I’ve lurked enough to know this is not an opinion that is in the majority here. I respect both sides of this argument (which is hardly revolutionary here), but I’ve not seen phrased this way before.
My thesis is identity politics is going to continue to hurt us. It's growing as irrelevant to young people today as the New Deal was growing to young people by the 60s, yet its practitioners still dominate the mainstream party and our public voices and, perhaps worse for us, its champions still dominate university faculties. The consequence is even though there is no longer a market for the product in the wider world, the model keeps on dropping off the assembly line with every graduating class. If you listen to the students shouting down speakers at Middlebury they are still speaking the language that their professors originated in the 60s. They speak it because that is what they are rewarded for on papers or public statements, or in articles submitted to high tone lefty magazines.
We have a bizarre situation in which our young activists are behind their own times. The identity themes that drive X Studies departments and Daily Kos and the New York Times Op Ed page and progressive radio and marches are somewhere between 20 to 30 years out of date. Two generations of the broad (voting!) public have moved past them and are now focused on economic themes. That is where we will find them — and where the real ability to reach and recruit them is, but the machine that churns out our leadership is literally not competent to lead those young people. Our self-selected "vanguard" has lost touch with our potential rank and file. They still want to lay the stress on symptoms: sexism, racism, homophobia. But young people who haven't been to Harvard (or someplace desperately trying to mimic Harvard) already take all of that as read, and have moved on to root causes: inequality, militarization of LEO, the extractive economy, the surveillance state.
It would be OK if it were just a matter of waiting for the old pols to die. That's what essentially happened in the 70s, when the current TPTB took power. But the way we are set up now, our future generation of "leaders" will still be speaking the old language, and utterly miss where The People have gone.And so we get the grotesque result that Donald Freaking Trump talks more effectively about plutocratic elites than the Democratic nominee. And more broadly we hemorrhage Congressional seats and state houses and governor’s mansions, all because our leaders are speaking in static, olde tyme themes that our public at large has long since assimilated and then built on. Our activists need to catch up. They cannot lead while marching in a long since past parade.