When I started doing that work, my story merges with a larger story.… How do I pull all these different strains together: Kenya and Hawaii and Kansas, and white and black and Asian—how does that fit? And through action, through work, I suddenly see myself as part of the bigger process for, yes, delivering justice for the [African American community] and specifically the South Side community, the low-income people—justice on behalf of the African American community. But also thereby promoting my ideas of justice and equality and empathy that my mother taught me were universal. So I’m in a position to understand those essential parts of me not as separate and apart from any particular community but connected to every community. And I can fit the African American struggle for freedom and justice in the context of the universal aspiration for freedom and justice.4
It is also worth noting that the most significant obstacle Obama faced in the 2008 election was when tapes of his pastor spouting anti-American rhetoric surfaced. Obama responded with a speech on race framed within universalist, pro-American values to reassure voters that he did not share his pastor’s divisive outlook.
Compare this universalist, pro-American-values approach to the antagonistic rhetoric you hear from Democratic Party leaders and the Left today.
In July 2016, the highest-ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi asserted that “non–college educated white males” vote Republican “because of guns, because of gays, and because of God—the three Gs—God being the woman’s right to choose.”
A Democratic congressman representing Ferguson, Missouri, hung a painting depicting police officers as pigs in the US Capitol.
Speaking before an African American audience, Vice President Joe Biden said that Republicans wanted to “put y’all back in chains.”
Even Obama, once he took office, started to veer from his universalist approach from the 2008 election into explicit identity liberalism.
He began weighing in on highly publicized law enforcement matters in a totally inappropriate manner. For instance, in the early days of his presidency, Obama remarked that police had acted “stupidly” in the case of an African American Harvard professor arrested for breaking into his own home because his door was jammed. Obama automatically assumed the officer was racially motivated. He made a huge mistake by ramping up the racial rhetoric during the Trayvon Martin shooting incident in Florida by saying, “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.”
The Democrats and the Obama administration also made the decision to put gay, lesbian, and transgender issues in the front and center of the Democratic Party. Public opinion on gay marriage has changed radically in the past few decades, and one could argue that fully embracing it made sense for Democrats. But identity liberalism demands that the full gamut of concerns for the community, no matter how niche, be given the spotlight.
Peter Thiel, a gay Republican, summed it up well when he said at the Republican Convention, “I don’t pretend to agree with every plank in our party’s platform. But fake culture wars only distract us from our economic decline.
“When I was a kid, the great debate was about how to defeat the Soviet Union. And we won. Now we are told that the great debate is about who gets to use which bathroom. This is a distraction from our real problems. Who cares?” he said.
The Left’s focus on identity politics served only to alienate working Americans living paycheck to paycheck and wondering when their concerns were going to be met. This is in part what paved the way for Trump to break through the “blue wall” of Rust Belt states during the election.
Finally, and most destructively, Democrats adopted a conscious strategy of delegitimizing the concerns of Americans who rejected Obamacare and other policies of the Obama administration as evidence of racism against a black president.
In a hearing of the Senate Commerce Committee in May 2014, then-chairman Senator Jay Rockefeller, a Democrat from West Virginia, fed this insidious narrative:
It’s very important to take a long view at what’s going on here. And I’ll be able to dig up some emails that make part of the Affordable Care Act that doesn’t look good, especially from people who have made up their mind that they don’t want it to work. Because they don’t like the president, maybe he’s of the wrong color. Something of that sort.… I’ve seen a lot of that and I know a lot of that to be true. It’s not something you’re meant to talk about in public, but it’s something I’m talking about in public because that is very true.
And Democratic US representative Steve Cohen of Tennessee told Bridget Johnson with PJ Media in June 2015 that “we need people to forget about being against Affordable Care Act. A lot of the reason they’re against it is because it’s President Obama, who’s African-American, and because it helps a lot of people that are poor and lower income.”
This is the same Representative Cohen who, according to Politico, in January 2011 compared Republicans to Nazis for opposing the law on the House floor.
“They say it’s a government takeover of health care, a big lie just like Goebbels,” Cohen said, referring to a Nazi propagandist. “You say it enough, you repeat the lie, you repeat the lie, and eventually, people believe it. Like blood libel. That’s the same kind of thing.”
The result of this obsession with identity liberalism is that a potentially unifying presidency became a divisive one. The hope for a better, more unified America—the 2008 Obama brand—faded into a cacophony of race, gender, and sexual orientation–based antagonism.
As a writer for the New York Times put it in a 2015 article called “The Year We Obsessed Over Identity,” “We had never really had a white president until we had a black one.”5
INTERSECTIONALITY: THE FAULTY THEORY BEHIND THE LEFT’S IDENTITY LIBERALISM
The faulty theory behind the Left’s attempt at coalition building through identity liberalism is called “intersectionality.”
If you have ever heard the term “white privilege” or been told to “check your privilege” by a Leftist, this is where the idea comes from.
