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 depravation 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 other people. 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 Warran—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 Progressivism and liberalism of identity politics.

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.”

Whither woke?

Up here in the Northern New Hampshire everybody’s asking: are we past the peak?

Yesterday, driving around and gazing at the brilliant oranges and reds glowing in the sunlight I realized that, contrary to what seems true when you look out my back window, the peak is not yet behind us. I’m glad I didn’t stay at home.

Clearly, you need a broader perspective to judge if a trend has peaked, or slowed down, or had a temporary setback or whatever.

There’s a circle of people that I tend to pay some attention to who are asking a similar question about a different trend. Have we passed “peak woke”? Unlike the foliage-obsessed, most of these folks are rooting not for a nay, but for a yay in answer to their question.

(What is woke, and isn’t there a better word for it?)  

Who are these people? They write or speak in the political podcasts and columns I read—a lot of them reside in Substack-istan. A lot of them tweet:

Wokeness has not peaked. Cancellation peaked because wokeness seized control of all the institutions it sought to control and drove out all dissenters, obviating the need for further cancellations as it imposes its agenda uncontested https://t.co/vnv2fyjqgs

— Wesley Yang (@wesyang) October 9, 2024

There are strong opinions. The most critical opponents of woke—especially victims of woke-driven cancellation like Mr. Yang—are more likely to be pessimistic. If identity politics seems to be less aggressive, it’s because it's work is mostly done, having succeeded in permeating civic institutions with woke values. Ibram Kendi’s star may be setting, but the Pulitzer Center’s 1619 project has gotten a very Kendi-esque message about the “foundational role” of slavery into US history curricula in all 50 states according to a five-year report the center issued last month.

Others seem to think that while a few bitter-enders (what someone referred to as “Blue MAGA”) continue to push radical (woke) identitarianism, these are “lagging indicators” and we’re mostly done with all that. 

A few examples that the great awakening is ending: some universities have stopped requiring diversity statements from job applicants. Corporations have cut back on DEI spending. Anti-woke writings issue from all directions on the political compass. Some news outlets have backed away from the woke advocacy that had seeped in to their coverage a few years ago.

The New York Times is the prime example. After some high profile cancellations during the 2020 “reckoning” (inquisition), the Times has adjusted its application of “moral clarity”  toward a more traditional version of journalistic objectivity. Hired in the wake of those fiascos, executive editor Joseph Kahn refused to capitulate to the demands issued in open letters by woke staffers who objected to coverage of transgender issues and the conflict in Israel/Palestine. The opinion page has also hired woke-critical writers like John McWhorter and Pamela Paul, also to the chagrin of some SJW staffers. Also, word usage. The Economist counted up the number of times “white privilege” appeared in the Times —2.5 per million in 2020 and just 0.4 in 2023.

Then there's the cyclical theory.  The movement is not dead, but has retreated to the shadows, as Freddie DeBoer puts it, “to reorganize itself and come up with new arguments” that will be unveiled at some point in the future. There really is no dustbin of history, it turns out, just rehab where out-of-fashion ideas go for rest and a makeover. 

But meanwhile, some of the ideas of the movement have become so deeply embedded into our cultural norms that we aren’t even aware of them. It’s like inflation. Prices have stopped rising, but they ain’t going back to what they were.

A key question about the current state of woke involves its current standing in the Democratic Party. Some would point to the triumph of Joe Biden, the least-woke candidate in 2020 and the fact that no significant Democrat ever endorsed “abolish the police.”

After the Democrat’s most cringe-worthy woke moment in 2020 when Congressional leaders took a knee and bowed their heads while wearing African Kente stoles in a moment of silence for George Floyd, the party has de-emphasized identity politics. 2024 nominee Harris hardly mentions that she would be the first female president and she’s abandoned most of her woke positions of 2020, like de-criminalizing border crossings.

But others think the Party hasn’t gone far enough. The decision to hand the nomination to Harris and her choice of the more liberal Tim Waltz over Josh Shapiro for VP are seen as signs that the Party isn’t going far enough. And Harris has renounced her woke 2020 stands, or said they were mistaken, or really offered any rationale for the change of position.

Brianna Wu recently cited a “Musicians for Kamala” YouTube event as typical of the way that “superficial identity politics” still dominate the Democrats' messaging and argued that the Party’s supposed “course correction” has been inadequate and is why Harris hasn’t pulled far ahead of the deeply unpopular Republican nominee.

Whether or not she is right about the party’s current direction, I think she is correct about the impact on Harris’s current standing in the polls. The great awokening has done perhaps irreparable damage to the Democratic Party’s ability to win elections and especially to the prospects of progressive reform within the party’s coalition.

