Several days ago there was a little stir about the speech Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), a potential presidential aspirant, gave at Netroots Nation. Specifically, Harris said:
“I have a problem, guys, with that phrase, ‘identity politics,’” Harris told the progressive gathering Netroots Nation, wading into a messaging debate roiling Democrats ahead of the midterm elections. “Because let’s be clear, when people say that, it’s a pejorative. That phrase is used to divide, and it is used to distract. Its purpose is to minimize and marginalize issues that impact all of us. It is used to try and shut us up.”
Democrats, liberals, and generally folks on the left are often accused of getting too caught up in “identity politics”, which basically means issues relating to race and gender. The argument is that by focusing too much on identity politics, liberals end up alienating many potential voters, and particularly White voters.
I’ll admit, sometimes liberals do get a little carried away with identity politics. The obsession with academic buzzwords and concepts like “microaggressions” and “cultural appropriation”, the proliferation of social media outrage mobs, shouting down conservative speakers on college campuses, saying it’s okay for people of oppressed groups to say whatever offensive things about White people they want — I think these are counterproductive and illiberal.
But at worst, these things have marginal impact on the physical, economic, and social well-being of most Americans and American society. On the other hand, I would argue that by far the more destructive and pervasive form of identity politics is the kind practiced on the right.
What do I mean by the identity politics of the right? Well, for one, there is the fact that some 86% of Republicans are White at a time when just 61% of all Americans are non-Hispanic White. 97% of all elected Republicans are White. 73% of Republicans are White and Christian at a time when just 43% of all Americans are White and Christian. The audience for Fox News is 92% White.
By comparison 57% of Democrats are White, which is very similar to the 61% of all Americans who are White. 79% of elected Democrats are White, which is still significantly higher than the percentage of all Americans who are White, but Democrats are considerably more representative than the 97% of elected Republicans who are White.
Also, among Democrats in Congress you will find an extraordinarily diverse group of Americans, from a crew-cutted Montana rancher in Jon Tester, to a Black Muslim from Minneapolis like Keith Ellison, to a Hindu-American woman from Seattle like Pramila Jayapal.
But look at the Republicans congressional delegation and you will find that virtually all of them are White and Christian. Needless to say, a Muslim could not be elected in today’s Republican Party.
And while the identity politics on the left may at worst result in a food truck going out of business for committing the crime of cultural appropriation, by comparison the identity politics on the right has actually worsened the economic well-being of virtually all poor, working class, and middle class Americans over the last 50 years or so.
By this I refer to the way in which White working class and rural White Americans went from being among the strongest supporters of economically redistributive, activist government measures — the policies associated with liberals and Democrats — to becoming the strongest supporters of anti-tax, anti-government conservatism.
At one time, working class and rural Whites were the driving force behind the Populist and Progressive movements, the labor movement, and the New Deal. Their support for those causes gave us policies like the minimum wage, maximum work hours, food and drug safety legislation, regulation of corporations, banks, and securities markets, the progressive income tax, inheritance taxes, collective bargaining guarantees, old age pensions, massive infrastructure and jobs programs, and assistance for needy families.
Those policies helped to make possible the Great Compression, in which the Postwar economic boom generated the most equal wealth distribution among all income groups (though obviously not racial groups) in American history.
But beginning in the mid-1960s, working class and rural Whites suddenly began to abandon their economic and political faith. According to Kevin Phillips, an adviser to Richard Nixon who helped devise the Southern Strategy, this was the cause of why the New Deal Coalition broke up:
The principal force which broke up the Democratic (New Deal) coalition is the Negro socioeconomic revolution and liberal Democratic ideological inability to cope with it. Democratic "Great Society" programs aligned that party with many Negro demands, but the party was unable to defuse the racial tension sundering the nation. The South, the West, and the Catholic sidewalks of New York were the focus points of conservative opposition to the welfare liberalism of the federal government; however, the general opposition... came in large part from prospering Democrats who objected to Washington dissipating their tax dollars on programs which did them no good. The Democratic party fell victim to the ideological impetus of a liberalism which had carried it beyond programs taxing the few for the benefit of the many ...to programs taxing the many on behalf of the few.
