I tend to agree with super that all politics are identity politics now. Identity politics haven’t failed, more so that Democrats have wrapped themselves in the wrong identities. Identities that many people across the country see as counter to their own.
That is, being working class (or someone who works for a living, however you want to phrase it) is an identity in and of itself. It is an extremely powerful identity and one that unites people across racial and gender lines. We’ve seen this work throughout American history in other political movements.
1. Right on, brother. Now we're talking. I'd suggest that we find a better term than "wrong identity" but conceptually you're right. This is why all the trans messaging is effective, even though it affects peoples' lives not at all. It's about identity, and yes, Dems have become seen as champions of identities other than working class (especially white working class). I would disagree that Dems "wrapped themselves" in this state of affairs.
Daniel Bell's "Cultural Contradictions Of Capitalism", published in the early 70s, was one of the first books to recognize the consequences of religion and traditionalism among the working classes. Class struggle had been disrupted, argued Bell, by the inability of American workers to establish solidarity because of racial divisions. The supposed vanguard of the new society was actually conservative and mostly wanted to live where black people didn't.
Add gender and sexuality into that mix and we have today's situation. This wasn't something that "liberals" or "neoliberals" or "Democrats" did, except in the sense that liberals have emphasized racial and social tolerance and inclusion for generations. The right was working to split minorities and labor, and AM talk radio was their secret weapon. It's really hard to do justice for groups that don't like each other, or at least when one group doesn't like the other group.
To the extent that Democrats fucked up, it was in not taking Rush Limbaugh seriously. And the reason they didn't take him seriously was that he seemed so stuck in the past. Video was the new thing. AM was an ancient, outmoded technology. Rush was just some backwater hick from Missouri (which he was). But what Dems didn't realize was the power of the delivery truck radio, so to speak. Radios in workplaces created a captive audience, and it was thus that the modern, toxic "white working class" conservative political identity was born.
2. You're right that working class is an identity and that's what is fueling Trumpism. It's a powerful identity. But it's also a culturally conservative one -- especially when it comes to gender and sexuality issues, to say nothing of race (an ancient divide-and-conquer strategy that remains potent today). So it's a real challenge to bring that identity within our tent.
This is why I've been favoring religion-based appeals. "Christian" (or any religious identity) is as powerful an identity as working-class and in many ways, more so. And I think it's more promising because it's expressly universalist. The problem with class politics is that they are inherently, by definition, divisive. If you go back to Marx, the "struggle" part of "class struggle" has always been necessary and foundational. In a simple economy and a simple society, that might not be bad, where the heroes and villains are clearly identifiable. But it has proven untenable for liberals to tell workers, "we are organized against those people as our enemies" without creating a conceptual permission structure for them to see other people -- i.e. black people, gay people, etc. -- as villains in somewhat different stories. We basically want class politics to divide people in a certain way and it just doesn't work like that.
Last week we were talking about the need for a new villain, and here too Christianity helps because Christianity has always employed the language of battling against sin rather than sinners. I know, hating the sin and loving the sinner is mostly bullshit, but I'm talking about the language and rhetoric. It's sort of weird for a union leader to stand up and say, "our enemy is cruelty and the hardening of hearts," but those ideas have been emanating from the pulpit for generations.
Our new enemies should be Divisiveness, Cruelty, and Hypocrisy. Hypocrisy, after all, has long been a religious concept. I've argued that MAGA world has a different view of hypocrisy than educated liberals. We see hypocrisy in terms of vice; it signals inauthenticity, inconsistency and lack of intellectual rigor. They see hypocrisy in terms of privilege, which has a sound basis in sociology, and want it. So we need to get back to the religious meaning of the term and attack that mindset that MAGA has so readily adopted about rules for thee. Jesus actually talked a fair bit about hypocrisy, right?
