This is an issue that has been bubbling up since election day. Was the loss of states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania due to the Democratic party turning its back on class issues, and appealing to voters who have been displaced by trade agreements and globalization, in favor of issues of identity. Which probably reached its apex in the concern of transgender bathroom rights. Did these identity issues turn off working class voters in these states, or was it a matter of giving those issues prominence over economic or class issues. Professor Mark Lilla of Columbia had a much commented upon piece the other day in the New York Times:
If you are going to mention groups in America, you had better mention all of them. If you don’t, those left out will notice and feel excluded.
But the fixation on diversity in our schools and in the press has produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups, and indifferent to the task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life. At a very young age our children are being encouraged to talk about their individual identities, even before they have them. By the time they reach college many assume that diversity discourse exhausts political discourse, and have shockingly little to say about such perennial questions as class, war, the economy and the common good.
We need a post-identity liberalism, and it should draw from the past successes of pre-identity liberalism. Such a liberalism would concentrate on widening its base by appealing to Americans as Americans and emphasizing the issues that affect a vast majority of them. It would speak to the nation as a nation of citizens who are in this together and must help one another. As for narrower issues that are highly charged symbolically and can drive potential allies away, especially those touching on sexuality and religion, such a liberalism would work quietly, sensitively and with a proper sense of scale. (To paraphrase Bernie Sanders, America is sick and tired of hearing about liberals’ damn bathrooms.)
www.nytimes.com/...
And Bernie Sanders now weighs in:
In a speech Sunday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) urged attendees to move away from “identity politics” and towards policies aimed at helping the working class.
Sanders spoke to a crowd of more than 1,000 mostly young people at the Berklee Performance Center in Boston, according to a report from WBUR.
"The working class of this country is being decimated — that's why Donald Trump won," Sanders said, according to the same report. "And what we need now are candidates who stand with those working people, who understand that real median family income has gone down."
Sanders also urged the crowd to move the party away from what he called “identity politics.”
"It is not good enough for somebody to say, 'I'm a woman, vote for me.' That is not good enough," he said, according to the same report. "What we need is a woman who has the guts to stand up to Wall Street, to the insurance companies, to the drug companies, to the fossil fuel industries."
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