In other words, when in the mid-1960s the Democratic Party actually tried doing something to help poor Nonwhites, many working class and rural Whites began to bail on the Democratic Party and the economic policies of the New Deal.
Democratic strategist Ruy Teixeira explained exactly how this happened in a 2008 piece on the White working class:
Indeed, just how far the Democrat party fell in the white working class' eyes over this time period can be seen by comparing the average white working class (whites without a four year college degree) vote for the Democrats in 1960-64 (55 percent) to their average vote for the Democrats in 1968-72 (35 percent). That's a drop of 20 points. The Democrats were the party of the white working class no longer.
It was at right about this time, in the early 1970s, that the Great Compression came to a sudden halt. Beginning in the 1970s and 1980s several external factors conspired to end the Great Compression - increased international competition, deindustrialization, oil embargoes, inflation. At a moment when average working Americans were becoming less secure and wealth becoming less evenly distributed, we really could have used some bold action from the federal government to help Americans cope with the economic upheaval that was taking place — progressive governance in other words.
But instead, at this very crucial moment in our economic history American voters opted for conservative governance in the form of tax-cuts, cuts in social services, deregulation, unfettered free trade, and anti-labor policies.
How so? Beginning in 1968, Republicans would win 5 of the next 6 presidential elections, four by landslide, although 1968 should also be considered a conservative landslide considering that between Nixon and George Wallace, conservatives garnered 56.8% of the popular vote and 347 electoral votes. The reason was simple — a massive exodus of working class and rural Whites from New Deal liberalism, to the ideology of anti-tax, anti-government conservatism, which usually meant the Republican Party, but it also meant an increasingly conservative Democratic Party.
The result in terms of policy was tax cuts, deregulation, unfettered free trade, and other policies that served to further enrich the wealthy and big business, and worsen economic inequality at a time when we badly needed the opposite kind of policies.
To be clear, as I’ve suggested Democrats were not blameless in this. Since the 1960s Democrats have moved rightward on economic matters. A Democratic House helped to pass Reagan’s tax cuts in 1981 and 1986. A Democratic President in Bill Clinton passed welfare reform, NAFTA, and repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. Obama did pass some much-needed and appreciated progressive legislation, but he went easy on the financial institutions that caused the 2008 crash, he failed to ask for and pass a bigger Stimulus for fear of offending conservatives, and he turned to austerity far too soon, again out of deference to conservatives.
But the Democrats’ turn to the right since 1970 did not occur in a vacuum. Again, the Democrats lost 5 of 6 presidential elections by landslides between 1968-1988, defeats that were fueled by the defection of working class and rural Whites to the Republican Party. This caused a great deal of introspection on the part of Democrats as to why they’d lost those Whites, and many somewhat understandably came to the conclusion that, as the saying goes, “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.” Just as Republicans did after five consecutive defeats to FDR and then Truman, in which they responded to those defeats by mostly accepting and adopting the policies and political framing of the New Deal, Democrats similarly responded to their defeats between 1968-1988 by accepting and adopting the policies and framing of the right.
Though the impact of this sharp rightward turn on policy fell disproportionately on Nonwhites, they also hurt poor, working, and middle-class people across the board regardless of race. And among those who suffered most were working class and rural Whites. These Whites, by turning against liberal Democratic policies that had helped to vastly improve their standard of living, all because Democrats tried to fully extend the benefits of those policies to Nonwhites, ended up bringing economic ruin upon themselves.
Between a) an identity politics that results mostly in annoying some people, angry arguments, and occasionally will cause someone to lose their job or have their business go under, and b) an identity politics that causes a particular group of people to inflict economic pain on themselves and most Americans, it’s clear which form of identity politics has a more adverse impact on society.
To be clear, I don’t count myself among those who regularly denounce Trump supporters as “Nazis” or say that all Trump supporters are racists. While there are indeed quite a few unreconstructed, unabashed racists among those who support Trump, for many others it’s not quite that simple.
