What Bernie Sanders Gets Right About Identity Politics
By Eric Levitz
Last week, Bernie Sanders argued that the Democratic Party must work to diversify America’s political class, while fighting to advance the rights of African-Americans, women, LGBT individuals, immigrants, and other marginalized groups.
He then stipulated that those fights cannot be won without advancing the material interests of the working class, because “our rights and economic lives are intertwined.”
Follow
Bernie Sanders
✔@SenSanders
Yes, we need more candidates of diversity, but we also need candidates to be fighters for the working class. https://medium.com/senator-bernie-sanders/how-democrats-go-forward-31c11955e61a#.z0jzdg1i1 …
9:37 PM - 22 Nov 2016
How Democrats Go Forward – Senator Bernie Sanders
We need to seriously rethink who we are as Democrats and how we best go forward.
medium.com
Many liberal commentators declared this argument to be, at best, a testament to Sanders’s “white male brogressive” cluelessness — and, at worst, a sign of the senator’s latent white supremacy.
Sanders bears some responsibility for attracting this invective. His tweet poorly summarized the argument of his op-ed: The senator has, on occasion, used the phrase “working class” to refer to a segment of Trump’s base. Thus, his pull quote could be misinterpreted as a suggestion that the desire to nominate “diverse” candidates must be balanced with the need to appeal to white voters in the Rust Belt. Further, one didn’t need to misinterpret Sanders’s argument to take exception to it. Many decried his implication that there are Democrats who need to be told that diversity isn’t everything. Which is a reasonable complaint: Sanders has frequently attacked such straw men, at times, implying that Hillary Clinton’s entire campaign message was “I’m a woman, vote for me.”
Nonetheless, Sanders’s actual contention was the opposite of what many of his critics claimed: He did not argue that there is an inherent tension between identity politics and economic populism, but rather, that the latter is necessary for realizing the former’s aims — which is to say, that the goals of racial justice and gender equality cannot be achieved absent the redistribution of economic power away from corporate America and toward the working class.
This point is both accurate and necessary. While no one in the Democratic Party believes that a candidate’s skin color or genitalia determines his or her progressive bona fides, many have spent the past year arguing that Sanders’s appeals to class solidarity — and the social democratic programs that he hopes that solidarity can yield — are of little use to anyone who isn’t white or male.
This context is critical for understanding the post-election, intra-left debate over identity politics.
In recent days, liberal Democrats have rightly rejected calls for the party to abandon its advocacy for the identity-based concerns of marginalized groups. Among the most prominent of such calls was a New York Times op-ed by Columbia University’s Mark Lilla, which implored Democrats to cease their “moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity,” and embrace a politics of “commonality,” like those practiced by Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.
As Slate’s Jamelle Bouie notes, Lilla’s veneration of these figures illustrates how easily a politics of white identity can be mistaken for one of universalism — and how costly that mistake can be:
Reagan gutted federal civil rights enforcement, nominated judges hostile to the “rights revolution,” and elevated a conservative legal movement that, in the years since, has chipped away at the victories of the 1960s. Bill Clinton was an expert practitioner of identity politics, with a “shared vision” aimed at white Americans. As a candidate, he took steps to repudiate the black left. As president, he reinforced the trend toward mass incarceration and enshrined discrimination against LGBT Americans within federal law. To describe either Reagan or Clinton as exemplars of a “post-identity” politics is to submerge whiteness, maleness, and Christian belief as identities.
As an alternative to Lilla’s prescription, Bouie argues that progressives must revive Jesse Jackson’s vision of a “rainbow coalition” — a movement that unites the disparate factions of the disempowered without ignoring the distinctions between their struggles, and thus “addresses all material disadvantage, whether rooted in class or caste.”
To the extent that the phrase identity politics signifies a commitment to alleviate the burdens of being an Other in a nation founded on the principle that “all [straight, white, propertied] men are created equal,” identity politics is indispensable for realizing Jackson’s ideal.
But this is not the identity politics that Sanders recently called on the Democratic Party to “move beyond.” Rather, he and his sympathizers are concerned with a strain of corporate-friendly liberalism that deploys identity-based critiques of class politics as tools for obscuring the divergent material interests of rich and poor Democrats.
For the left to overcome its infighting and realize the promise of the rainbow coalition, it will need to be on guard against this particular brand of liberalism; because an identity politics that disdains class solidarity is one that will fail the most vulnerable members of the marginalized groups it claims to represent.
To understand why such class-blind identity politics is ascendant — and thus, likely to bedevil the left in the coming battles for the soul of the Democratic Party — one needs to consider the growing socioeconomic divide within blue America.
A tale of two parties.
Going into 2016, the Democrats were a tale of two parties, a coalition that linked cosmopolitan capitalists and upwardly mobile professionals to a largely nonwhite working-class base: In 2012, Obama won roughly as many votes from the bottom 40 percent of America’s income ladder as he did from the top 40 percent. That same year, the top 0.01 percent of earners contributed 25 percent of all donations to the party of organized labor — up from 7 percent in 1980.
