters desire a different message. If Democrats don't offer it, a Republican will. Black South Carolina Democrats pointed the way. A majority of people in those groups want to be treated like free, capable Americans. That is their identity.
A Democrat could win with that message.
18 comments:
I am making this comment as a Jew, one of my many identities.
The intersectional left seems to have decided that Jews are part of the oppressive class, and therefore have no right to express their own views and fight for their own interests when those views and interests are in opposition to those expressed by classes considered to be oppressed.
On the issue of Israel, leftists seem to have absorbed the view pushed by Yasir Arafat that led to the 1975 adoption of the “Zionism is Racism“ resolution by the UN General Assembly. Zionism is demonized throughout academia and other left-wing locales as nothing but a form of oppression against indigenous Arabs, totally ignoring that Israel had a significant indigenous and continuously-present Jewish population since long before Arabs existed as an identity group.
The left places a major emphasis on the concept of “underrepresentation.” If an area (such as STEM) has fewer “underrepresented minorities” than their percentage of the population, that is seen as a problem that needs to be corrected.
What these advocates never want to talk about is that some groups (e.g. Jews and Asians) are overrepresented in STEM. The only way to “get the numbers right“ would be quota ceilings on overrepresented groups. The left will never come out and say this explicitly, but there is no way for them to accomplish their goals without implementing these group-limiting quotas.
Expecting groups like Jews and Asians to go along with these policies assumes levels of liberal guilt and masochism that do not actually exist. Like Peter says, the coalition that Democrats depend on is in the process of being destroyed by identity politics, and rightfully so.
I have said for decades that it was a bad idea to turn this country into the war of the tribes. The left has insisted on doing it anyway. The consequences will be on their heads, and they deserve it.
How could “thought leaders in nonprofits and universities and the elite media” ever steer us wrong? (Snark)
It doesn't have to be one or the other, it can be both. Groups of people with valid, legitimate concerns and problems in our society should not be ignored and told to just deal with it. It's always easy to diminish and disregard someone else's suffering. Not my problem! Empathy is for losers!
Democrats lost in 2016 because they didn't take Trump seriously, and also because Republicans conceded the election at their convention. It was Democrats to lose at that point, and they did.
Identity politics is a valid frame, but it's Republicans who are trying to denigrate it, like CRT, precisely because it threatens the status quo. It's not identity alone, but connected to economic justice and inequality. Look at the House, and the diversity of the Democratic caucus and the homogeneity of the Republicans. The Republican party is 90% white, a characteristic of a racial insurgent organization.
The Democrat's message is not the issue. Moderates keep thinking they have to somehow convince Regressives to abandon their prejudices. That's simply an inability to see over the class divide. The big problem for Democrats is that too many Americans don't acknowledge the threat to democracy from a party determined to seize power by any means they can.
"It can't happen here." - Frank Zappa
"Groups that are targets of prejudice": Blacks, Hispanics, Asians**, Jews, Muslims, even women?? Toss in Native Americans, LGBTQ and the disabled, as wheedling, Debbie Downer Democratic thought "leaders" do--including Veep Harris herself yesterday, expressly--and that renders roughly 70% of the U.S. population as Certified Aggrieved.
The first word captures the big problem with Democratic identity politics, which Mr. Sage captures pretty nicely here: Groups, as opposed to individuals. Many if not most individuals in those groups do not want those maudlin perpetual-victimhood or persecution complexes urged upon them by self-anointed Democratic saviors.
Demand for hate crimes and other forms of what we might rather quaintly refer to as "actual" bigotry far exceeds the supply. It's no coincidence that professional grievance-mongers squeal loudest and most hyperbolically now, as the auspices for their existence fades. We WERE insensitive. Now the pendulum is on hypersensitivity.
Most people of all cultures, origins and backgrounds instinctively distrust Marxist collectivism, the cult of the lowest common denominator, and appreciate America as the place where more than anywhere else individual initiative is rewarded regardless of identity. Today's Democrats demand the former and deny the latter.
(**Asians are credentialed victims only situationally now. NOT to the extent that the poorest of them succeed, and earn outsized admissions to elite universities, because of traditional work, education and family ethics, along with (gasp!) a healthy respect for institutions and the authorities. Soon they'll simply be "white".)
Rick,
Who could imag>ine, that they would freak out in Washington DC? :-)
I’m gonna get my TV dinner and cook it up…
link
What is the elite media?
That sounds like a FAUX News talking point (in other words, a lie.)
Here's a thought:
Why doesn't the US stop treating people differently because of their religion, and stop getting involved in the Middle East?
If the US was serious about being energy independent, it could do so and tell the Middle Eastern countries that try to influence our foreign policy to take a hike.
The elite media is written by and and for people who have been tracked to run things.
The New York Times
The Washington Post
Wall Street Journal
The Atlantic
The New Yorker
The Economist
Bloomberg News
Axiox
Forbes
ABC CBS NBC PBS
Politico, TheHill
In the current media world there are a few dozen Substack and other independent reporters and opinion writers, eg Matt Yglacious, Andrew Sullivan, people like them. They would include book authors like Woodward, popular academics like Pinker and Douglas Brinkley and Joe Meachem.