As I was working on this essay, a Substack post from the Democratic strategist Ruy Teixeira landed in my inbox. His piece, “The Progressive Moment is Over,” diagnosed how the great progressive movement that was personified in Bernie Sanders, has been completely discredited and abandoned even by some of its most ardent supporters. 

He blamed four “terrible” progressive ideas, at least three of which can be categorized as “woke.” 

More on that soon: "Woke-the damage done."

DEI and the left critique

 

In January, Times reporter Nicholas Confessore published the results of his investigation of what he said was a concerted effort by “conservative activists” to abolish DEI on public university campuses. They had managed to get almost half the states to at least consider banning campus D.E.I. programs “even as polling has shown that diversity initiatives remain popular.”

Based on “thousands of documents obtained by The New York Times” including “casual correspondence” among “like-minded allies around the country,” full of “unvarnished views on race, sexuality and gender roles” in private emails, the report left the impression of a sinister right-wing conspiracy among racist homophobes against blameless and popular diversity programing.

After that report, Confessore decided he “needed to see D.E.I. programs up close,” so he traveled to the campus of the University of Michigan, home of a particularly extensive and longstanding DEI program.

It turns out that it’s not just far right, politically motivated conspirators who have a problem with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs.

Some excerpts from his very long piece, published Wednesday in the Times Magazine, which I assume gets into today’s print edition.

Programs across the university are couched in the distinctive jargon that, to D.E.I.’s practitioners, reflects proven practices for making classrooms more inclusive, and to its critics reveals how deeply D.E.I. is encoded with left-wing ideologies….

Some researchers argue that teaching students to view the world chiefly through the lens of identity and oppression can leave them vulnerable instead of empowered. Psychologists have questioned whether implicit bias can be accurately measured or reduced through training. The notion that microaggressions are not only real but ubiquitous in interracial encounters is widespread in D.E.I. programs; a 2021 review of the microaggressions literature, however, judged it “without adequate scientific basis.”...

Some evidence suggests that the steady expansion of D.E.I. into campus life is actually constraining student interaction across political and cultural divides. One recent analysis by the political scientist Kevin Wallsten found that the larger the D.E.I. bureaucracy at a university, the more discomfort students felt expressing their views on social media and in informal conversations with other students....

Even some liberal scholars believe D.E.I. looms too large. Amna Khalid, a historian at Carleton College in Minnesota, argues that modern D.E.I. is not, as some on the right hold, a triumph of critical theory or postcolonialism but of the corporatization of higher education, in which universities have tried to turn moral and political ideals into a system of formulas and dashboards. “They want a managerial approach to difference,” Khalid said. “They want no friction. But diversity inherently means friction.”

According to Confessore, UMich has spent a quarter of a billion dollars on DEI programs and expanding administrative positions and has had profound effects—largely negative—on campus culture and politics.

These growing bureaucracies represented a major — and profoundly left-leaning — reshuffling of campus power. Administrators were even more politically liberal than faculty members, according to one survey, and far more likely to favor racial preferences in admissions and hiring. They promulgated what Lyell Asher, a professor of English at Lewis & Clark College in Oregon, has called “an alternate curriculum,” taught not in classrooms but in dorms, disciplinary hearings and orientation programs.

Some administrators discovered that student activists could be a potent campus constituency. The former president of one top research institution recalled for me how students once came to his office with demands, presented in a kind of theatrical performance, to enhance the university’s D.E.I. program. The former president, who asked for anonymity for fear of risking his present job, later learned that some of the program’s senior staff members had worked with and encouraged the students to pressure the administration on their behalf. “That was the moment at which I understood that there was a whole part of the bureaucracy that I didn’t control,” he said.

When I read Confessore’s January piece, I knew he was leaving something out. It’s true that conservatives have used DEI and other examples of what they call the woke ideology to discredit any policy or politician they don’t like. While some of their criticism is affirmed by this new reporting, much of it is cynical and dishonest.

The more incisive, measured, and accurate criticisms of both woke ideology and diversity programs have come from the left or the center—or from non-politicized subjects of DEI programming.

For example:

* Back in June of 2020, journalist/podcaster Katie Herzog interviewed with Shannon Loys, a graphic designer who participation in DEI training at the Seattle Repertory Theater, run by none other than Robin DiAngelo, the “Patron saint of DEI.” At the end of the interview, Loys and Herzog, both progressives, concluded that the training did more harm than good. Loys said she became “more cautious” in her interactions with Black co-workers, more likely to avoid interactions rather than risk causing offense.

