Original post here
I may be a little late to this topic, since the whole controversy came out a month and a half ago, but the issue is still simmering, and the direction of the Democratic Party is still in flux. How the Democratic party deals with the issue has serious implications for the future of the country. It’s an issue that still warrants talking about to say the least.
So of course, in the aftermath of the election there’s been a debate raging about the role of “identity politics”, the tendency to focus on narrow issues of race, gender, sexual orientation, etc., in the modern Democratic politics. Conservative and Centrist commentators have taken the opportunity to crow about how over-reliance on this sort of politics caused them to turn into an exclusivist party, over reliant on demographics and unwilling to appeal to the “mainstream”. Much of this was just the same old tired diatribes about “PC Culture” that we hear every time Democrats do poorly in an election. But then Sanders and, and many other progressives, began criticizing the party from the left, faulting it for failing to push common, primarily economic, vision for the party, and instead cynically adopting a veneer of social progressivism to deflect criticism and delegitimize their opponents.
This generated a lot of controversy. Many were quick to dismiss Sanders and his allies. Many have equated their argument to trivializing issues that are important to women, minorities, immigrants, and the LGBT community. Others have claimed that politics is little more than “identity politics”, and trying to do what Sanders and others are suggesting is either untenable, or amounts to ignoring their constituents.
On the whole, I think these attempts to dismiss the issue are wrong headed. First off, as many have pointed out, they mischaracterize the argument being made, trying to portray it as complaining that a lot of voters vote on issues of race, gender, and sexual orientation. In fact, what he’s criticizing is lousy messaging and cynical attempts to coopt issues of identity politics, which is basically a cogent point. Second, they’re quick to dismiss that there is an issue that needs to be addressed. On the contrary, there are tons of examples of the Democratic leadership, and others, doing exactly what Sanders was accusing them of and getting away with it. This does have serious consequences for the effectiveness of Progressive politics.
First, Some Basic Points
There isn’t actually a contradiction
It’s worth noting that, strictly speaking, there isn’t actually any cause for conflict over “identity politics”. If the Democratic Party is based on one principal, it’s that true social progress can be measured in how society empowers and engages all its members. The goals of economic and racial justice and gender/sexual empowerment are all basically compatible with this goal. Indeed, in a lot of ways, they’re self-reinforcing, and meaningless without one another. Equality before the law is a vapid right if people don’t have the economic means to realize it. Conversely, meaningful working class solidarity can’t be achieved in a context of racial animosity and sexism.
Today, there is a basic understanding of this among the various branches of the Democratic coalition. To be sure, this wasn’t always the case, and there are numerous instances when the reforms of economic progressives failed to enfranchise racial minorities, women, immigrants and so forth as they should have. But, whatever their failings a century ago (and it’s easy to exaggerate them), they’re far outstripped by instances of successful cooperation. The labor movement was a pretty important conduit through which feminists and the civil rights movement were able to organize, and the support of organized labor, which was decades ahead of the mainstream, was pivotal to the success of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 60s. Similarly, labor abandoned any of its anti-immigration stances decades ago, and now recognizes that the best way to preserve labor protections is to make sure everyone, including non-citizens, are entitled to them.
But more than this, a large part of the reason the working class and identity politics are the same is because they serve the same voters. This is, of course, because racial minorities and women are disproportionately likely to belong to the working class, or otherwise be economically vulnerable. They’re also like a key component of laboring organizations. Today, African Americans are the most likely ethnic group to belong to a labor union.
The point is that, the trade-off between economic and racial/social justice is a false one. Economic enfranchisement and racial/social enfranchisement are complimentary goals. Indeed, recognizing this, and extending it to a more broad based argument that can appeal to everyone, should be important in establishing a more cohesive and vigorous Democratic party directed from the grassroots.
Still, It’s Probably Inevitable That Large Swathes Of The Electorate Prioritize Racial/Gender Issues, And That’s Not Fundamentally A Problem
Of course, you can emphasize how economic and racial/gender justice are complimentary ends and how a broad progressive vision of society benefits everyone, but at the end of the day, you can’t tell people what to prioritize. People are going to chafe at the notion that they should treat issues they should as of paramount importance.
This isn’t an irrational thing for people to do. Racial/Gender injustices are certainly severe enough to warrant a person’s full attention, and while it’s tempting to think that we can kill two birds with one stone by focusing on economic injustice, there are a lot of situations where that isn’t the case. Besides that, it’s worthwhile to recognize that cultural ties are often stronger than economic ones, and stark divides in race, gender, and sexual orientation are often more apparent than abstract systemic problems.
All this is to say that identity politics is just people voting their interests as they see them, which is what the democratic process is all about. There’s nothing wrong with it, and just as importantly it’s unavoidable. Anyone who legitimately is trying to tell voters that their priorities are wrong is just pushing on a string.
