Greenfield: Did Identity Politics Doom Dems?

The survival of the Democrats rests on immigration.

November 24, 2016

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.

The specter of identity politics is haunting the left. It shows up at teary-eyed election parties in Berkeley, debates over craft beers in Williamsburg and the editorial pages of the big opinion shaper papers.

No less an icon of the left than Bernie Sanders has been grumbling that his movement needs to reconnect with working people again. He even tentatively denounced identity politics. “It is not good enough for somebody to say, ‘I’m a woman, vote for me.’” Bernie bears a grudge. That’s obvious. But the old Socialist has a history of spouting the old Socialist working class denunciations of immigration.

Bernie is really arguing that the Democrats ought to emphasize class more and race less. Similar left-wing squeaks have popped up in a handful of editorials. But they aren’t likely to travel very far.

The Democrats are losing the Rust Belt, just like they lost the South, because they have become an urban political machine. Identity politics is just urban organizing with a lot of left-wing lipstick on top. Bernie’s state is 95% white. Even Burlington hovers somewhere in the high eighties. Bernie can only organize around class because a coalition of minorities wouldn’t get him to the nearest post office.

Identity politics beat Bernie in the Democratic primaries. But it might have cost Hillary the election. And now Trump is in a position to end the Democrats by cutting their immigration lifeline. The Dems have burned their bridges with the working class by gambling everything that they have on demographic change. If they change doesn’t materialize, then they are trapped at the dead end of a short alley.

That’s the big problem the Democrats face. Identity politics with its hysterical outbursts of rage and specialized vocabulary of victimhood (privilege, victim-blaming, microaggressions) is toxic nationally, but dominates the academic and big city political populations that are its base. The Obama coalitions of millennial college leftists and disaffected minorities are passion voters whose turnout is unreliable and when they don’t turn out, then the aspirations of the Dems become sand castles with a storm coming in.

Democrats went into this election convinced that the tide of demographic change was on their side. That tide depends heavily on immigration. If Trump secures the border, deports illegal aliens and revamps immigration to serve national interests, then the Democrats lose their demographic future.

And they realize it. They’ve gambled their political future on immigration. If immigration can’t deliver the demographic changes that the left touted, then they will become a minority party.

The left used to oppose immigration. The Socialist Party inveighed against, "the immigration of strikebreakers and contract laborers, and the mass importation of workers from foreign countries brought about by the employing classes for the purpose of weakening the organization of American labor, and lowering the standard of life of American workers.”

But the left shifted away from working class regions and toward urban areas. Its political organizing was no longer based on experiences rallying coal miners or fruit pickers, but bullying college students. Identity politics was ideal for big campuses where identity coalitions were even more powerful than in big cities. Voter turnout is laughably light. Those who do vote are more likely to carry political agendas.

Under Obama, campus politics went national. The Dems made the final shift from class to culture war. When Hillary first ran for the White House, she could juggle the traditional three races appeal. This time around she had to incoherently appeal to a bewildering range of angry identity groups.

The Obama coalition ran on passion politics. The minority half of the coalition needed someone representative. The campus half wanted hip inspiration. Hillary Clinton couldn’t deliver either one.

But the lessons of her defeat aren’t lost on Democrats aspiring to higher office. Paying lip service to diversity is no longer enough. The only way to ensure minority turnout in national elections might be to have a minority politician at the top of the ticket. The future would belong to the Obama clones.

Bernie certainly understands the implications of that even if some Democrats don’t. He could very well be the last white male with a serious shot of entering the White House as a Democrat. And he’s strongly hinting that he would like to run again in 2020. That’s why he has to question identity politics.

Class over race means Bernie could still become the Dem nominee. Race over class could lock him out.

That’s also why Obama has reassured Dems that identity politics will eventually pay off, even if there might be the occasional setback along the way. Nevertheless the country will still be transformed. Bernie however has questioned whether a permanent Democratic majority would even be possible.

Without the prospect of a permanent majority through mass migration on the horizon, the Democrats have to consider abandoning identity politics and returning to tried and true class warfare.

But a retreat from identity politics may not even be possible.

