Should Democrats change their approach to identity politics?

In the immediate aftermath of the election, the Times quoted Bernie Sanders explaining the results:

“It’s not just Kamala,” he said. “It’s a Democratic Party which increasingly has become a party of identity politics, rather than understanding that the vast majority of people in this country are working class. This trend of workers leaving the Democratic Party started with whites, and it has accelerated to Latinos and Blacks.”

Sanders’ always campaigned on economic populism, but he had felt it necessary go along with identitarian appeals in response to relentless woke criticisms during his presidential campaigns.

I reviewed the identitarian attack on Sanders here.

This was the first time Sanders criticized the woke left as far as I know.

Maybe others would follow. After all, in the past three elections, Dems have lost voters in just about every group their identity appeals tried to win over.

But in all the comments by Sanders since that time—and I’ve seen a lot of them—he has not repeated that critique, but continued to double down on economic populism.

That may be because the woke police are still on the beat over here on the left side of American politics. Seth Moulton is now likely to face a primary challenge for saying something that 69% of Americans agree with about trans athletes.

It won’t be enough for Democratic politicians to quietly back away from the most fringe woke positions they’ve embraced—either implicitly or explicitly. Harris tried that and it didn’t work. Undecided voters who watched the Trump ad showing her endorsing gender reassignment surgery for imprisoned unauthorized immigrants shifted from D to R by 2.7%. 

As someone who has lived through the hothouse years in one of the venues where woke fever took hold, I understand voters’ suspicions of the subtle signs that the woke left is not in charge anymore. There needs to be a recognition that the cancellations, firings, scoldings, shamings, struggle sessions, and other means of ideological coercion were wrong and that the leaders of the institutions that promoted them are either no longer in charge or acknowledge their mistakes. Until that happens and the party has its Sister Souljah moment, no one will believe they are safe to speak their minds. Or vote Democratic.

---

Notes

These are problems and questions I’ve been grappling with all fall. I asked if we have passed “peak woke,” in this post.

Today’s post was inspired by Ruy Teixeira’s blog post, "Economic Populism: Opiate of the Democrats."

An excerpt:

In a widely-noted finding from a post-election survey by the Blueprint strategy group, the third most potent reason—after too much inflation and too much illegal immigration—for voters to choose Trump over Harris in a pairwise comparison test was, “Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class.” And among swing voters, this concern about cultural focus was the most powerful reason….

Other than that NYT quote, Sanders has refrained from the critique of identity politics and doubled down on his theme of economic populism. That, Teixeira, argues reflects magical thinking:

Changing the subject to economic populism doesn’t work and won’t work [on it’s own, I would add]—any more than talking incessantly about MAGA extremism/fascism did in the last election. Working-class voters aren’t stupid and they can tell when you’re just changing the subject and have not really changed the underlying cultural outlook they detest. Convincing voters of the latter is much harder and more uncomfortable for Democrats. But it has to be done. 

None of this means abandoning trans people.  Moulton responded to criticism by noting that, although he doesn't want his daughter to play sports with biological men, he will continue to vote to protect trans rights, as he has done in the past.  When asked by a listener why trans people should work to elect Democrats who don't support every "edge case" of the trans-activists agenda, Podcaster Ezra Klein said this: 

What matters first is not everything the politician says but the power they have.... 

The questions they should be asking, I think, need to be more fully political — that the question is gaining power for the coalition that will listen to and work with you, not finding a coalition that says everything that you want them to say. Because the nature, the purpose, of the political coalition is to win political power, not to signal agreement.

 

Dems' next move: Oppose or #resist?

 

A bipartisan opening?

In the aftermath of the election, Democrats need to decide whether their relationship to Trump 2.0 is resistance (again) or the normal opposition of a minority party.

Resistance failed last time

It's not clear what #resistance 1.0 accomplished. Indictments in the past year and even 34 felony convictions didn’t hurt Trump in the polls and may have helped him. His standing with primary voters rose six points in the week after the first indictment, in the hush money case. And it bolstered his fundraising.

The court cases were the last chapter of the first resistance movement. The first chapter began during the 2016 campaign but the movement really got going after the election that year. #Resisters flooded social media and street protests erupted all over, culminating in the “pussy hat” march in DC. Pundits and journalists pledged not to “normalize” Trump, and introduced more “moral clarity” into their headlines, using the words “lie” and “racist” to characterize Trump’s pronouncements, instead of trusting readers to make those judgments. According to the Times, the #resistance was being “televised, podcasted, hashtagged, Snapped, Facebooked, Twittered and Periscoped.”

The “breakout hit” of the genre was “Pod Save America,” started by former Obama staffers, including the one who wrote the president’s speech at the White House Correspondence dinner that inspired Trump to run for president. That tells us something about why the #resistance failed.

The street protesters said they were marching against Trump, but you might excuse his 63 million supporters for thinking they were marching against their votes—or against American Democracy. According to Wikipedia,

Numerous petitions were started to prevent Trump from taking office, including a Change.org petition started by Elijah Berg of North Carolina requesting that faithless electors in states that Trump won vote for Clinton instead, which surpassed three million signatures.

Calls for impeachment began even before The Donald took office, and two Democrats filed formal articles of impeachment just six months after the inauguration.

And, according to an article in the Washington Post on inauguration day, 2017, the drive to impeach coincided with efforts by “Democrats and liberal activists” to “stymie Trump's agenda.” Let’s not talk about the pee tape.

Perhaps all the dire predictions and early talk of impeachment led to a boy-who-cries-wolf phenomenon when Trump actually did impeachable things during his presidency. At any rate, whatever the legal or ethical merits of all the protests, impeachments and indictments, their political impact was negative. Trump’s vote totals only increased every time he ran:

2016: 62,984,828

2020: 74,223,975

2024: 76,861,090

It’s not likely that there will be one unified approach to Trump 2.0 given the diversity of the Democrats’ coalition and the prominent role of the “shadow party” and random left-crazies, like the people calling in bomb threats and swatting cabinet nominees last week.

