Danny Johnston/AP Photo
Protesters who sympathize with the Occupy Wall Street movement demonstrate at the state Capitol in Little Rock, Arkansas, October 15, 2011.
You wouldn’t know it if you limited your reading to The Liberal Patriot, but the action these days in identity politics is all on the right. By importing white South Africans while expelling immigrants of color, by sacking the Black and female leaders of our armed forces while putting the Pentagon in the hands of a white nincompoop, by stripping the government’s archives of records of Black achievement and heroism while retaining the stories of pre-desegregation whites, Donald Trump has worked mightily to restore the white identity politics that was the norm in America before the 1960s.
To be sure, Trump couldn’t have won re-election last year by the votes of whites alone. He understood he needed to stoke and exploit the antipathies of a broader swath of voters. He accomplished that by incessant attacks on an amorphous cultural elite, attacks he’s escalated since taking office, as Harvard faculty and students can attest.
While Trump has taken white nationalism and the war on cultural elites to their highest levels in a very long time, he can make no claims of invention or even resurrection. These themes have been swirling around the American right for decades, if not centuries. In the early 1960s, Alabama’s segregationist governor, George Wallace, not only helped to rabble-rouse a white backlash against the civil rights movement and laws, but also coined the phrase “pointy-head bureaucrats” to create an image of out-of-touch attorneys and academics indifferent to the havoc they were wreaking by their efforts to undo long-established laws and cultural norms (in this case, racism). Wallace’s playbook was soon taken up, albeit with less incendiary terminology, by mainstream Republicans from Nixon to Reagan to the Bushes, as well providing inspiration for the culture warriors of the 1990s—Pat Buchanan and Newt Gingrich most prominently—who set the terms of discourse for the 21st-century GOP.
The real causes of the working class’s distress shouldn’t be all that hard for the Democrats to address.
During these years, Democrats fell into identitarian mindsets and practices, too. The great egalitarian advances of the 1960s, after all, were undertaken precisely to include groups, predominantly Blacks, historically excluded from the promises of American democracy—the right to vote, to employment, to housing, to Social Security and the minimum wage, as well as to representation. The right concluded that entrusting the armed forces to a highly experienced Black man— Biden Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin—was the result of affirmative action run amok, while restoring it to a highly inexperienced white man—Trump Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth—marked a return to race-blind meritocracy. But decades of attacks on affirmative action paved the way for such Trumpian substitutions. Moreover, in the six decades since Wallace railed at the pointy-heads, those pointy-heads became major players in the nation’s center-left and left, and developed a distinct politics and mode of discourse that often accentuated the gap that had opened between them and a working class that was either stagnating or downwardly mobile.
Electorally, the Republicans’ white identitarianism, both abetted and mitigated by their attacks on cultural elites, enabled them to capture enough working-class votes to put Trump back in the White House and win both houses of Congress. The groups benefiting (both actually or supposedly) from the Democrats’ identity politics fell short of constituting an electoral majority, while the moderately populist economics the Democrats preached and sometimes practiced didn’t put them over the top, either. Despite its failure to deliver any tangible benefits, the Republicans’ one-two punch certainly resonated with angry and frustrated electors who understood that the economic prospects—i.e., the life prospects—they confronted were far more limited than those of their parents’ generation. Nothing that mainstream Democrats had on offer touched any of that anger, or even came close.
But for their current, and completely justifiable, anger at Trump, Democrats are simply not identified as the angry party. In the hundreds of focus groups that public opinion analyst Anat Shenker-Osorio has conducted with swing voters, she’s confirmed this view of the party’s identity. Besides asking directly about what words those voters associate with each party, she’s asked what animals they think of when the parties are brought to mind. For Republicans, those animals are lions, tigers, and sharks. For Democrats, they’re tortoises, slugs, and deer-in-the-headlights.
That last characterization is clearly specific to the Democrats’ shock at Trump’s opening salvos—in which virtually everyone was caught in the headlights (with the heroic exception of chiefly Democratic-appointed judges). But the disparity between the overall characterizations speaks to what the Democrats need to do.
While repudiating some far-fetched cultural standards is clearly in order, I don’t see how such repudiations actually address the entirely understandable anger that working-class Americans feel at their diminished life prospects in today’s economy. That Republicans have been able to persuade many of them that the culprits behind their limited options are immigrants or affirmative action beneficiaries constitutes a huge indictment of the Democrats. The shift of income over the past half-century from wages to investment, the decline of unions, the increasingly plutocrat-friendly character of the tax code, the corporate-and-bank control of trade policy, the ever-rising political clout of the rich—these are the real causes of the working class’s distress, and shouldn’t be all that hard for the Democrats to address, and legitimately and powerfully connect to working- and middle-class anger.
It’s not as if there hasn’t been a ready-made slogan for this form of Democratic identity politics. I think “We are the 99 percent” will do quite nicely. As both policy and politics, that’s the Democrats’ road back to power.
