In Defense of Identity Politics | Signs

Many women (and men) spent the post-election weeks in an altered state, where the world seemed torn asunder and all that was solid melted into air. But as the various postmortems poured in, one dominant frame emerged: Democratic electoral failure was the result of a myopic focus on “identity politics” by a liberal elite woefully beholden to the politically correct trifecta of race, gender, and sexuality, ignoring the supposed centrality of class and the failing fortunes of the poor white working man. This is wrong-headed and dangerous.

Identity politics is … what we used to call civil rights.

—Samantha Bee, Full Frontal

Finding traction among a curious mix of Democratic party leaders, left-wing pundits, and right-wing ideologues, the story goes something like this:  Hillary Clinton lost because the party didn’t pay significant attention to the pain and dislocation of the white working class and focused too much on identity politics, ceding the economic revitalization argument to the populist rhetoric of Donald Trump.  In the conservative or neoliberal version of this view, offered by folks such as Mark Lilla, Democrats had a “fixation on diversity” and instead of focusing on the anger of rural white men, spent the campaign “calling out explicitly to African-American, Latino, L.G.B.T. and women voters at every stop.”   The left-wing version isn’t much different, treating racism and misogyny as symptoms of a “larger” problem, not as problems in and of themselves. Echoing the 1990s mantra “It’s the economy, stupid,” they argue that racism and sexism were unfortunate side effectsof the real illness of economic vulnerability and insecurity. Writing in The Nation, D.D. Guttenplan acknowledges that Clinton’s campaign might have been “genuinely inspiring to millions of women” but dismisses arguments about gender or racial hatred as just so much elitist “petulance” that ignores the (economic) populist surge at the heart of Trump’s victory. Harold Meyerson claims, in The American Prospect, that Trump voters legitimately “felt left behind and displaced” by the “establishment economic policy.”  Over at Politico, Rob Hoffman excoriates the “smugness” of the Left, claiming that the “PC” liberal elite waged “a war against right-wing ethics,” pushing Trump to certain victory.  And socialist standard-bearer and presidential wannabe Bernie Sanders repudiates Trump’s racism and sexism yet somehow imagines this can be forgiven or perhaps forgotten, for as long as “Trump has the guts to stand up to those corporations he will,” claims Bernie, “have an ally with me.”  In a Boston speech following the election, Sanders argued that we need to “go beyond identity politics” and then doubled down and schooled a Latina activist by insisting that “it is not good enough for somebody to say, ‘hey, I’m a Latina, vote for me.’” Which, it turns out, no one has ever done.