What would opposition look like?

Conor Friedersdorf makes the case for Democrats acting like a normal opposition party:

Everyone should normalize Trump. If he does something good, praise him. Trump is remarkably susceptible to flattery. Don’t hesitate to criticize him when he does something bad, but avoid overstatements. They are self-discrediting. And know that new House elections are just two years away. Focus on offering a better alternative to voters, not ousting the person they chose. Meanwhile, oppose Trump’s bad ideas by drawing on the normal tools Americans use to constrain all presidents. Our constitutional and civic checks on executive power are formidable, frustrating every administration. So be the John Boehner to his Obama. Even if ill intent exists in Trump’s inscrutable mind, his coalition does not wish to end democracy. Some will turn on the president when he merely has trouble fulfilling basic promises.

Step one: cognitive empathy

One object of the opposition is to win the next election. Democrats won’t make a comeback if they don’t make a better effort to oppose Trump while winning back some of his voters. The first step is to try to understand them. (The fancy term for that is "cognitive empathy," which I've argued frequently on this blog is an essential capacity of democratic citizenship.)

I was not optimistic this will happen after I watched John Stewart interview professor Heather Cox Richardson, an Exeter alum whose Substack blog has well over a million subscribers, takes in more than $5 million annually and is deeply admired by my Democratic friends (one of them sent me the YouTube link). While Stewart kept bringing up the failures of the Democrats—their capitulation to Reagonomics and de-industrialization, Harris’s “hugging” of Dick Cheney and defense of the rigged system—Richardson kept putting the blame back onto the voters.

How do you explain the shift of so many Hispanics, Blacks and women to Trump? Stewart asked. Cox replied with an allegory involving 10 people in a room: “They are hearing stories that say you must turn against those two people at the bottom or we’re going to turn against you.” Trump voters, she said “carry confederate flags and carry Nazi flags” and include “white women who will die from lack of medical care” because of how they voted.

This condescending notion of false consciousness—of uneducated peasants perpetually acting against their self-interest out of gullibility, ignorance and wickedness—is a favorite hobby horse of the super smart denizens of the academic left and is really annoying to anyone who is the object of the analysis.

Unfortunately, it sometimes also slips out of the mouths of Democratic politicians, as when Hillary Clinton put Trump voters in a basket of deplorables and most recently when Obama said sexism was preventing Black men voting for Harris.

People who want the Democrats to do better in the next election should stop assessing the morality, or IQ, or rationality of the 77 million Trump voters, and focus on what the party can do to win them over in the next election.

Maybe Democrats could win back some working class voters if they said something like this about the election results (whether or not it’s true):

The American people understand that our economic and political systems are rigged. They know that the very rich get much richer while almost everyone else becomes poorer. They know that we are moving rapidly into an oligarchic form of society. The Democrats ran a campaign protecting the status quo and tinkering around the edges. Trump and the Republicans campaigned on change and on smashing the existing order. Not surprisingly, the Republicans won. (Sanders email, 11-23) 

That’s Bernie Sanders. If, as he’s been saying for some time now, the system has been “rigged” against your interests for 40 years, maybe a vote for Trump isn’t completely irrational.

Maybe the system has been rigged after all!

(For a counterpoint to the Stewart/Richardson discussion, here’s another Exeter alumn with a different view)

Should Democrats Compromise?

Resistance implies that any compromise with the “fascists” in power is capitulation to evil.

But despite being in the minority, the opposition party is also part of the government and has an obligation to govern in the public interest. So, in addition to working on winning more votes in the next election and just trying to stymie Trump’s agenda (and the wishes of 76 million voters), they should be looking for opportunities to cooperate with the party in power whenever it could improve the lives of Americans or advance the national interest.

In the first Trump term Bernie opposed the USMCA (Trump's NAFTA renegotiation) but more House Democrats voted for it than Republicans and it did make some small changes likely to benefit American and Mexican workers and American dairy farmers. 

Other bipartisan legislation back then included reforms to the criminal justice system, addressing the opioid crisis, funding vocational training, reforming the Veterans administration, and granting aid to farmers.

(See “President Donald J. Trump Has Shown that Extraordinary Bipartisan Achievements Are Possible” at the UC Santa Barbara American Presidency Project.)

Trump may or may not have been sincere when he said: "When Republicans and Democrats talk, debate, and seek common ground, we can achieve breakthroughs that move our country forward and deliver for our citizens." But the fact that he said it shows he wants to be seen as open to bipartisan compromise.

Democrats must exit the campaigning mode and find issues where they can force him to honor this pledge. Trump’s party has a slim majority in the House and lacks a filibuster-proof Senate majority so Democrats will have some leverage between now and the midterms.

One promising area is labor. Trump selected a labor secretary backed the PRO Act, which would make union organizing easier, but half of Republicans oppose her. Democratic Senators will likely play a key role in her confirmation, but should also push the administration to follow her appointment through with concrete pro-labor policies. Democrats might also look for an area of compromise in Trump's appointment of a critic of the pharmaceutical industry to head HHS. 

On Sunday, Sanders tweeted his support for Elon Musk’s plan to cut defense spending and Musk responded: “cool.” Another possible area of compromise? 

Roadblocks

I see two characteristics of the Democratic coalition that will make it hard for the party to effectively perform a normal opposition.

First, the party has come to be dominated by educated elites who are just so culturally different than the working class voters who have been trending rightward, that cognitive empathy may just be impossible.

Second, the liberal values of Democrats often come in conflict with any populist impulses they may have and pose a difficult dilemma. A passage from Alan Wolfe’s Future of Liberalism identifies this problem:

There are and always will be issues in which liberalism's commitments to openness, proper procedure, or fairness will come into conflict with democracy's insistence not only on fulfilling the will of the majority but on doing so as rapidly as possible…. For all their commitment to equality, liberals do believe that the political views people sometimes hold are not, if they had more knowledge and were open to more deliberation, the political views they should hold.