Intersectionality was coined and developed as a concept in 1989 by Kimberlé Crenshaw, a law professor seeking to explain why the interests of black women were left out of traditional feminist concerns.
“Intersectionality… was my attempt to make feminism, anti-racist activism, and anti-discrimination law do what I thought they should—highlight the multiple avenues through which racial and gender oppression were experienced so that the problems would be easier to discuss and understand,” she wrote in a 2015 opinion piece.6
Originally articulated on behalf of black women, the term brought to light the invisibility of many constituents within groups that claim them as members, but often fail to represent them.… Intersectionality has given many advocates a way to frame their circumstances and to fight for their visibility and inclusion.7
In theory, intersectionality builds coalitions by getting different minority groups to recognize that their griefs all have common, intersecting causes. In practice, it breeds division and resentment among the coalition it is trying to build.
Rather than leveling an alleged racial- and gender-based hierarchy of power, it inverts it, putting the supposedly least privileged persons at the top. The result is a self-narrowing bullying culture of privilege checking, because each group is trying to one-up the others in the rankings of who is most oppressed so that their niche concerns receive the most attention. Intersectionality replaces the call to recognize our shared humanity and the common goal of equal rights with a compulsion to divide us into smaller and smaller groups.
A January 2017 story in the New York Times perfectly captured the toxic nature of intersectionality in practice.
It was the week before President Trump’s inauguration, and the Left was mobilizing for a counterdemonstration the day after his inauguration in Washington, DC, and other major cities.
Jennifer Willis, a white woman from South Carolina, was planning to attend with her daughters. But then sh
e read a Facebook post by a march volunteer that made it seem as if white voices were not wanted.
The volunteer, who was a black activist from Brooklyn, advised “white allies” to “listen more and talk less,” according to the New York Times. She even went so far as to suggest that those who were not activists before the election shouldn’t show up. “You don’t get to join because now you’re scared too. I was born scared.”
Taken aback by this exclusionist attitude, Ms. Willis decided not to attend. “This is a women’s march,” she said to the New York Times. “We’re supposed to be allies in equal pay, marriage, adoption. Why is it now about, ‘White women don’t understand black women’?”8
It turns out that lecturing strangers based solely on their gender and color of their skin is not an effective way to build bridges.
In case you think the attitude displayed by this march organizer is an aberration, take a look at these headlines from popular articles posted on liberal websites over the past few years.
“Let’s Hope the Boston Marathon Bomber Is a White American”9
“White Guys Are Killing Us: Toxic, Cowardly Masculinity, Our Unhealable National Illness”10
“Yes, Diversity Is about Getting Rid of White People (And That’s a Good Thing)”11
“White Men Must Be Stopped: The Very Future of Mankind Depends on It”12
“The Plague of Angry White Men: How Racism, Gun Culture and Toxic Masculinity Are Poisoning America”13
“29 Things White People Ruined”14
Within this mentality, it is easy to understand why so many Democrats responded to any opposition to the secular-socialist Obama agenda with accusations of racism. If the prism through which you view the world is one defined by race, gender, and sexual orientation, then everything must be motivated by either acceptance or hostility to those aspects of identity.
Again, this is a fundamentally different approach from that of the civil rights leaders of decades past. For example, Dr. King actually warned civil rights advocates against viewing all issues through the prism of race. In his final book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community, King wrote specifically about the importance of addressing poverty as a universal issue as opposed to addressing only how it affected the black community.
In the treatment of poverty nationally, one fact stands out: There are twice as many white poor as Negro poor in the United States. Therefore I will not dwell on the experiences of poverty that derive from racial discrimination, but will discuss the poverty that affects white and Negro alike.15
It was also telling to see what issues animated the Left during the Obama presidency.
A writer at the liberal website Vox wrote a very prescient article in the summer of 2016 called “The Smug Style in American Liberalism.” In it, he points out that the Left managed to organize massive boycotts of states that passed bills deemed hostile to the gay and transgender agenda, enlisting corporate entities to pull their assets in an attempt to bully the states’ leaders to back down. Meanwhile, the decision by many of these same states to refuse Medicaid expansion under Obamacare—an issue that affects vastly more people—barely inspired a peep from these same activists.16
The Left also poured enormous energy into protesting—sometimes with violent results—the shootings of black men by police and others. Some of those shootings were unjustified, and the offenders were eventually tried and found guilty. Many others, however, turned out to have been much more complicated situations than the initial media reports suggested. That didn’t matter to the Left and its newly formed identity politics front group, Black Lives Matter. This is why the phrase “hands up, don’t shoot” is still used as a rallying cry on the Left to protest the police, even though it came from protests against the shooting of Michael Brown, who never surrendered to the Ferguson police officer in question.17
It is also worth noting that intersectionality began to gain popularity on the Left right around the time it was becoming clear that the Great Society programs of Lyndon Johnson, which promised to lift up the poor and eliminate racial disparities, had been proved to be a failure.
Since the legal barriers limiting the rights of African Americans and women had been removed decades earlier, persistent inequality required that the Left develop new theories for why African Americans and women had not made the gains that were promised.
