The One Type of Democratic Identity Politics That Will Actually Work

[Celerity]

If they want to win back the working class, they need to get in touch with its justifiable anger.



https://prospect.org/politics/2025-06-02-one-type-democratic-identity-politics-will-actually-work/



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.



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.

snip

[bucolic_frolic]

1. Absent mondern-day Trust Busters

I don't see how we turn this around. Taxing elites isn't working legislatively, ideologically, or actually. So if you can't tax monopolies, and legislative tweaks in the form of laws to help the poor expire and are fought tooth and nail, you have to break them up. And in most industries the challenge is worse: duopolies or oligopolies, two or several companies that control the market for the most part. So you have a hard time theoretically and ideologically making a case for perfect competition that drives prices down.

[Ponietz]

2. Thom Hartmann said the same thing recently

This is one issue most Americans could unite around and remedy. Thanks Thom Hartmann

https://newrepublic.com/article/195862/billionaire-hoarders-wealthy-biggest-threat

We defeated Confederate oligarchs with this disease back in 1865. We beat money hoarders back again after the Republican Great Depression with FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society. We thought we were safe, as the middle class grew from around 10 percent of us to around two-thirds of us (with a single paycheck!) by the late 1970s.

But then, in 1978, in the Bellotti decision written by “Powell Memo” author Lewis Powell himself, five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court ruled that money is actually “free speech” and corporations are “persons.” It floated Reagan into office in 1981 on a tsunami of oil and banking industry money. Five other corrupted SCOTUS Republicans doubled down on that bizarre ruling in 2010 with Citizens United, creating an entirely new form of corrupt political bribery via something they created out of thin air that is called a SuperPAC.

As a result, today these morbidly rich hoarders shovel small amounts (millions) into the pockets of captured politicians who then provide them with tax breaks, profit-driving deregulation, and government subsidies that return billions to them. And the impact on average Americans over the past 47 years that we’ve been living in the Reagan revolution has been dramatic.

While every other developed country in the world offers free or nearly free health care to its citizens; free or nearly free education, including college; and almost universal unionization and a high minimum wage, we’re stuck living in the nation these billionaires have forced on us just to satisfy their own avaricious obsession with more, more, more money:

[dalton99a]

6. +1

[Gum Logger]

3. The Dems rely on dumb luck instead of making the their own luck

Just set back and watch Republican wreck and ruin

[Quiet Em]

4. The MeToo Movement, Covid precautions and discussions about how society is structured to favor white men

That's what I believe has made some men angry. That anger is not justifiable so I don't know how to fix it.

[somsai]

5. 13% of voters were white non college men who voted for Trump

I think Meyerson over at the Prospect if he really thinks economic issues are where it's at, he should probably stick with them and for get some white racist candidate that was shot over 50 years ago.

The multi ethnic multi racial working class would like a raise, men, women, everyone. Mexico tripled the min wage over 4 years, why can't we do the same? $22.50 as a base rate would do more for our parties prospects than huffing hopium out of a bag like glue.