Wolfe uses the Supreme Court’s Brown school desegregation decision as an example of liberal values properly trumping majority opinion. But he also praised the Court’s deference to majority sentiments in the South with their “all deliberate speed” ruling and the slow pace of desegregation in practice. The Court

opted to give those people, and the political institutions that represented their views, sufficient time to grow into the position they ought to have rather than the one they did have. Ten years later, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, giving the decision in Brown ex post facto democratic legitimacy. The lesson was clear: liberals could and should break with public sentiment in order to ensure that what was popular and what was right could become the same thing.

This comment echoes the great historian of Populism, Lawrence Goodwyn, who coined the term "ideological patience."  

Some parts of the Democratic coalition have been promoting views that may or may not be the views that Americans “ought to have,” notably in the past election promoting transgender rights.

Polling has shown that an ad ridiculing Harris’ support for funding of gender re-assignment surgery for prisoners played a key role in moving undecided voters to Trump. As Jonathan Chait has argued, Democrats can live up to liberal principles by defending the dignity and legal rights of transgender people without going along with every demand of the most radical gender activists, especially those involving minors.

This is a delicate line to walk, however, and I’m afraid the over-educated people who dominate the party and it's many factions (the "shadow party), can come together along that line and have ideological patience for their fellow citizens.

Who's weirder?

Caledonian-Record, Nov. 18, 2024, p. 1.

In all the hand-wringing over the results of the recent election, I haven’t seen any comments yet on the voter’s answer to this all-important question posed by the campaign:

which Americans are the weird ones?

By pinning that label on the opposing party, Tim Walz got himself nominated for VP. Unfortunately for the Democrats, a majority of voters don’t seem to have agreed with him.

The weird question has also been the subtext of a debate raging this month in the letters-to-the-editor section of the local newspaper about a drag story hour planned for a library in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, just over the river from here.

Opponents of the event saw it as part of a broader conspiracy to undermine gender norms, the nuclear family, and Western civilization itself—to “break taboos” and “implant a measure of confusion in children,” according to one letter-writer.

On the other side, a defender of the event said protests against drag queens are a threat “to the core values and the very bedrock of our nation.”

According to reports of the event at the Atheneum last Saturday, opponents of drag stories were decisively outnumbered by supporters, but Vermont is a deep blue (deeply weird?) state that went 64% for Harris and Walz.

In the excitement this summer after the Democrats’ seeming resurrection, I thought Walz’s weird comment would help the Democrats. Upon reflection, though, it seems odd that the liberal party would position themselves in opposition to weirdness. As the pro-drag writer said, the “bedrock” principle at stake in supporting the Athenaeum event was “the freedom to be an individual.” Isn’t that the whole point of liberalism, after all?

Gender non-conformity is just one more offshoot of the liberal uber-project of tolerance of difference and the right to think and behave outside social norms—to be “very strange” or “bizarre” if you want to go by Webster’s take on weird.

Maybe a better way of understanding the nation’s answer to Tim Walz’s question is to consider a different definition. In 2010, a group of researchers led by Joseph Henrich, discovered that most of the findings of social science didn’t apply to the majority of humans on Earth. It turns out that the undergraduates psychologists and sociologists mostly used for their experiments are not typical people.

Henrich wasn’t making a value judgement, but just noting they are outside the norm and their values and behaviors can’t be used as examples of “human nature.” He coined the acronym WEIRD—Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. To some degree everyone in Europe and North America, is WEIRD compared to folks in less developed countries, but there’s a continuum—more education and urban living makes you WEIRDer.

WEIRDer people tend to be more individualistic, analytical, cosmopolitan, progressive, secular, and left brain oriented. Less WEIRD folks are more communal, holistic, rooted, traditional, religious, and better at right-brain thinking.

(I wrote about Henrich's 2020 book, "The WEIRDest People in the World.")

It’s tempting to think that with all that education, WEIRD people are smarter, but judging by the reactions to the election, one gap in their intelligence is the ability to understand the non-WEIRD.

If Democrats want to make a comeback, though, it’s crucial that they develop this right-brain capacity.

Democrats did really well with the eggheads who have advanced degrees—about 60 percent of the doctors, lawyers and college professors who make up the professional-managerial class who make up only 19% of the electorate. But they lost decisively among the majority of voters without a four-year college degree.

The future of the Democratic party will rest on their ability to win back some of those voters, the people who don't take their kids to drag queen story hours. But can they do it without abandoning the liberal value of tolerance and losing both their weird and WEIRD voters?

And in the longer run, what can educators like me, who teach some of the WEIRDest people on the planet, do to fill the empathy gap in their intelligence, which I’ve argued elsewhere on this blog is perhaps the most important element of good citizenship.

Whose idea was it, anyway?

 

Or, You can't just blame "progressives."

One cause of the Democrat's recent election disaster may have been what political Svengali, Ruy Teixeira identifies as one of four “terrible progressive ideas”:  

Promoting lax law enforcement and tolerance of social disorder.

The results of the idea are illustrated vividly in Jamie Thompson's “Catching the Carjackers” in the November Atlantic.

Carjacking is one of several crimes that increased significantly from 2019 to 2023—by a factor of six, from 152 to 958 in DC. In her reporting for the article, Thompson rode with police in the Carjacking Interdiction Unit of Prince George’s County, a suburb of Washington DC.

Law enforcement officials she spoke with blamed the policing, prosecution and sentencing reforms of the past decade, along with anti-cop sentiments reflected in cries of “abolish the police.”

A frustrated officer pointed to a “coddling mindset” of the courts, citing

dozens of cases in which teens were arrested for armed carjacking, pleaded to this or to lesser charges, and were released on probation. Kids found to be involved in carjackings rarely seemed to get any significant time in juvenile detention. He compiled a list of what he called the “top offenders”—teens on probation for carjacking who went on to be charged with additional carjackings.