* Like many self-identified Marxists, Freddy De Boer, has been a frequent critic of the woke left for its focus on racial and gender identity (what fellow socialist Adolph Reed refers to as “ascriptive” categories) to the exclusion of class. His book “How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement,” is a scathing and revealing explanation of how Woke identity politics like DEI serve the interests of elites at the expense of the truly disadvantaged. DeBoer and Reed see DEI as essentially a conservative effort to coopt progressive movements. These critiques are nothing new. Reed has been sounding the alarm for decades, and in 2001, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn published Race Experts claiming that the race relations consultants that proceeded DEI had “hijacked the Civil Rights Revolution.”

* In 2022, Maurice Mitchell, national director of the very progressive Working Families Party, which touts him as “a nationally-recognized social movement strategist, a visionary leader in the Movement for Black Lives, and a community organizer for racial, social, and economic justice,” wrote an essay, “Building Resilient Organizations,” in which he revealed how identity politics like DEI had hampered the progressive organizations he has served in.

* Other critics from the left that come to mind at the moment include Tyler Austin Harper, Michael Powell, Jonathan Haidt, Greg Lukianoff, Yasha Mounk, Sam Harris, Matt Yglesias, Catherine Liu, the socialist magazine, Jacobin (sometimes), and Musa al-Gharbi. 

* I wrote this piece in 2021 about how one staple of DEI training, getting white people to “check their privilege,” does more harm than good to the cause of racial justice.

And then there are very quiet critics, like those quoted in Wednesday's article, who work or study at the institutions where these programs have proliferated. One Michigan professor who had been investigated for causing offense in his class said the school has created a “gotcha culture,” in which students scrutinize their teachers’ comments for offensive words or comments and the “Bias Response Team” launches investigations based anonymous complaints, often for “offensive” or “disrespectful” word choices.

Unlike the conservative anti-woke activists or the many left-leaning critics outlined above, these mostly left-leaning folks keep reservations about diversity programs to themselves to avoid conflict or  discipline imposed by administrators whose job is to enforce DEI cultural norms.

Michigan may be an extreme example, but based on my own experience, and the research Confessore did beyond Michigan, the problems catalogued in the article seem to be typical of institutions that have introduced these programs. 

But Confessore's expose seems to be an indication that DEI and other elements of identity politics are on the wane at institutions like the Times itself.  A burning question among observers: have we passed "peak woke?" 

Also, isn't there a better word for woke?

Political socialism

"Some on the left see Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s endorsement of Mr. Biden as a betrayal of progressive values"

 A reader of this blog (yes there is one) read my “Bernie won” post (Aug. 22) and asked why Sanders has been “less prominent” of late and if I thought his supposed victory had actually made things better for American workers.

Part of my response was to say that Bernie is more of a pragmatic politician than his socialist label and his refusal to join the Democratic Party would suggest.

It would be hard to show that any of the concessions he won from Biden and that have resulted in legislation during the last four years has had a significant impact on the life of workers. And of course his “victory” doesn’t represent an ultimate triumph of socialism, but a socialist might be pleased. 

Sanders is not one of those socialists that Bernard Crick says are “grossly unrealistic, often in too much of a hurry” and often “impatient of political means.” (If you don’t know who BC is, I’ve explained it here). “Great changes can only come in stages,” Crick writes, and politically oriented socialists should pursue “short-term tactical reforms within the system to build a basis of popular confidence for advance.”

It is not selling out to work within existing institutions, contrary to what AOC’s vociferous critics (eg, like DSA) are saying about her.  Bernie Sanders did not abandon his larger goals by endorsing Biden, and now Harris, and refraining from loud criticism of the administration.

As Crick says, socialists (and you might say this about any ideologues without representation among viable political parties) can push for incremental reforms within the current system and simultaneously work on “long-term persuasion” that might “change the climate of expectation,” leading to more dramatic changes down the road. FDR’s New Deal, for example, led to a sea change in Americans’ expectations of what the government would do to assure prosperity.

Sanders seems to have nudged the Democrats away from neoliberal policies toward more worker-oriented policies or at least poses, like Biden walking on a picket line, which might change voters' expectations for future policies.

Crick’s political socialism is informed by the failure of past revolutions that failed. He concludes in his note to impatient socialists:

From a base camp established amid representative or parliamentary institutions, the time needed for the establishment of a socialist society may appear desperately long. But the built-in political necessity of socialist governments having to carry with them an enfranchised public opinion, as well as an already organized trade-union movement, guarantees that each move of the camp further and further up the mountain will be on solid ground, less likely to slip backwards or simply to get stuck… great changes can only come in stages.

---

(Crick quotes: 241, 239) 

Source of the quote under the picture: New York Times

There were a lot of unrealistic and impatient socialists after Bernie lost the 2020 Democratic nomination.