Identity Politics and the Left

February 14, 2017 6:14 PM

Thea N. Riofrancos and Daniel Denvir discuss the role of identity politics in American leftism.

By pitting race and gender against class, some liberals’ eschewal of class-based mobilization and others’ dismissal of “identity politics” ensure electoral defeat for the Democratic Party. And insofar as this zero-sum understanding of identity resonates among leftists committed to class struggle, it threatens to sow divisions among those working towards economic and social justice—divisions we can scarcely afford given the militaristic, xenophobic, and plutocratic agenda pursued by the White House.

A clarification of terms, and of history, is in order.

posted by Joseph Gurl (19 comments total)

Indeed, “identity politics” isn’t the problem at all. The debate shouldn't be about whether “identity politics” is a good or bad thing, but rather over the term's very different and too rarely explicated meanings. As suggested by the recent proliferation of references to the “white working class,” identity politics does not exclusively refer to groups marginalized on account of their race or gender. Rather, identity politics is implicated in all mass politics. People interpret their conditions and their interests in relation to historically constructed collective identities. Whether it be a black McDonald’s worker who thanks to Fight for 15 comes to understand the links between poverty wages and mass incarceration or a white machinist who witnesses a boss use a co-worker’s immigration status as leverage against a unionization drive, identities are never etched in stone but contingent on political and social context. Contra leftists who implicitly assume that class identity would magically cohere if workers were not divided by race or gender, the success of any political movement depends on both resonating with existing identity categories and, as struggles and conditions evolve, forming new ones. For leftists, then, the critical issue is not whether “identity” is the basis for politics, but rather how identities are articulated, and whose identities are being mobilized, in what ways, and toward which ends.

posted by Joseph Gurl at 6:50 PM on February 14, 2017 [5 favorites]

Unlike in 2008, when she attacked Obama’s pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Clinton in 2016 highlighted the needs of women and people of color. But her new emphasis on marginalized groups—after years supporting welfare reform and the war on crime, and defining marriage as “a sacred bond between a man and a woman”—was still based on the same Clinton playbook, if with new talking points. For the most part, she took people of color for granted and figured their interests as narrow and symbolic, while ultimately failing to outline a big picture economic agenda that appealed to poor or working people of any race as such. Instead, she emphasized Trump's dangerousness—a weak strategy given how many Americans have come to consider the status quo to be an existential threat.

It's almost as if Neoliberal ideology (yes, I know what it means, yes Clintonian liberalism qualifies) wants to perform an equality narrative without taking concrete steps to fix racial, gender, and economic equality.


Maintaining militant opposition to homophobia, anti-Muslim Christian supremacism, and police violence might not help win over white workers in the rural Midwest. But combined with a strong class program, socially conservative workers can not only stomach such positions but might even be convinced, over time, to change their minds. Difference, conceived intersectionally, highlights our common interests—and our real enemies.
posted by R.F.Simpson at 7:01 PM on February 14, 2017 [7 favorites]

I've got to give it to the author: you have to be truly committed to your Clinton-hate to look out at the window at President Trump & Co burning the country down and still decide that what the world needs is another piece shitting on Bill, Hillary, and whatever you define that day as "neoliberalism".

anyway I clicked on the link because I was interested in a nuanced discussion of identity politics but instead got a bunch of GRAH-CLINTON-BAD-GRAH, so I'm pretty disappointed
posted by Anonymous at 8:30 PM on February 14, 2017

anyway I clicked on the link because I was interested in a nuanced discussion of identity politics but instead got a bunch of GRAH-CLINTON-BAD-GRAH, so I'm pretty disappointed

Thank you for saving my blood pressure. It's too late at night to be reading that kind of drek.

(Wouldn't it be nice to see a leftist writer critique what the left was doing the past year?)
posted by steady-state strawberry at 8:37 PM on February 14, 2017 [2 favorites]

RTFA, steady-state strawberry.

schroedinger - if that's your only takeaway, then I don't know what to say. The substance of the piece is far, far from that.
posted by Joseph Gurl at 8:43 PM on February 14, 2017 [4 favorites]

I'm not particularly anti-Clinton and I thought this was a very thoughtful piece. I think we need more people pointing out that working against racism and working for the working classes (of all colors) are not mutually incompatible goals.
posted by overhauser at 8:44 PM on February 14, 2017 [3 favorites]

The article isn't all "it's the Clintons' fault", but it is some "it's the Clintons' fault." The acceptable amount of conflation of "the Clintons" in 2017 is "none", and the acceptable amount of blaming of Hillary in isolation is "very little." Her sin was losing the election, a loss that has many other causes in addition to her own weaknesses as a candidate, including a coup led from Northwest DC, Russian interference, a diseased media entertainment industry, and some good old fashioned bad luck and bad timing.

If you subtract that stuff out from the piece, there's a decent message about how the left should be about "both, and" when it comes to different aspects of identity. Of course, it's possible to decrease marginalization on the class axis, so while class is relevant to other identities, it's not equivalent.

But of course we can't subtract that stuff from the piece. The election had to be mentioned, of course, but it could have been done without tramping the dirt down on the grave plot of Hillary's political career based on some things that were under her control and a lot of things that weren't.
posted by tonycpsu at 8:57 PM on February 14, 2017 [7 favorites]

But combined with a strong class program, socially conservative workers can not only stomach such positions but might even be convinced, over time, to change their minds.