Cars have been hijacked near the Capitol and Supreme Court buildings. Victims include a Congressman and an FBI agent. Thompson quotes motorists who are afraid to stop for gas, a school administrator complaining about carjackers showing up in school a day after their arrest, and cops who have no incentive to do their job. Thompson writes:

The carjacking crisis came at a time when police departments were already struggling to hire officers. The Prince George’s County Police Department, budgeted for 1,786 sworn officers, has about 350 open positions, leaving the force the smallest it’s been in a dozen years. (In 2012, according to Aziz, nearly 8,000 people applied to be police officers in the county; in 2022, only about 800 did, most of them unqualified.) D.C. has lost nearly 500 sworn officers since 2020, leaving the force at a half-century low of 3,285. Many officers who remained were hesitant to do proactive police work, preferring simply to respond to 911 calls. “The general feeling was If you’re not going to fund me, acknowledge me, or appreciate me, I’m going into self-preservation mode," [county police Major Sunny] Mrotek told me. To Mrotek and his colleagues, the relationship between the retreat from aggressive policing and the explosion of violent crime seemed obvious.

The article reads like a confirmation of every critique you might have encountered on Fox News of the progressive policing reforms of the past decade.

If it was inevitable that denigrating police and releasing criminals from detention would lead to an increase in crime, it was also inevitable that a rising crime rate would hurt Democrats and help the party of “Law and Order,” as it did in 1968 and some other elections since then. But in 2020, even mentioning what happened in 1968 could get you in trouble on the left. David Shor (a self-described socialist) lost his job in a Democratic think tank for tweeting—during the sometimes-violent George Floyd protests—that social disorder in 1968 helped Nixon win the presidency on a law-and-order platform.

We should have listened, because when it becomes unsafe to stop for gas, policies that restore safety in the short term are going to displace all others, including every other progressive or Democratic priority.

In much of the post-election discussion of why Kamala Harris lost the election, the reforms that led to the rise in crime—as well as all the other policy ideas that voters seem to have been rejecting—are being laid at the feet of the “progressive” wing of the party by analysts like Teixeira.

Democrats need to reject progressivism and move toward the moderate center, the punditry is saying. They need to give the reins of the party back to the Democratic Leadership Council types (that is, Bill Clinton), who so successfully resuscitated the party’s fortunes in the1990s. I’ve been arguing all fall that this progressive-moderate distinction misses the point. The party needs to be more discerning as it changes its course and pick and choose between progressive and moderate approaches to different policies.

We need different terminology.

The key divide in the party is not between “progressives and moderates,” but between the class-focused and identitarians. Or, if you prefer, between normies and the awokened. How about the intersectional left and the universalist left? Or populists vs technocrats?

Or, as substacker John Halpin would have it, Bernie Sanders of 2016 (“who ran a sharply focused class-based campaign in 2016 against the Democratic establishment and Trump”) vs. Bernie Sanders of 2020 (“an intersectional cornucopia of ‘economic, racial, social, and environmental justice for all.’”)

In a previous post, I described the relentless hounding that led Sanders to make that switch, and it illustrates the dynamics that will make it hard for the party to resist pandering to identity-based appeals in the future. One of those dynamics was the power of the Black vote in key Democratic primaries, which overwhelmingly went to Clinton in 2016. But it turns out that Bernie’s adoption of an “intersectional cornucopia” did nothing to attract more Black voters in 2020 primaries. It turns out that Blacks are the most conservative element in the Democratic coalition.

It’s true that some of the most enthusiastic promoters of law enforcement reforms were people who call themselves “progressive.”

But in the 2010s, progressives, liberals, and lots of people all over the spectrum were increasingly—and rightly—becoming alarmed about the impact of the criminal justice system on Blacks, particularly black men.

Michelle Alexander’s exposé of the mass incarceration of Black men in 2010 (The New Jim Crow), followed by a train of high-profile police shootings from Michael Brown to George Floyd, led to a broad consensus that extended beyond “progressives” in favor of policing and sentencing reform and eventually led to the bipartisan “First Step Act,” which President Trump signed in December of 2018 and bragged about, at least for a while.

Some advocates, however, undermined this emerging consensus by taking reform ideas to extremes with the slogans “abolish the police,” and “defund the police.” Mainstream Democratic politicians, not wanting to alienate the reformers, expressed support for the sentiments behind the slogan. Kamala Harris’s comments, dredged up by CNN shortly after President Biden handed her the Democratic nomination in July, were typical:

“This whole movement is about rightly saying, we need to take a look at these budgets and figure out whether it reflects the right priorities,” Harris said on a New York-based radio program, “Ebro in the Morning” on June 9, 2020, adding that US cities were “militarizing police” but “defunding public schools”…. In an interview a day earlier, Harris also lauded Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti for his decision to slash $150 million from the police budget and move it into social services. 

From the beginning of his 2016 campaign, Sanders talked about spending more on schools than on prisons, but he de-emphasized race in the policies he advocated to address the mass incarceration and police shooting of black men.

He rejected both “abolish” and “defund,” and suggested spending more money to improve policing. “There’s no city in the world that does not have police departments,” he told a New Yorker interviewer.

I think we want to redefine what police departments do, give them the support they need to make their jobs better defined. So I do believe that we need well-trained, well-educated, and well-paid professionals in police departments. Anyone who thinks that we should abolish all police departments in America, I don’t agree.

These aren’t the sentiments that devastated the morale of DC police. 

Soon after Sanders entered the 2015 race, a Vox piece explained Sanders’ class-first approach to the problems of African Americans.