All this reinforces the importance of being able to localize a message to appeal to an audience. For progressive liberals who want gain the lockstep support of African Americans, Immigrants, Women, or LGBT voters on various common causes, this means their job isn’t just about getting those voters to appreciate the commonalities in their shared vision, it also means adapting the message to the audience is something you’re probably going to have to do at some point. Likewise, this goes in reverse. If minority voters, immigrants, women, or LGBT want to achieve their policy goals, they need to be able to explain why those policy goals aren’t simply a niche issue for them, but something which has broader implications for people who fall outside their narrow group. It’s just good politics.
That Said, Sanders Is Right To Complain
In the greater scheme of things. There isn’t really a conflict between economic progressivism and identity politics, nor is there anything wrong with people voting primarily on issues of race, gender, or sexual identity. But that’s besides the point. Sanders, and the vast majority of people on the left, were never saying otherwise. What they were complaining about are the cooptation of socially progressive causes and the broader failure of the party to make a convincing argument that it stands for anything beyond niche issues. These are both highly prevalent and highly problematic.
Socially Progressive causes are coopted all the time, and it has serious consequences
The thing is that, none of that has any bearing on what Sanders was actually saying. His main complaint wasn’t about people voting on issues of race, gender, or sexual identity, and I haven’t seen many on the left legitimately try to make that argument. What they’re criticizing is cooptation, people attempting to deflect criticism of economic exploitation or bad politics by wrapping them up in a shallow veneer of social progress. The point is basically cogent, It’s a lot easier to get companies to enact superficial changes to conform to modern taboos of racial/gender discrimination than it is to enacted meaningful systemic changes. As Sanders said, while it’d be nice if more top executives were non-white or women, but in another sense, all that would do is shift around people in a system that’s still just as unequal, on net. To put it another way, slavery wouldn’t have been fixed if there had been more African American slaveholders. The fundamental problem with slavery wasn’t that it was racist, the main problem with slavery was that it was slavery.
And while there’s a weird tendency to brush this sort of cooptation, it’s pretty easy to find. After all, we’re just coming off a primary where Centrist Hillary Clinton and her supporters pointed to her alleged appeal among African Americans and status as the first major female candidate for President as a pretext to ignore her campaign’s obvious defects, while simultaneously dismissing Sanders and his progressive supporters as a bunch of retrograde white misogynists. And this is hardly an isolated incident. Attempts to break teachers unions and push charter schools have been advertised for years under the false pretense that doing so would help inner city minority students. Cory Booker repeatedly tries to model himself as some kind civil rights icon, even as he spent his political career cozying up to the Wall Street and Big Pharma, while antagonizing the public education system. Silicon Valley executives frequently dress up their rampant abuses of the H-1B visa system as immigrant advocacy. And so on and so forth.
Of course, you can argue that people who vote on issues of race, gender, or sexual orientation aren’t that easily taken in by this kind of shallow tokenism or cynical divide and conquer. You’d be mostly right in this, as Hillary Clinton learned on election night when she underperformed, badly, among women, African Americans,Latino voters, etc. But that’s kind of the point, it’s lousy politics.Not only that, there are also plenty of instances of people abuse identity politics as a wedge against. Conservative operatives have been attempting to weaken minority opposition to Right to Work Laws by accusing labor unions of being predominantly racist and exclusionary institutions since at least 1958. There’s virtually an entire cottage industry built around dismiss any push for fair trade, or even any attempt to curb the worst excesses of globalization, as merely selfish attempts to thwart the aspirations of the global poor.
But while this type of cooptation isn’t actually all that effective, it can still suck all the air out the room and undermine cohesion in the Democratic coalition cohesion by creating false controversies. It can still commit the party to a series of strategic blunders by nominating Cory Booker in 2020, or equating “appealing to working class Midwesterners” with “pandering to racists”. So it’s basically true that we should be wary of this sort of thing taking hold in Democratic politics.
The Future of the Democratic Party
Beyond this, there is a broader question of what the Democratic party should be. During the Democratic primary, a number of commentators pointed to an article by Grossman and Hopkins which posited that the Democratic Party is not be viewed as a cohesive party united by a shared ideology, but rather as a coalition of social groups that who trade their support in exchange for policies that serve the narrow goals of their constituents. While at the time the implication was often that Sanders and his campaign based on pressing core Progressive beliefs was doomed in the face of political reality, in hind sight it seems to vindicate it.
Without a common cause, the democrats didn’t have anything around which to mobilize support. Without a clear vision for the future beyond a patchwork of policies meant to serve specific interests, they couldn’t convince voters that they represented a viable path of achieving change. On the contrary, working through trasactional politics allowed the leadership to become insulated, keeping their voters at arms length, and playing insider games to lock up support. This made it easy for someone like Trump to paint them as little more than a continuation of politics as usual.
The problem isn’t the voters, it’s leadership who some decades ago abandoned all but the most vague liberal principals in the interest of winning for its own sake. They never made an effort to impress on voters that they all shared the same basic ideal, accessible to everyone. Indeed, at times they seems to actively suppress it. This sort of politics cannot continue.