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.