Thanksgiving Mailbag
Moo > Quack > B'CAWK! > Gobble Gobble.
Hello readers. I hope you’ll all have a restful holiday, but not so restful that you skip this newsletter. Fifteen questions and answers for the 15 days of Thanksgiving.
Ben W: Is the identity politics issue really something Democrats do? Or is it something Republicans, pundits and supposed centrists who claims they’re “classical liberals” need to believe Dems do because it grants them some power over the party’s online brand? I often feel like it’s the latter.
It’s important to be precise about terms here, because as you suggest, the debate over this is a bit rigged. Democrats could completely deracinate, degender, de-everything their rhetoric and agenda, and critics to their right would nevertheless insist their efforts to (e.g.) expand insurance and nutrition assistance to the poor are forms of “identify politics.” When Democrats undertook a highly redistributive but race-neutral health-care reform, Rush Limbaugh called it “reparations.”
We’re right to reject those critiques as offered in bad faith. It is similarly wrong to equate efforts to achieve civil equality with much maligned identity politics. Nobody else’s rights are infringed when two men get married, denying them that right is straightforwardly oppressive, codifying marriage equality is libertarian in the best sense of the word.
But draw the lens back just a little further and it’s hard to dispute that Democrats partake in a kind of identity politics that their good-faith critics wish they would not. The kind
recently described as a politics of “disparate identity rather than shared, common experience.” Hillary Clinton’s campaign adopted an identity-politics based campaign, first in the primary against Bernie Sanders, then in the general election, as an overt strategy.By the time we got to the Harris-Walz campaign, Democrats had dialed the politics of disparate identity way back—Kamala Harris spent almost no time talking about the history-making nature of her candidacy, or the identity-based inequalities her agenda would redress. But in between we saw Joe Biden sew up his own nomination by promising to appoint the first black female Supreme Court justice, and select a female running mate. Other leaders continue to make overt, identitarian appeals, or shut down arguments on identitarian bases.
This was just a couple months ago. This was a couple months before that. The identity-based pushback against those of us who thought Sonia Sotomayor should have retired before the election was both noxious and infuriating in a “fool me thrice” way. I personally am unthreatened when Chuck Schumer boasts about the Democratic Party’s representational strides, but it shouldn’t take a lot of empathy to understand why people who aren’t doctrinaire liberals or progressives might think their contributions would be unwelcome in the coalition.
To be clear, I don’t think Biden wrecked the Democratic brand by making the promises he made, but he damaged it at least some, and we should be clear eyed about why—about how it played outside the party, how easy he made it for Republicans to fan race- and gender-based grievances, and (not least of all) how unfair it was to Ketanji Brown Jackson and Kamala Harris. Democratic Party politics would’ve been a little easier by some small margin if he’d just nominated them instead of announcing a litmus test for their jobs in advance, and it wouldn’t have set the fight for civil equality back at all.