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.”