Intersectionality is worlds away from the old racial pandering. The culture of identity outrage dominates left-wing messaging. The opposition to Trump leans heavily on victim politics rather than class. We are incessantly lectured on all the Muslim and illegal alien kiddies who go to bed crying because of him. This performance of passive aggressive victimhood has only disgusted even more of the country.

Identity politics is tethered to outrage and therefore is inherently unstable and alienating. It’s based on a subjective experience that is deemed inaccessible to those with more “privilege” and yet it is an experience whose emotional outcomes are meant to govern our lives. It’s a selfishly anti-intellectual creed that cannot be reasoned with because it derives from the recesses of personal emotion.

It’s not an intellectual exercise, but a performance of personal suffering and outrage. And there’s no way around it without jettisoning the crust of political correctness that makes victimhood sacred. Those who suffer the most are morally superior. Their whims and wishes must dominate the Dem agenda.

An older left could have made a compelling case for the victimhood of the unemployed coal miner, but no such creature exists in campus politics where there are 63 gender identities, but no white working class. The left has defined victimhood as the alienation experienced by those who are different. There is no room for oppressed majorities, only minorities. An ideology that once defined itself by labor is far more interested in charting the erratic emotions of unstable college kids than in the real problems of working people. It can relate to the former, but not the latter.

Democrats have to choose between identity politics and the working class. Abandoning identity politics would be a painful process while abandoning the working class has proven to be painless and disastrous. But identity politics without mass migration and social transformation is unworkable. Immigration determines the future of the Democrats. This election is forcing Democrats to make a choice.

Obama’s identity politics preached that Republicans had to embrace identity politics or lose their ability to win national elections. But if the Democrats can’t sustain the rate of demographic change that they need, their lost grip on the working class white vote may lock them out of the White House.

Identity politics (also known as class warfare) is a cornerstone of dialectical Marxism.

Bingo. What we are seeing here is a replay of the division within Marxism itself: who constitutes a "class" and on what basis?

Marx furiously defended his assertion that only economics mattered; that a black and a white proletarian had more in common as proletariat than different as races. So, too, with nationalism, and he would have been profoundly disappointed to see German working men fighting Russian working men at the end of WWI despite the revolution in the latter.

It is a bit of an oversimplification, but one of the upshots of the Frankfurt School was that there can be other class descriptors, all related to some sort of social oppression or other. Hence the transposition of Marxist precepts into the various "liberation" movements.

The fundamental weakness - one might call it an "internal contradiction" to use old Karl's term - is that this allows membership in multiple classes, with conflicting class interests within each individual. (Which, incidentally, leads to the conclusion that the only proper repository of political rights is within the individual citizen, which is entirely contrary to Marxism).

What Greenfield has articulated brilliantly here is that such alliances are by nature only temporary; that at some point - his example is the white coal miners - the model simply cannot withstand reality. And I think it isn't so much a choice between manipulating the American public around class and manipulating the American public around race; I think that neither one will do, at least in the long term. That's heresy to certain campus social theoreticians but they're going to have to move with the times.

But it makes sense when you consider the failure of Hillary's attempt to leverage Women's Liberation into political office. It's about thirty years too late, and only by focusing narrowly on the specific office of President is it even a coherent case in American politics. If there's a glass ceiling, it's a very long way up there. You can only raise passion over that in a comfortable population whose every other need is satisfied and whose members don't feel the pressure of being a black woman or a Hispanic woman or, heaven help us, a white woman whose husband happens to be a coal miner.

And underlying it all is that grand identity within American politics: that of being Americans who love their country. That used to be the one sine qua non of every election, yet we reached a point in this last election where a Democrat rally embarrassingly discovered that its promoters had failed to provide American flags and that nobody had noticed. A coalition built without a wrapper falls apart, and so it did.

I'm not quite as satisfied, however, that this sort of thing cannot turn on a dime, it being so highly dependent on the candidate. Witness, for example, the sudden transition of the Democrats from Henry Wallace to Harry Truman.

Greenfield's other insight is that the real coalition within the current Democrat party is nearly all urban, including urban racial power centers and academia - I would place most of the media in that category as well. Maps of the Democrat vote in the last election and city populations were nearly indistinguishable. Something like this appears to be the case in western Europe as well. One might be tempted to cede globalism to the boulevards if only they'd leave the rest of us alone but that isn't going to happen.

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