My in-laws are Trump supporters, yet they absolutely adore their mixed-race granddaughter. I have a good friend who is a Trump supporter yet she was married to a Latino man and had a son by him. Every other year I go to my wife’s family reunion in rural Northern California, they are almost all conservative Trump supporters, yet they could not be more warm and generous to me and my half-Chinese, half-White daughter, and several are married to persons of other races and have mixed-race children.
But it’s also clear that while they may not be bigots in the Jim Crow sense where they don’t want to share the same water fountain as Nonwhites, they also very strongly, even desperately prefer an America that is predominantly White, where there are Nonwhites but not too many, and where America’s dominant culture is the White Judeo-Christian version of America they grew up in.
How do we know this? Polling and studies show that Republicans and Trump supporters are particularly worried about America’s rapidly changing demographics and what they perceive are threats to American culture. Also, just listen to Republicans and Trump supporters, and they’ll tell you.
Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson recently wrote in the Weekly Standard
“In focus groups … I often hear older voters on the right describe Millennials as a hostile force trying to take their country away from them.”
Or as Republican Congressman Daniel Webster put it in this piece about The Villages, a heavily pro-Trump retirement community in Florida that not coincidentally is 98% White,
“They want an America that’s a little more like it was when they were growing up, and that’s what Trump is offering.”
And here is popular right-wing Fox host Laura Ingraham just last night:
So powerful a narcotic is this form of identity politics that for the last half century or so, working class and rural Whites have voted time and time again, against all evidence and reason, for their own economic destruction.
It’s why in the 2008 election, in the midst of the worst financial and economic crash since the Great Depression that happened on the watch of a Republican President, White Americans still voted by a landslide margin — 55-43 — for the Republican John McCain. But even crazier is the fact that working class Whites went for McCain by an even larger margin, 59-40. While Obama’s performance among those groups was actually an improvement on Kerry’s, the shift was just a few points.1
It’s why working class Whites, once the base of supporters behind Huey Long’s Share Our Wealth movement, which sought to redistribute wealth by imposing confiscatory taxes on the wealthy, are today the strongest supporters of repealing the estate tax and the Trump tax cut, even though they know the benefits of the Trump tax cut go mostly to the wealthy (see below).
It’s why, as Trump and Republicans seek to shore up their base in advance of a midterm election where the Republican majority is in serious jeopardy, they are trying to activate supporters by pushing cultural fears instead of promoting the benefits of the tax cut that for working people has been mostly nonexistent. As a GOP ad maker, Will Ritter, pointed out about the tax cuts, “We wish it got the pitch forks out and it doesn’t” — but Republicans believe highlighting illegal immigration and calls by some liberals to abolish ICE apparently does get the pitch forks out.
It’s why Republicans and Trump supporters will either tolerate, ignore, or wholeheartedly support the unprecedented scale and brazenness of Trump’s mendacity, his cruelty, his unhinged behavior, his destruction of our democratic norms. It’s why evangelical Christians don’t care about Trump’s affairs, and why “America First” Trump supporters don’t care if Trump colluded with Russia to hack an American election. Those things are okay in their minds so long as Trump is what they see as the only thing preventing the destruction of their America by the people who make up the Democratic base — liberals and Nonwhites.
So whenever you see or hear anyone castigating liberals for being too obsessed with identity politics, or that liberal identity politics is somehow destroying America, just remember to bring up the fact that by far the most prevalent and destructive form of identity politics, the kind that causes damage far beyond mere butt-hurt, is the kind we see on the right.
1 To put this in some perspective in 1932, the last time we had an election during an economic crisis that happened on a Republican president’s watch, the electorate went for Democrat Franklin Roosevelt 57-41 in the popular vote, a sweeping reversal from 1928 when the electorate went for Republican Herbert Hoover 58-40. This was an electorate that was well over 90% White, and in many states, especially in the South, it was closer to 100% White. This electorate, that for all intents and purposes was the White vote, shifted 35 points between 1928 and 1932 in response to the Depression and the fact it took place on a Republican’s watch. Yet despite pretty similar circumstances, between 2004 and 2008 the White vote shifted just five points.