Tjhere is a strong influence of Ivy League pedigrees. The tone is serious rather than tabloid.
Fox sneers at them but the existence of serious journalism organs is a reality and I don't hide from it. A smart guy who writes for the college newspaper at the University of Iowa has essentially no chance of being a Rhodes Scholar or a NY Times writer or editor. A similarly smart guy like James Fallows or Nick Kristof who writes for Harvard's Crimson becomes a Rhodes Scholar and ends up in the elite media. It isn't a matter of talent. It is a matter of tracking.
The public both resents this reality and wants in on it. People want the best for their kids. Some cheat and game the water polo athletic pathway in at places like USC. Others dont cheat, but they send their kids to Phillips Exeter or Phillips Andover, and the ambitious smart kid is tracked to enter into the college track which leads to the Supreme Court in 25 years, maybe.
Hello Michael:
Ron Unz is a California gadfly Republican, a rich software developer and social commenter. He has also been warning about tribalism and identity politics for decades.
This article is dated and focused on California, but it makes an important prophetic point: When politics are group-grievance based, divided into ethnic tribes, as white numbers decline into minority status it is inevitable that the white tribe will organize and agitate for it's group rights and redress of its grievances. And that effort will be called white nationalism.
California and the End of White America
BY RON UNZ • COMMENTARY • NOVEMBER 1, 1999
https://www.onenation.org/opinion/california-and-the-end-of-white-america/
Mc--
1. The U.S. treats everyone the same who hates Jews, from religious reasons or otherwise, and every nation which wishes to extirpate Israel, the existence of which was made necessary by the Holocaust. Jews in Israel, by the way, predate by a few millennia the time Arabs seized the Middle East in the name of Islamic imperialism.
2. The U.S. was energy independent and a net energy exporter as recently as 2020. Biden hamstrung domestic oil production, stopped our Keystone pipeline while approving Russia's mew Nord Stream, and is now reduced to begging OPEC to increase oil supply while inflation rages, just as it was under another bad president, Carter.
The mistake here is portraying ‘identity politics’ as unique to Democrats when, in fact, Republicans are just as guilty of it. One small example: During his last campaign, he-whose-name-must-not-be-spoken tried to stir up racist fears among white suburban voters, vowing to protect them against affordable housing and the people who live there.
The undisputed leader of the GOP is a ‘birther’ (i.e. racist) who described white supremacists as “very fine people.” His notorious 9/11 claim, that he saw “thousands and thousands” of New Jersey Muslims cheering as the World Trade Center came down, is pure racist bullshit. And, of course, we have the Great Wall of Trump that Mexico would supposedly pay for. The white nationalist demographic that Republicans are appealing to couldn’t be more obvious.
Gee, what a shame. President Biden stopped a continent spanning death funnel from poisoning the Ogalalla Aquifer as it transferred Canadian Tar sand to the Gilf Coadt for transshipment to Asia. Cry me a river, Low Dudgeon.
Staying within the powerful, persuasive Greta Thunberg eco-morality box, edc.pers, the pesky little problem is that Biden is a net protector of the global death-funnel status quo. It’s just American workers and the American oil and energy purchaser he wants to screw, which is why I replied the way I did to Mc’s sudden, heartening concern about American energy policy.
The takedown of the notorious Keystone XL (KXL) tar sands pipeline will go down as one of this generation’s most monumental environmental victories. After more than 10 years of tenacious protests, drawn-out legal battles, and flip-flopping executive orders spanning three presidential administrations, the Keystone XL pipeline is now gone for good.
Anybody who cares about climate, ecosystems, drinking water sources, and public health is deeply grateful. That pretty much eliminates most Republicans. They're still in denial of the ever-increasing heat, superstorms, fires, floods, melting icecaps, rising sea levels, toxic air and water - or perhaps they just don't care much about their offspring.
Ayla Jean,
Good article. Thanks.
The saving grace in all of this is that both Hispanics and Asians are assimilating rapidly. In another generation, they will be “white.“ Just look, for instance, at the rates of intermarriage. Or look at the increasing numbers of Hispanics (and even working class blacks) who are starting to vote Republican.
Progressives may yet succeed in inadvertently causing this country to descend into a war of the tribes. But there are reasons to hope that it won’t happen as most of the country turns away from extreme left-wing ideologies that surveys have shown are supported by less than 10% of the American people.
You've made zero case as to why religion should influence US public policy. It shouldn't.
Your second point talks only about fossil fuels, whose burning is damaging the planet.
The US needs to develop alternative energy sources, which Biden is trying to do. The oil companies could lead the way through diversification. The planet has no choice.
Carter was ahead of his time. I'll take a nuclear engineer as president over a sideshow barker any day.
Mc--
1. Yes I did: when there are explicitly religious villains, it's unavoidable.
2. Fossil fuels are what Biden is begging for from OPEC. You brought up the Middle East.
3. Biden is not trying very hard. Regardless, our own energy independence was the best stance for transition.
4. Agreed, Carter is much smarter and more credible than Biden.
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