We shouldn't spend much energy on trying win social conservatives. We don't really need them anyways. There are plenty of people who are not social conservatives that are more reachable. It's a matter of trying to get them to stay informed and vote.
posted by FJT at 9:19 PM on February 14, 2017 [1 favorite]

Another hot take in the form of "Hillary lost because she did not share my particular politics which I will now outline for you."

Here is your periodic reminder that Hillary won the popular vote by 3 million votes, and something like 150,000 votes in Pennsylvania and Florida would have shifted the election the other way.

Leftists need to get over the kick of blaming their neighbors on the political spectrum for our problems. The GOP is the problem. Nineties Bill Clinton is not the problem.
posted by zompist at 9:36 PM on February 14, 2017 [4 favorites]

Here is your periodic reminder that Hillary won the popular vote by 3 million votes

Periodic reminder that the Democratic Party has been steadily losing everything else.
posted by atoxyl at 10:13 PM on February 14, 2017 [3 favorites]

This is another reason I'm sick of Shit-On-Clinton articles: the discussion inevitably returns to the re-litigation of the 2016 election, because two years of arguing about it was not enough.
posted by Anonymous at 10:42 PM on February 14, 2017

i suppose this makes me a radical but i would like to see the people who led us to our country's current state held responsible for their actions. this includes the democratic party and their failed candidate.
posted by JimBennett at 10:52 PM on February 14, 2017 [1 favorite]

Maybe you could have her locked up, as the current president has suggested? She lost the election, she is a private citizen now, she does not need whatever special brand of punishment you feel the need to dole out.
posted by zompist at 10:56 PM on February 14, 2017 [1 favorite]

The Clintons have had a major hand in the Democratic policy platform over the past two decades, directly and indirectly, and the article traces that lineage in the process of critiquing that platform. It seems totally reasonable in that light to devote a significant number of column inches to their political history in particular. I don't know how much more forcefully such a piece has to argue in favor of an enhanced focus on policy regarding economic inequality in addition to an enhanced focus on policy regarding race, gender, orientation, and ability for people to start taking advocacy for the former seriously. It is extremely weird and concerning to me that the response to inquiries as to what the Democratic party could do better in the face of the 2016 election has almost universally been one of disdain, denial, and accusations of "re-litigation."
posted by invitapriore at 10:56 PM on February 14, 2017 [2 favorites]

please don't try to equate my massive disappointment in the clinton campaign's legitimate screw ups (which i detailed in a post the mods chose to delete, so i won't rehash) with the insane fervor of flynn and his supporters. that's insulting. if we let the dems off the hook for their massive failure in this presidential race - and their failures downballot for the last seven years - there is no hope for leftist candidates in 2018 or 2020. the party is not connecting with voters. mistakes were made and instead of burying our heads in the sand we should be acknowledging those mistakes, acting on them, and mobilizing. there is not a lot of time for us to get our shit together.
posted by JimBennett at 11:06 PM on February 14, 2017 [1 favorite]

OK, well, if we're going to get into it:

If we are going to engage in finger-pointing, I question why our fingers point first to Clinton and not to, say:

• The massive campaign of voter disenfranchisement that demonstrably affected a number of the states that she lost, including crucial swing states like Wisconsin and Florida.
• The international and national forces arrayed against her, such as fucking Russia government and the goddamn FBI.
• The longstanding strains of sexism that ran through the attacks on her by the Left and the Right, that basically distorted and amplified every attack against her.

If we are going to talk about identity politics, I wonder as to why the author is so confident that the hearts and minds of Conservative Rural America can change, but seems so set on the idea that politicians themselves are unable to change. It could not possibly be that a politician is a human being whose ideas about homosexuality and race might evolve over the decades? Or do we expect our politicians to spring forth from the womb with fully-formed opinions that fit neatly into modern-day progressive ideals?

There is a curious wing of so-called progressives are resolute in their assertion that any politician that once supported an insufficiently progressive policy will be insufficiently progressive for all time, no matter how many mea culpas issued. Yet this same wing will romanticize at length the Working Class White Voter, no matter how racist and abhorrent their beliefs, because somehow they find a way to extend forgiveness and understanding to Uncle Johnny as he rants about "thugs" and "rap culture", but cannot muster similar feelings to the politician who supports gay marriage now because that politician hasn't always supported gay marriage.

----

Frankly, if people think Clinton was not discussing policy and jobs during her speeches, then they weren't paying attention. See: The most common words in Hillary Clinton’s speeches, in one chart. Now, if we want to have a discussion about what the media focused on and how it shaped perceptions of her campaign, that's a different story. But if you didn't recognize she was talking about jobs and the economy, it wasn't for lack of them trying.
posted by Anonymous at 11:24 PM on February 14, 2017

I think we do need to have a better national dialogue that incorporates class as an aspect of identity, and I welcome discussions around that. But the authors' attempt to frame the root issue as the fault of The Clintons And Their Flying Neoliberal Monkeys is pretty hamfisted and distracts from the broader social and historical contexts that led us to where we are today.
posted by Anonymous at 11:29 PM on February 14, 2017

If a word cloud is supposed to be some sort of indication of economic policy bonafides, I think we're probably not going to get very far here.
posted by invitapriore at 11:33 PM on February 14, 2017 [2 favorites]

The word cloud pointed out where her emphasis was in speeches. If you think she didn't provide sufficient policy detail, did you ever spend time perusing the gobs of policy papers on her website? Because again, there was a lot on economic policy there. Like, providing white papers and policy details has been her whole thing for her whole political career.
posted by Anonymous at 11:53 PM on February 14, 2017