They began to focus on invisible obstacles—they call them institutional barriers and unconscious biases—baked into the structure of society that discriminate against minority groups.
This was easier for those on the Left to do than to accept that the big government liberal programs they cherish were failing to deliver the education and job prospects that they promised.
TRUMPING IDENTITY LIBERALISM
The problems with the Democrats’ identity liberalism quickly began to manifest itself during the Obama presidency. The Democrats began to hemorrhage white, working-class voters who felt excluded from identity politics and wanted their economic concerns met and their dignity as Americans respected.
Democrats lost the House of Representatives and the majority of governorships in 2010 due to a rejection of Obamacare and the administration’s failure to adequately address the economic downturn. During that election, the Republicans’ share of white voters without college degrees increased to 62 percent, from 54 percent in 2008. The House slogan of then–minority leader John Boehner, “Where are the jobs?” proved to be very powerful.
Democrats also lost the House because minority populations are clustered in a small number of congressional districts. This makes identity liberalism particularly ineffective at generating the turnout necessary to succeed in the House in midterm elections.
Obama’s reelection in 2012 allowed the Democrats to ignore their growing weakness with working-class whites. He managed to use Mitt Romney’s history at Bain Capital restructuring companies to paint him as exactly the sort of rich CEO who had been moving factory jobs overseas. Obama also successfully made the case that the country’s continuing economic weakness was the fault of President Bush, and that Mitt Romney would take us back to Bush’s policies.
Obama’s skill at campaigning brought the Democrats a temporary reprieve, but they made notably little progress in the House of Representatives and at the state level despite Obama’s comfortable victory over Romney.
The 2014 election is when the weakness of identity liberalism really became visible. Republicans gained nine seats in the Senate, thirteen seats in the House, two governorships (including heavily Democratic Maryland), and the control of eleven additional statehouses.
Alarm bells should have gone off among Democratic leaders that identity liberalism was failing to pull together the sort of dominant coalition predicted in the aforementioned Emerging Democratic Majority. In fact, one of the coauthors of the book, John Juids, wrote an article warning that Republican gains with the middle class, in particular non–college educated whites, was creating an “emerging Republican advantage.”18
The party, however, couldn’t break away from its obsession with identity liberalism.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016, in stark contrast of that of Barack Obama in 2008, was a veritable smorgasbord of identity liberalism.
First, she explicitly ran as the first woman president. Her campaign slogan was “I’m with her.” Her campaign accused her primary opponent, Bernie Sanders, of sexism and his supporters of being “Bernie bros” (sexist frat boys). This was just the warm-up round for the general election, when her campaign and the mainstream media spent enormous energy defining Trump as a sexist misogynist.
And as the Huffington Post reported, Clinton made history in two ways during her first presidential debate with Trump. She was the first woman to participate in one, but she was also the first candidate in American history to call her opponent racist during a debate. Clinton said Trump “has a long record of engaging in racist behavior.”
Citing a University of Virginia professor, the Huffing
ton Post, a liberal website, reported, “The word ‘racist’ has never been used in a televised presidential debate.”
Clinton wasn’t done, however. She went on to accuse all Americans of harboring “implicit bias” toward other groups and suggested that police needed retraining to deal with their unconscious racism.
These claims sent the same message to Trump’s supporters that her “basket of deplorables” comment delivered.
Throughout the campaign, there were warning signs that this approach was backfiring.
Trump was drawing massive crowds with an anti-PC message that was an explicit rejection of identity liberalism and a laser focus on the economic concerns of the working class that Clinton and the Democrats were ignoring.
While most polling showed Clinton with a comfortable lead, a deeper dive into the numbers showed her weaknesses. After the Democratic convention, the Atlantic editor Ronald Brownstein warned that the party’s message was alienating more people than it was attracting. “Reduced reliance on working-class whites since the 1990s has freed Democrats to pursue a more consistently liberal cultural agenda,” he wrote. “But anyone watching this convention’s first nights might easily view social inclusion, not economic opportunity, as the party’s core priority. ‘One of the challenges for Democrats is talking about diversity, talking about gender in a way that doesn’t put people on the defensive, [and] make them feel like they are being… accused of being bigoted,’ says Democratic pollster Margie Omero.”19
In addition, union leaders who supported Clinton reportedly tried to warn her campaign that she was not addressing their members’ concerns, but they were also ignored.20
Of course, the results of the election were shocking at the time, but in hindsight, they were consistent with the trends of previous elections. Trump continued to build on Republican advantages with the middle class and non–college educated whites. Meanwhile, the power of identity liberalism to boost turnout among the minority community proved to be a mirage. African American turnout was down significantly from 2008 and 2012 without the nation’s first black president on the ticket. And Trump actually increased the share of the vote received from African Americans and Hispanics over Mitt Romney. It turns out that identity liberalism even alienates members of minority groups more concerned about economic issues than niche social justice fights.
Understanding Trump Page 11