As that last figure suggests, the class contradictions in the Democratic tent weren’t always this severe. Throughout the 1980s, Americans making over $100,000 voted for GOP presidential candidates by a two-to-one margin. In his race against Mitt Romney, Obama won 45 percent of all ballots cast by Americans with six-figure salaries. And this fall, Hillary Clinton won 46 percent of Americans who make more than $250,000 a year, according to exit polls, while Donald Trump took 41 percent of voters who make under $30,000 — a 16-point improvement on Romney’s share of that bracket (all of these figures derive from exit polls). Democrats still do better with the working class than with the rich; but this is becoming less and less true.
Photo: Paul Chinn-Pool/Getty Images
Critically, the growth of the Democrats’ upscale wing has coincided with a vast increase in economic inequality: Over the past four decades, the gap between the average earnings of families in the top quintile of the income ladder — and that of those in the middle quintile — has grown from $68,600 to $169,300 (both those figures are inflation adjusted).
In other words: The class divide within the Democratic Party is growing at the same time that the divide between classes in the United States is doing the same.
The challenge this presents to Democrats is not unlike that confronted by Richard Nixon, when he sought to fortify and expand the GOP’s gains among the white working class. Then, to mollify class tensions within the “silent majority,” Nixon deployed appeals to white identity politics (a.k.a white racial resentment, a.k.a. racism), to obfuscate the divergent material interests of rich and poor Republicans.
In a Democratic Party increasingly divided between a predominately white professional class, and a largely nonwhite working class, left-wing identity politics — or, more precisely, “intersectional” critiques of economic reductionism — can serve a similar end.
And, in fact, Hillary Clinton — and liberal commentators sympathetic to her campaign — used identity politics to that very end, throughout the 2016 Democratic primary.
What Clinton talked about, when she talked about a “single-issue candidate.”
To the extent that the Clinton-Sanders race was a debate about domestic policy (as opposed to personal competence), it was a debate about whether the government should drastically increase taxes in order to fund a massive increase in social spending.
Sanders argued in the affirmative, contending that the government has a moral responsibility to guarantee health care to every citizen and access to higher education for every adolescent with the intellectual aptitude to pursue it. The senator further argued that the sorry state of the nation’s infrastructure — and the scarcity of well-paying blue-collar jobs — justifies a $1 trillion investment in rebuilding America’s roads and bridges.
Clinton offered alternative proposals in each of these policy areas, but the size and scope of her plans were constrained by her opposition to raising taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 a year.
By Eric Levitz
Last week, Bernie Sanders argued that the Democratic Party must work to diversify America’s political class, while fighting to advance the rights of African-Americans, women, LGBT individuals, immigrants, and other marginalized groups.
He then stipulated that those fights cannot be won without advancing the material interests of the working class, because “our rights and economic lives are intertwined.”
Follow
Bernie Sanders
✔@SenSanders
Yes, we need more candidates of diversity, but we also need candidates to be fighters for the working class. https://medium.com/senator-bernie-sanders/how-democrats-go-forward-31c11955e61a#.z0jzdg1i1 …
9:37 PM - 22 Nov 2016
How Democrats Go Forward – Senator Bernie Sanders
We need to seriously rethink who we are as Democrats and how we best go forward.
medium.com
Many liberal commentators declared this argument to be, at best, a testament to Sanders’s “white male brogressive” cluelessness — and, at worst, a sign of the senator’s latent white supremacy.
Sanders bears some responsibility for attracting this invective. His tweet poorly summarized the argument of his op-ed: The senator has, on occasion, used the phrase “working class” to refer to a segment of Trump’s base. Thus, his pull quote could be misinterpreted as a suggestion that the desire to nominate “diverse” candidates must be balanced with the need to appeal to white voters in the Rust Belt. Further, one didn’t need to misinterpret Sanders’s argument to take exception to it. Many decried his implication that there are Democrats who need to be told that diversity isn’t everything. Which is a reasonable complaint: Sanders has frequently attacked such straw men, at times, implying that Hillary Clinton’s entire campaign message was “I’m a woman, vote for me.”
Nonetheless, Sanders’s actual contention was the opposite of what many of his critics claimed: He did not argue that there is an inherent tension between identity politics and economic populism, but rather, that the latter is necessary for realizing the former’s aims — which is to say, that the goals of racial justice and gender equality cannot be achieved absent the redistribution of economic power away from corporate America and toward the working class.
This point is both accurate and necessary. While no one in the Democratic Party believes that a candidate’s skin color or genitalia determines his or her progressive bona fides, many have spent the past year arguing that Sanders’s appeals to class solidarity — and the social democratic programs that he hopes that solidarity can yield — are of little use to anyone who isn’t white or male.
This context is critical for understanding the post-election, intra-left debate over identity politics.
In recent days, liberal Democrats have rightly rejected calls for the party to abandon its advocacy for the identity-based concerns of marginalized groups. Among the most prominent of such calls was a New York Times op-ed by Columbia University’s Mark Lilla, which implored Democrats to cease their “moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity,” and embrace a politics of “commonality,” like those practiced by Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.