His response to events like the unrest in Ferguson in 2014, or in Baltimore this spring — which to other progressives were a reminder of structural racism in the criminal justice system — was to focus on local youth unemployment rates, and call for more young black Americans to get jobs. To Sanders, that’s the ultimate solution to the underlying problem. To progressives who think addressing racism is an end in itself, that’s a separate issue from getting police to stop killing young black Americans.

(2020-Sanders’ laundry list of criminal justice reforms.)

Sanders was criticized by race-first advocates of criminal justice reform for this approach and in general derided as clueless about how to speak to Black voters.

But the Atlantic car-jacking story seems to suggest that 2016-Sanders was right, and the problem of crime in DC stems more from material deprivation than racism in the police force.

After apprehending a 12-year-old carjacker, officer Sara Cavanagh, searched his home—a two-room apartment housing 10 people, riddled with cockroaches. She found rotting take-out food under a bed but nothing in the refrigerator. Police records revealed that the boy had been physically abused at the age of 6. During his arrest, Cavanagh discovered he had been victim of a shooting and still had a bullet in his back.

Thompson reported that about half of the juveniles arrested by the carjacking unit have had previous interactions with the cops as victims.

“I really didn’t want to like this kid—he’d just carjacked an old lady,” said Cavanagh, who is white. “But I felt sorry for him.”

But what is to be done? Conservatives might blame the breakdown of family life caused by civilizational decay for the conditions in that boy’s home. Liberals and progressives would blame structural forces. Bernie pointed to economic structures. “Structural racism” became the favored explanation across the left in 2020.

Ta-Nehisi Coates organized his influential best-seller about the central importance of race in American life, Between the World and Me, around the police shooting of his friend even though the offending cop was Black.

Defining the problem as racial leads to the search for racists, which inevitably led to framing the police as the villains in the story. Derek Chauvin seemed to confirm this narrative. Hence, “abolish the police.”

But agents of DC law enforcement in Thompson’s story don’t seem like nasty racists.

Like Cavanagh, those quoted in the story have sympathy for perpetrators who have been the victims of brutalizing conditions. But they have more sympathy for the mostly Black victims of their crimes.

“It’s really important to hold two ideas in your brain at the same time,” the first assistant attorney general in DC told Thompson, “Carjacking is a terrible crime that has terrible effects on victims—and these are children who don’t have the same decision-making abilities as adults. A child who commits a crime like this has already been failed in so many ways.”

The notion that this failure involves systemic racism led to reforms that may have eased white guilt—but it they also led to more carjackings.

DC Attorney General Brian Schwab called for “a ‘both and” approach’: Violent offenders must face aggressive prosecution—and communities must address root causes of crime. Rather than careening wildely from one extreme (defund the police) to the other (lock ‘em up).” 

Viewing the root causes as material rather than racial might lead to better reforms. 

Some of the commentary after the election suggest a recognition that the party needs to shift to an economic populist message while de-emphasizing identity issues. Left-leaning Democratic pundits ranging from Ezra Klein to David Brooks suggested the party went wrong in not following the lead of 2016-Sanders.

But the tendency to use the simplistic progressive-moderate binary continues, and it unnecessarily muddles the brains of both the progressive and the moderate left, preventing the adjustments necessary to piece together a winning coalition. It's not just "moving to the center."

And if the Democratic Party can’t do it, there are those in the Republican coalition who think they can. Meet Patrick Ruffini—the Republican Pollster who has laid out a plan for the Republican Party to assemble a populist, working class coalition that will lead to an unbeatable majority. The natural home of the majority of Americans without a college degree, he argues in his book The Party of the People, is now the Republican, not the Democratic Party. His book is an effort to show them the way to permanently capture those voters.

What now, Democrats?

 

An incomplete survey of opinion in the hours and days after the election about why the Democrats lost and how they should change course.  

The last time Trump won, Democrats responded in two ways: introspection and #resistance. Introspection quickly took a back seat to resistance, beginning with the massive “pussy hat” march on Washington. Resistance seems to have done nothing for the party’s ability to win elections, so I’m hoping this time my party will take introspection a bit more seriously and it might lead to some changes and future electoral victories.

 David Brooks' Wednesday column in the New York Times, “Voters to Elites: Do You See Me Now?”  provides a 40-year history of Reagan-inspired neoliberalism that led to the decline of the working class and has culminated in the “Trump Era.”  He argues that it makes perfect sense that decent people would want to overturn that regime, even if it means voting for a “monstrous narcissist.” The column agrees with much of what I’ve been saying and writing about, mostly on this blog, since 2016 and as recently as Sunday.

Somewhat shockingly both Brooks and Ezra Klein joined Jacobin and others in seeing a missed opportunity in Democrats’ rejection of Bernie Sanders-style populism. Brooks:

My initial thought is that I have to re-examine my own priors. I’m a moderate. I like it when Democratic candidates run to the center. But I have to confess that Harris did that pretty effectively and it didn’t work. Maybe the Democrats have to embrace a Bernie Sanders-style disruption — something that will make people like me feel uncomfortable.

The success of so many pro-worker referendums in Trump voting states on Tuesday— raising minimum wages, requiring paid sick leave, banning anti-union practices—suggests there may be something to this view.

The opposing view among left-leaning pundits, like Ta-Nehisi Coates after 2016 and Carlos Lozada on Wednesday attribute Trump’s win to an evil American electorate.

Atlantic writer Tom Nichols articulated this view Wednesday when he dismissed all the rational possible reasons for casting a Trump vote, including “economic anxiety.” Policy, he says, didn’t matter. Voters hostile to democracy, impervious to facts and reason, and driven by “racial grievances” liked Trump’s anger and “promises of social revenge” and are looking forward to the continuation of a “nonstop reality show of rage and resentment.” He continued:

Americans have done this to themselves during a time of peace, prosperity, and astonishingly high living standards. An affluent society that thinks it is living in a hellscape is ripe for gulling by dictators who are willing to play along with such delusions.

