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.

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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.