As Slate’s Jamelle Bouie notes, Lilla’s veneration of these figures illustrates how easily a politics of white identity can be mistaken for one of universalism — and how costly that mistake can be:
Reagan gutted federal civil rights enforcement, nominated judges hostile to the “rights revolution,” and elevated a conservative legal movement that, in the years since, has chipped away at the victories of the 1960s. Bill Clinton was an expert practitioner of identity politics, with a “shared vision” aimed at white Americans. As a candidate, he took steps to repudiate the black left. As president, he reinforced the trend toward mass incarceration and enshrined discrimination against LGBT Americans within federal law. To describe either Reagan or Clinton as exemplars of a “post-identity” politics is to submerge whiteness, maleness, and Christian belief as identities.
As an alternative to Lilla’s prescription, Bouie argues that progressives must revive Jesse Jackson’s vision of a “rainbow coalition” — a movement that unites the disparate factions of the disempowered without ignoring the distinctions between their struggles, and thus “addresses all material disadvantage, whether rooted in class or caste.”
To the extent that the phrase identity politics signifies a commitment to alleviate the burdens of being an Other in a nation founded on the principle that “all [straight, white, propertied] men are created equal,” identity politics is indispensable for realizing Jackson’s ideal.
But this is not the identity politics that Sanders recently called on the Democratic Party to “move beyond.” Rather, he and his sympathizers are concerned with a strain of corporate-friendly liberalism that deploys identity-based critiques of class politics as tools for obscuring the divergent material interests of rich and poor Democrats.
For the left to overcome its infighting and realize the promise of the rainbow coalition, it will need to be on guard against this particular brand of liberalism; because an identity politics that disdains class solidarity is one that will fail the most vulnerable members of the marginalized groups it claims to represent.
To understand why such class-blind identity politics is ascendant — and thus, likely to bedevil the left in the coming battles for the soul of the Democratic Party — one needs to consider the growing socioeconomic divide within blue America.
A tale of two parties.
Going into 2016, the Democrats were a tale of two parties, a coalition that linked cosmopolitan capitalists and upwardly mobile professionals to a largely nonwhite working-class base: In 2012, Obama won roughly as many votes from the bottom 40 percent of America’s income ladder as he did from the top 40 percent. That same year, the top 0.01 percent of earners contributed 25 percent of all donations to the party of organized labor — up from 7 percent in 1980.
As that last figure suggests, the class contradictions in the Democratic tent weren’t always this severe. Throughout the 1980s, Americans making over $100,000 voted for GOP presidential candidates by a two-to-one margin. In his race against Mitt Romney, Obama won 45 percent of all ballots cast by Americans with six-figure salaries. And this fall, Hillary Clinton won 46 percent of Americans who make more than $250,000 a year, according to exit polls, while Donald Trump took 41 percent of voters who make under $30,000 — a 16-point improvement on Romney’s share of that bracket (all of these figures derive from exit polls). Democrats still do better with the working class than with the rich; but this is becoming less and less true.
Photo: Paul Chinn-Pool/Getty Images
Critically, the growth of the Democrats’ upscale wing has coincided with a vast increase in economic inequality: Over the past four decades, the gap between the average earnings of families in the top quintile of the income ladder — and that of those in the middle quintile — has grown from $68,600 to $169,300 (both those figures are inflation adjusted).
In other words: The class divide within the Democratic Party is growing at the same time that the divide between classes in the United States is doing the same.
The challenge this presents to Democrats is not unlike that confronted by Richard Nixon, when he sought to fortify and expand the GOP’s gains among the white working class. Then, to mollify class tensions within the “silent majority,” Nixon deployed appeals to white identity politics (a.k.a white racial resentment, a.k.a. racism), to obfuscate the divergent material interests of rich and poor Republicans.
In a Democratic Party increasingly divided between a predominately white professional class, and a largely nonwhite working class, left-wing identity politics — or, more precisely, “intersectional” critiques of economic reductionism — can serve a similar end.
And, in fact, Hillary Clinton — and liberal commentators sympathetic to her campaign — used identity politics to that very end, throughout the 2016 Democratic primary.
What Clinton talked about, when she talked about a “single-issue candidate.”
To the extent that the Clinton-Sanders race was a debate about domestic policy (as opposed to personal competence), it was a debate about whether the government should drastically increase taxes in order to fund a massive increase in social spending.
Sanders argued in the affirmative, contending that the government has a moral responsibility to guarantee health care to every citizen and access to higher education for every adolescent with the intellectual aptitude to pursue it. The senator further argued that the sorry state of the nation’s infrastructure — and the scarcity of well-paying blue-collar jobs — justifies a $1 trillion investment in rebuilding America’s roads and bridges.
Clinton offered alternative proposals in each of these policy areas, but the size and scope of her plans were constrained by her opposition to raising taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 a year.