The problem with this view is that it suggests there’s no point in even trying to win the next election through the normal means of democratic politics. It reflects a certain type of anti-politics, which I consider to be at the root of our public dysfunction.

In short, Nichols would deposit 73 million of our fellow citizens into Hillary Clinton's basket of irredeemable deplorables.

Politics is not the place to make moral judgements of the voters. Leave that to St. Peter. Politics is simpler—it’s about getting more of them to vote with you—and your moral judgements will only get in the way of that.

In a Wall Street Journal column, a former Democratic voter, Ann Bauer, said her Republican vote was less for Trump than against woke “shaming rituals” and “the hectoring superiority,” of “the people who told us we were too stupid to understand, or too racist, too sexist, too self-hating, too similar to Nazis.”

The hectoring shamers probably didn’t realize they were advancing Trump’s political fortunes, but they were. Danielle Allen’s theory of citizenship says that daily interactions among citizens of different classes and races and political inclinations have an important impact on politics in establishing trust within the electorate. Shaming surely feeds polarization. Read about her theory of “political friendship” here.

(Also, my Defense of MAGA voters)

Predictably, the Wall Street Journal argues that the Democrats lost because they are too far left—both on cultural and economic issues—and too aggressive about it. A board editorial decried “Bidenomics,” “lawfare,” “cultural imperialism,” “regulatory coercion,” and talk of killing the filibuster (As someone with family members on Obamacare, I’m very happy for the filibuster right now). The call for moderation was echoed—also predictably—by Matt Bennett over at the Clinton-Democrat centrist think tank, Third Way.

Journal columnist Kimberly Strassel put her finger on a different Democratic weakness.  The liberal media bubble, she said, pushed a “narrative of fantasy” through the 2024 election season, reporting uncritically on Biden administration denials of the president’s cognitive decline and shielding the party from an accurate view of the “mood and worries of the country.” This view reflects what Ruy Teixiera and John Judis identify in their book, Where Have All the Democrats Gone? as two things that drag down the party: the Fox News fallacy and the Shadow party. 

(The WSJ presented Democrat Teixeira's election reaction in this profile. He seems to echo the pro-Bernie sentiment seen elsewhere, calling him the "last of the classic Democrats whose main center and focus was the working class" and criticizing Clinton for running "to his left on cultural issues.")

The socialist magazine Jacobin agreed that the focus on identity politics, e.g. “white dudes for Harris,” hurt Democrats, who have become a party of, by and for elites. They helped raise a whopping $1 billion for her campaign, but also “marked Harris as the property of an educated professional class . . . largely uninterested in material questions,” Matt Karp writes. 

Daniel Finn noted the outsized influence of Mark Cuban and other billionaire donors on the campaign. They got Harris to water down her plan to crack down on price gouging (leaving her with no other way to address inflation), promise to less zealously enforce anti-trust laws, and reject Biden’s plan to raise the capital gains tax. 

Branko Marcetic noted that Harris was offering a $25,000 give-away to people in the position to buy a home, but had nothing to say about rising evictions and homelessness, the record number of cost-burdened renters, stagnation of median income below the 2019 level, and rising inequality and poverty—especially among children.

A type of explanation that absolves Harris and the Democrats might be called structural determinism. Conditions were ripe for a Republican victory and impossible to defy. In “How Donald Trump Won Everywhere,” Derick Thompson argues that Nov. 5 was America’s “second pandemic election.” The pandemic was a traumatic event that inevitably led to the defeat of the incumbent party in 2020. This outcome was a response to the trauma of the COVID economic aftershock—the inflation caused by supply-chain disruptions and increases in government spending during the pandemic. 

“The global rise in prices has created a nightmare for incumbent parties around the world. The ruling parties of several major countries, including the U.K., Germany, and South Africa, suffered historic defeats this year... There is no escaping the circumstances that Harris herself could never outrun. She is the vice president of a profoundly unpopular president, whose approval was laid low by the same factors—such as inflation and anti-incumbency bias—that have waylaid ruling parties everywhere.”

The Democratic Party operatives on “Pod Save America” used a similar argument to say that Harris actually did a good job of persuading voters to support her, noting that more blue voters moved to Trump in non-swing states where Harris didn’t campaign than in battle-ground state where she did.

If Thomson can be referred to as a structural determinist, Nichols might be considered a moralist, and Coates a defender of identity politics. The Wall Street Journal provides a conservative interpretation, but so too do the Democrats at Third Way.

The class-first interpretation at Jacobin and elsewhere is usually linked to an anti-identity politics view. 

After the election, Mr. class first himself, Bernie Sanders, who had worked out a fragile accommodation with identitarians (despite their attacks on him in 2016), seemed to make a clean break with them on Wednesday for the first time (as far as I know), according to a comment to the New York Times: 

“It’s not just Kamala,” he said. “It’s a Democratic Party which increasingly has become a party of identity politics, rather than understanding that the vast majority of people in this country are working class. This trend of workers leaving the Democratic Party started with whites, and it has accelerated to Latinos and Blacks.”

In Sunday’s “Woke—Who’s to Blame” post, I argued that Democrats tend to win at class politics and lose culture war politics, and backed that up with some historical background. I cut out a paragraph or on how the Republicans are more effective at waging culture war. Here it is now:

When it comes to waging culture war, the Republicans—predictably—have brought a gun to the Democrats’ knife fight. Where left wing cancellations involve private actions—social ostracism or firings—right wingers are wielding the power of the state to push their cultural agenda and punish culture heretics. In Texas, for example, Republicans have passed laws that encourage citizens to report neighbors, parents, librarians, and teachers, who promote or assist transgender therapy, abortion, or critical race theory. One law even offered a $10,000 bounty to anyone who sues a fellow-citizen who “aids or abets” abortion. Conservatives have been the masters of cancellation and censorship throughout American history. In the 19th century South, pro-slavery conservatives exiled opponents of slavery like the Grimke sisters and banned abolitionist literature from the mails. And they updated those practices for the 20th century during the Red Scare of the 40s and 50s. [Texas information based on reporting in the November Atlantic]

In “Whither Woke?” I entered the debate among some progressives about whether we have reached and passed “peak woke” and if the left was abandoning identity politics. The New York Times ran a piece on this question after my post, so in “Scoop!” I connected claims in their article to some of the pieces I’ve been working on this fall on the subject.

