Vivek Chibber
Yes, and she didn’t take the bait. So that observation is true, that she didn’t run on it.
Nevertheless, it is also true that identity politics played a big role — although not a deciding role — in her defeat. The deciding role was economic issues. Largely, it didn’t really matter that she didn’t run on identitarian terms. She was going to lose anyway because of economic issues.
But make no mistake: even though the association with identity didn’t cause her defeat, it was a big factor. And to ignore that would be a big mistake.
So how did she and her party become so closely identified with identity politics, and what role did it play? First of all, even though she steered clear of it, the party has been propagating it in a very aggressive way over the past six or eight years. So dropping it at the eleventh hour didn’t fool anyone. And that’s why Trump’s ads were so effective in attacking her as somebody pushing identity politics down people’s throats — the Democrats had been doing it for eight years already.
As with so many things in our political moment, it goes back to the initial Bernie Sanders campaign. The Democratic Party’s answer to Bernie Sanders’s propagation of economic justice and economic issues was to smear him as somebody who ignored the plight of what they love to call — their new term — “marginalized groups,” which is people of color, women, trans people, all matters dealing with sexuality. This was their counter to the Sanders campaign, and they’ve used it assiduously now for eight years.
So, if in the last two months they decided to pull away from it, who do they think they’re fooling? Literally nobody. And that’s why the turn away from identity politics failed, because it just seemed so ham-handed and insincere. Nobody bought it.
As for the deeper question about the roots of identity politics in the Democratic Party, I think it’s a historical legacy in two ways. The first is an obvious one. Coming out of the 1960s, when the so-called new social movements emerged, the Democrats were the party that upheld and supported those demands. Even when they were demands for the masses, not just for elites, this party supported them — unlike the Republicans, who were the party that resisted the feminist movement and the Civil Rights Movement. So that’s one historical legacy.
The second legacy is slightly more subtle, which is that, coming out of the New Deal era, the most important electoral base of the Democrats was the working class, and this class was overwhelmingly located in urban centers, large cities, because that’s where the factories were. After the ’80s, the geographical location of that electoral base didn’t change, it was still cities, but the cities changed. Whereas cities used to be the place where blue-collar workers and unions were based, by the early 2000s, cities became reorganized around new sectors — finance, real estate, insurance, services, more high-end income groups.
That’s why Trump’s ads were so effective in attacking Harris as somebody pushing identity politics down people’s throats — the Democrats had been doing it for eight years.
The Democrats were still relying on the cities for their votes, but because the cities’ demography had shifted, it had a profound effect on the electoral dynamics. Affluent groups became the base of the party, and race and gender became reconceptualized around the experiences and the demands of those affluent groups.
So the Democrats were depending on a much more affluent voting base than they had in the past. At the same time, organized pressure from working-class minorities and women was declining because of the defeat of the union movement, and the main organizations taking their place in the Democratic Party were the nonprofits and business.
Take the issue of race. In the high tide of liberalism, the black working class had a voice inside the Democratic Party through the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the trade unions, and they brought anti-racism into the party through the prism of the needs of black workers. When the unions are dismantled and trade unionism in general goes into decline, who is voicing the concerns of blacks? It’s going to be the more affluent blacks and black political officials that have come up through the post–civil rights era.
And those politicos, by the 2000s, are spread all across the country. There’s a huge rise in the number of black elected officials, mayors, congressmen, etc. And they now no longer have any reason to cater to working-class blacks because workers are politically disorganized. The political officials end up captured by the same corporate forces as the white politicians — but they get to have the corner on race talk.
Socialists used to look with contempt at the attempts of elites to take over these movements. My dream is for the Left to regain the moral confidence and the social weight to do that again.
By the 2000s, race talk and gender talk has been transformed from catering to the needs of working women and working-class blacks and Latinos to the more affluent groups who are the electoral base of the Democratic Party in the cities. And even more so by the politicos who now have increased in number tremendously, aided by the NGOs that do a lot of the spadework and consultancy for the party. What’s missing is 70 to 80 percent of those “marginalized” groups who happen to be working people.
So the Democrats are the party of race, the party of gender — but race and gender as conceptualized by their elite strata. That’s the historical trajectory. And that’s why, within the party, they leaned on this distorted legacy, because it was a form of race politics that fit with elite black interests.