Blame for losing the Presidential election has been leveled at Democrats for something called “identity politics.” The charges? Preoccupation with gays, blacks and women. Coddling immigrants. Too much political correctness. White Lives Matter!
A piece in the New York Times by Libertarian Mark Lilla (“The End of Identity Liberalism“) castigates liberals for celebrating diversity instead of commonality. Lilla adds that liberals wrongly attribute their loss to “whitelash” – white economic suffering turned into racist rage. He accuses liberals of waiting impatiently for “demographic extinction” of white, rural, religious Americans. Lilla often writes of what he sees as an almost tidal pull of religion on society. He notes that white rural Christians think of themselves as victims – a potent and volatile concept of identity – and he warns that, while “identity politics” may have started with the Klu Klux Klan, “those who play the identity game should be prepared to lose it.”
Lilla advises liberals to turn their backs on civil rights “issues that are highly charged symbolically […], especially those touching on sexuality and religion. Such a liberalism would work quietly, sensitively and with a proper sense of scale. […] America is sick and tired of hearing about liberals’ damn bathrooms.”
But it’s not just bathrooms. As Lilla observes, it’s every issue pitting fundamentalism against secular Americans. And not all of “America” shares LIlla’s religious views – or even his concept of what “America” is.
In “The Federalist,” a conservative journal, Rachel Lu writes that the GOP saw how successfully identity politics worked for liberals and is using it themselves. But she worries that it “has primarily been rooted in a nostalgic vision of an aging, mostly-white voting base.” She thus credits the demographic problem Lilla dismisses while agreeing with him that the GOP is playing with fire.
Kay Hymowitz, author of books on how feminism hurts men, writes in the conservative “National Review” that liberal politics exploits alliances between groups that have nothing in common except for “one source of solidarity: a common enemy known as ‘the white male.'” This is a common complaint from the White Right, and Hymowitz asks provocatively: “Now that a disaffected group of white men are claiming identity politics for themselves, will that change?”
Neoconservative Christopher Caldwell, in the New York Times (“What the Alt-Right Really Means“), addresses some of these disaffected white men – some of them neo-Nazis and white supremacists. His thesis is that the “Alt-Right,” given plenty of column inches by Trump advisor Steven Bannon at Breitbart News, is simply “practicing identity politics in the manner of blacks and Hispanics.”
But do Democrats really demonize whites in order to advantage every other group? Is Hymowitz correct that gays, Blacks, Muslims, the poor, Hispanics, disenfranchised voters, prisoners, women, Native Americans, and others have absolutely nothing in common?
Hymowitz is wrong on both counts. The “common enemy” of each group is injustice, not white men. And minorities – and whites – have plenty in common, beginning with a desire for an inclusive, tolerant nation.
The GOP is 89% white, while that number is 60% for Democrats. For decades it has been the Democratic Party that defended a variety of civil rights – abortion, voting rights, wage parity, marriage equality, privacy – rights the GOP works so tirelessly to dismantle.
Fighting for civil rights in itself is not identity politics. Neither is protecting disadvantaged constituencies or insisting that Constitutional rights apply to all – and not merely Premium Class citizens.
True, since at least Bill Clinton’s administration the Democratic Party has neglected blue collar workers – not that the GOP ever cared – but in the Trump narrative it’s only white folks whom Democrats have betrayed. This strange, even racist, GOP narrative completely Photoshops minorities out of the working class picture. In Trump’s reality show minorities are all cast as welfare queens, rioting thugs, terrorists, illegal aliens, subversives, or crybabies.
Besides maintaining their defense of civil rights, Democrats must do a better job of representing workers – which means spending less time at Davos and the Aspen Institute and more time in union halls. Go visit Wisconsin! – a state Clinton bypassed in 2016. Pay more attention to Main Street and show less breathless infatuation with Wall Street and Silicon Valley. Go back to your roots, Democrats.
Meanwhile, the Trump campaign finally found the winning ticket with its third campaign manager, an anti-Semite with a soft spot for neo-Nazis. The Great new America they’ve promised is founded on a cynical and dangerous form of identity politics we haven’t seen since 1925.
That was the year the United States had 4 million members of the Ku Klux Klan.
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