All of the above interpretations—including mine—tend to reflect assumptions the authors held before the election took place. It will take some weeks before the best exit polling data is released. Keep your eye out for that, at Catalist and Pew.

Woke—Who’s to blame?

Most polls are showing a virtual tie and in 2016 and 2020 Trump did better in the election than he had been doing in the polls. How can this plutocrat be within range of beating the people’s party for a second time? Answer below.

In July of 2015, I signed up for a Bernie Sanders campaign rally in Portland, Maine. Soon after, I got an email saying the rally would take place in a larger venue to accommodate the growing crowd. I think they had to move the venue a couple of times as more and more of us signed up.

Sanders eventually filled the Cross Insurance Arena with a crowd that cheered enthusiastically for his indictment of “establishment politics and establishment economics” and a laundry list of progressive policy ideas aimed at reining in Wall Street greed and restoring the middle class.

We were feeling the Bern and the fire only grew hotter over the next five years, culminating in Sanders’ victories in the first three primaries of 2020. As he delivered his victory speech in Nevada in late February of that year, it seemed like the Democratic Party was on the verge of a progressive populist revolution.

Fast forward five years.

An essay landed in my inbox last week with a title that sadly states the obvious: “The Progressive Moment Is Over.”

So, what happened?

The email, by Ruy Teixeira, blamed four “terrible ideas.” But idea #3 is particularly terrible in its effect on Democrats’ electoral prospects:

Insisting that everyone should look at all issues through the lens of identity politics was a terrible idea and voters hate it.

I didn’t take notes on Sanders’ Portland speech, but the Portland Press Herald did. According to their report, the closest he came to an identity issue was wanting to spend more tax dollars on schools and less on prisons. What stands out in my memory of the rally—and in the Portland Press Herald ’s report on it—was a relentless focus on economics and class. 

He condemned free trade agreements, Wall Street greed, the stingy minimum wage, the decline of the middle class, and growing wealth inequality.

“The greed of Wall Street and the greed of corporate America is destroying the great middle class of this country,” Sanders said. “And people are saying from coast to coast, ‘You can’t keep getting away with that.’ ”

That was what he tried to focus on throughout his two campaigns for the presidency. But promoters of terrible idea #3 made that difficult.

From the very beginning of his campaign in 2015, the press gave prominent coverage to criticism of Bernie for failing to emphasize race and other identity categories as the source of oppression.

At a conference for progressive activists the same month as the Portland rally, some in the audience were “frustrated” because he “answered questions about racial issues by pivoting back to economic ones.”

As Vox explained at the time: “Sanders believes in racial equality, sure, but he believes it will only come as the result of economic equality. To him, focusing on racial issues first is merely treating the symptom, not the disease.”

Later that summer, BLM protestors seized his microphone at campaign events in Pheonix and Seattle. To some, those spectacles suggested he was not sympathetic to the plight of African Americans, to others surrendering the podium made him look week. In Seattle, he never ended up delivering his planned remarks in defense of Medicare and Social Security and press coverage focused on the protest rather than Sanders’ class-based message.

During the 2016 presidential nomination contest, Hillary Clinton used identity politics to get an advantage over Sanders. She framed her candidacy as a bid to break the highest “glass ceiling” and defended an ally’s suggestion that there was a “special place in hell” for women who didn’t vote for her.

And she attacked Bernie’s class politics in this famous comment:

If we broke up the big banks tomorrow — and I will if they deserve it, if they pose a systemic risk, I will — would that end racism? … Would that end sexism? Would that end discrimination against the LGBT community? Would that make people feel more welcoming to immigrants overnight?

Meanwhile, when an interviewer asked Sanders if he supported open borders, he called the idea a Koch brothers scheme to lower wages. The reaction on the identity-focused left was swift and widespread, derided as “ugly” and “backward-looking.”

Sanders also got flack in 2016 from the era’s most prominent Black writer, Ta-Nehisi Coates, for opposing reparations for slavery. Class-based programs, Sanders argued, would disproportionately help Blacks and other people of color who suffer disproportionate rates of poverty.

Coates who voted for Sanders, said the candidate didn’t understand the argument for reparations and suggested that since every other part of his radical socialist agenda was pie-in-the-sky with no chance of passing through Congress, why not add another radical, divisive and unrealistic item to the list?

After Sanders’ loss to Clinton, the renowned Black historian Barbara Fields lambasted the Democrats for missing a chance to build a class-based majority. Bernie, she said, had

found a way to talk about the overall inequality and injustice without trying to speak to individual designated portions of the populace as though they were separate entities.… [Democrats] decided they [would] rather keep their apparatus and apparatchiks who benefit from [the fracturing of the electorate along identity lines].… They threw away a grace we were given, and so we got instead Donald Trump.

We’ll never know if the left-populism of Sanders could have beaten right-wing populism in the general election, but we do know that Sanders did better than Clinton in polling matchups against Trump during the late primaries of 2016.  His reception at a recent rally in Pennsylvania for Harris suggests he is still popular.  “I know a lot of people that are voting for Trump that actually like Bernie Sanders,” one rally-goer told a Times reporter.

Thanks at least in part to the machinations of party leaders, the Democrats picked maybe the worst possible candidate to run in the year of Brexit and anti-establishment populist fervor.

Hillary Clinton was practically the embodiment of the unpopular and mostly-repudiated anti-worker neoliberal economic regime that both Sanders and Trump ran against that year.

