After eight years of using shallow “identity politics” as a cudgel against the Left, Democratic pundits and elected officials are now blaming leftists themselves for the fact that such politics took over the party.
Democratic Elites Embraced the “Identity Politics” They Decry It’s great that liberal pundits and Democrats have come around to what Sanders and his supporters have been saying for years. But they carried the turn to identity politics and “woke” rhetoric, while others on the Left insisted on a different approach. And they’re now overcorrecting their past mistakes in a dangerous and foolish way: by choosing to simply throw vulnerable groups like trans people and undocumented immigrants under the bus wholesale. The key to Sanders’s political success, which began in a far more socially and politically conservative era, wasn’t that he parroted the Right’s positions on social issues and people’s basic rights. It’s that he made his populist economic messaging the center of his political identity even as he steadfastly defended basic liberal values, explaining that right-wing attacks on the vulnerable were a ploy to divide people and distract them from the real culprits, the economic elite — earning him the support of both liberal activists and working-class voters across the political spectrum. If Democrats’ takeaway now is that they must vilify trans people and immigrants while abandoning a positive counternarrative, it won’t just be a moral disgrace — it will also flatten the nuances of what voters actually believe about these issues. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#33748): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/33748 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/109784902/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
