IDENTITY POLITICS & REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY. My piece on John Edwards and the poor from earlier this week has generated some very interesting and provocative discussion, and, in light of Mark Schmitt's item from yesterday and Ezra's unearthing of 15-year-old advice from one of America's leading poverty experts, I thought it would be worth adding that I'm not sure it would help Edwards electorally at all to put forward a critique of poverty that included a sharper critique of racial inequality. I agree with Mark that it would be much more daring -- absolutely -- but I also don't know that it would help Edwards per se, because the problem, as I tried to outline, is not so much what Edwards is saying or proposing, but rather, the difficulty of making a convincing argument for the unequal democratic status quo as a solution to problems that stem from the self-same unequal democratic status quo at the very moment voters are also being offered an opportunity to overturn several hundred years of historical precedent and make American democracy more fully representative.
