Which is why it’s short-sighted, not to mention dangerous, to call for liberals and progressives to abandon their focus on “identity politics” and concentrate instead on economics and class—as if these factors could in any way be pried apart.
Railing against so-called identity politics and political correctness is standard fare on Fox News and Breitbart News, but those aren’t the only places it’s coming from, and the critics have only become more vocal since the election. The lesson a great many liberal Democrats seem to have taken away from Hillary Clinton’s defeat is that her direct appeals to women and minorities on the campaign trail made white working-class men feel left out, driving them to Trump. Columbia University professor Mark Lilla expressed this most prominently in a postelection essay in the New York Times. He chided Clinton for “calling out explicitly to African-American, Latino, LGBT and women voters at every stop. This was a strategic mistake.” This focus on the traditionally marginalized groups, and the “moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity…has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing.” Unity, apparently, requires that all those noisy minorities (combined, an overwhelming majority, actually) need to pipe down about their individual grievances so Democrats can get back to “It’s the economy, stupid,” the mantra of Bill Clinton’s 1992 winning presidential campaign.
Except this is exactly the wrong conclusion to draw from the 2016 elections. Clinton’s failure was not one of messaging but of track record. Specifically, it was the stupid economics of neoliberalism, fully embraced by her, her husband, and her party’s establishment, that left Clinton without a credible offer to make to those white workers who had voted for Obama (twice) and decided, this time, to vote Trump. True, Trump’s plans weren’t credible, but at least they were different.
Similarly, if there was a problem with her focus on gender, sexuality, and racial identity, it was that Clinton’s brand of identity politics does not challenge the system that produced and entrenched these inequalities, but seeks only to make that system more “inclusive.” So, yes to marriage equality and abortion access and transgender bathrooms, but forget about the right to housing, the right to a wage that supports a family (Clinton resisted the calls for a $15 minimum wage), the universal right to free health care, or anything else that requires serious redistribution of wealth from top to bottom and would mean challenging the neoliberal playbook. On the campaign trail, Clinton mocked her opponent’s “Trumped-up trickle-down economics,” but her own philosophy is what we might call “trickle-down identity politics”: tweak the system just enough to change the genders, colors, and sexual orientation of some of the people at the top, and wait for the justice to trickle down to everyone else. And it turns out that trickle-down works about as well in the identity sphere as it does in the economic one.
We know this because it’s been tried. There have been historic symbolic victories for diversity in recent years—an African-American first family, two Black attorneys general, Hollywood pushed into recognizing Black directors and actors, out gays and lesbians working as news anchors and heading Fortune 500 companies, hit TV shows built around transgender characters, an overall increase in the number of women in management positions, to name just a few. These victories for diversity and inclusion matter, they change lives and bring in viewpoints that would otherwise be absent. It was immensely important that a generation of kids grew up seeing Obama in the most powerful office in the world. And yet this top-down approach to change, if it is not accompanied by bottom-up policies that address systemic issues such as crumbling schools and lack of access to decent housing, is not going to lead to real equality. Not even close.
In the United States, the significant gains made for greater diversity and inclusion at the top in recent years have occurred at a time of mass deportations of immigrants, and as the wealth gap between Black and white Americans actually increased. According to the Urban Institute, between 2007 and 2010 the average wealth of white families fell by 11 percent (a huge amount), but Black families saw their wealth fall by 31 percent. In other words, Blacks and whites became more unequal during a period of tremendous symbolic advancements, not less. Part of this is because Black families were disproportionately targeted for subprime loans, so they were hit the hardest when the market collapsed in 2008.
During this same period, young Black men continued to be shot and killed by police at an obscene rate (five times higher than white men of the same age bracket, according to a study by the Guardian), their murders often captured on video and seared into the imaginations of still-developing young minds. It is against this backdrop that Black Lives Matter has become this generation’s civil rights movement. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, writes: “The Black political establishment, led by President Barack Obama, had shown over and over again that it was not capable of the most basic task: keeping Black children alive. The young people would have to do it themselves.” Similarly, while there are a great many women in positions of power—not enough, but substantially more than a generation ago—low-income women are working longer hours, often at multiple jobs, without security, just to pay the bills. (Two-thirds of minimum-wage workers in the States are women.) In the World Economic Forum’s annual global rankings on the economic gender gap, the US fell from the 28th spot in 2015 all the way down to 45th place in 2016.
While white Trump voters responded to their precariousness by raging at the world, many traditional liberals seem to have responded by tuning out. When Hillary Clinton called out identifiable groups at every rally, declaring that she would “stand up” for each of them, it was too tepid an offering to build the ground-swell of support she needed. So while white identity politics pumped up Trump’s base, trickle-down identity politics fell flat for his opponent. In crucial states such as Iowa, Ohio, and Wisconsin, Clinton drew 15 to 20 percent fewer Democratic voters than Barack Obama had in 2012. And that depressed progressive turnout is a big part of how Trump managed to eke out an electoral win (despite losing the popular vote).