The key to Sanders’ defeat in 2016 was the Southern states, where Black voters overwhelmingly chose Clinton. As he prepared for a 2020 campaign, Sanders hoped to do better with those voters. He hired more Black staffers and while he continued to emphasize economics and class, he made some concessions to the identity left.

For instance, he raised his hand during a debate in 2019 along with most of the other Democratic candidates when asked if he was in favor of decriminalizing illegal border crossings, a position that has haunted 2019 hand-raiser Kamala Harris this year.

But Bernie continued to run afoul of the identitarians in the party—now on gender issues. Liz Warren—the identitarian primary contender in Bernie’s progressive lane—attacked him for allegedly telling her, in a private conversation, that a woman couldn’t be elected president. Sanders denied the claim. Meanwhile, his followers were derided as “Bernie Bros” and condemned for sexist behavior on Twitter.

Next, Bernie was condemned by transgender activists for doing an interview with Joe Rogan and accepting his endorsement because of comments Rogan had made about transgender women.

History as prologue

The focus on identity is the fountainhead of the culture wars that have been raging with varying levels of intensity since the 1960s when the fundamental basis of political conflict shifted from class—which gave Democrats and liberals within the Republican Party an unbeatable advantage from 1932 to 1960—to race, ethnicity, and gender—which has made the Democrats very beatable and enabled conservatives to take over the Republican Party.

In Before the Storm, Rick Perlstein shows how Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign elbowed liberals out of the Republican party. We associate Goldwater with anti-communism and laissez faire economics and an electoral college wipeout, but it was his opposition to the Civil Rights Act that enabled him to win five deep-South states—the cradle of the Confederacy—and end the Democrats’ century-long lock on the South.

What has happened to progressives and the Democratic Party since the apogee of Bernie Sanders’ presidential ambitions in 2020 after he won the first three primaries and seemed poised to capture the nomination is not all that different from the trajectory of the left after LBJ’s landslide victory in 1964.

Goldwater’s campaign showed Nixon how to use racial identity to activate white tribal instincts during a time of racial unrest and win the presidency in ’68 and ‘72. Back then Nixon stoked opposition to crime, anti-war demonstrations, urban riots, civil rights legislation, affirmative action, and busing. Lately the right has focused on affirmative action, crime and protests again, but also immigration, drag queen story hour, left-wing cancellations, DEI programing, transgender controversies, and liberal/left-wing academics (including high school history teachers).

And the right has shrewdly painted every policy idea they don’t like, including much of the Sanders economic agenda, as “woke.” But while their attack on identity politics has been successful with an electorate that leans conservative on culture, liberal Bernie-esque economic policies also remain popular.

As Teixeira has argued in his book and elsewhere (but not in the “four terrible ideas” email), the party that adopts liberal or progressive policies on class and economics along with moderate or conservative policies on culture and identity could win a commanding majority. But Republicans can’t give up on tax breaks, and Harris can’t make a clean break with the cultural left.

She chose a VP who had capitulated more to the woke left than the more centrist option—the Jewish Governor of the must-win state of Pennsylvania, perhaps out of fear of backlash from anti-Israel protestors.

She has moved a bit in that direction, but maybe not enough. Recently she declined an interview with Joe Rogan, probably out of fear of the same backlash that Bernie suffered. But in doing so, she missed a chance to win back some of the male voters—the Bernie Bros?—who have been leaving the party in droves.

And she hasn’t had the “Sister Souljah” moment that Bill Maher and others are calling for. If she loses on Tuesday, it will be because she didn’t make a clean break—not with the progressivism of Bernie Sanders, but with terrible idea #3—the identity politics practiced by both the progressives and the moderate liberals in the Democratic coalition.

Scoop!

A Times article, by Jeremy Peters, Nov. 2.

I scooped the New York Times.

Between Oct. 16 and 26 I posted a series of essays about the current state of identity politics on this blog.  Then today, Nov. 2, the Times published this article noting that identity politics is losing its "grip on the country."

I agree with much of Jeremy W. Peters’ reporting but not all. For one thing, the heading should say it's losing its grip on the Democratic party. I'm not so sure the right wing is giving up on it.  More on that in a future post.

In “Wither woke?” I posed the same question that Peters is addressing—have we passed peak woke?—and came to the same general answer, pointing to some of the same contrary evidence that he mentions toward the end of his piece. 

In “DEI and the left critique,” I wrote something akin to his comment that "some of the most effective pushback to the hard left has, in fact, come from within institutions sympathetic to progressive impulses." But unlike Peters, I noted that the left-critique of identity politics is not new, and all along has been more convincing and insightful than most conservative critiques.

Throughout his piece Peters repeats an error common in the media, conflating the “progressive” with the “identitarian left.” For example in citing Yasha Mounk, who is guilty of this too, he writes: “Today, he said of progressives, ‘The brief era of their unquestioned dominance is now coming to an end.’” I’ve been working on a piece on this topic for the past week. Coming soon.

Part of the problem is that there is no one good word to describe the identity obsessions of some folks on the left.  In “Don’t say woke,” I provide a glossary of the many different terms you might use in addition to "idenity," and rather than "progressive."

Since 2020, Peters writes, “candidates who aligned themselves with progressive activists have fared poorly in many high-profile races, even in deep blue bastions.” It would be more accurate to say that candidates who align themselves with 2020-style woke activists have fared poorly. Peters points to two such House members, Corey Bush and Jamaal Bowman. But AOC and Sanders are still quite popular. She won her district primary with 82 Percent of the vote in August, and Sanders leads in his Senate re-election race 66-25%.

In “Political socialism” I pointed out how AOC and Sanders embrace politics rather than the moral grandstanding characteristic of the woke left, and that has been part of their continued success.

My next post, out tomorrow, deepens this point by showing how appeals to identity categories like race and gender are no less common on the moderate, establishment left than among those we might think of as “progressive.”