In the aftermath of the Democrats’ disastrous loss to Donald Trump, the party and its orbiting rings of lower-level apparatchiks, consultants, and celebrity pundits have been groping around for some explanation that would divert blame from where it belongs: the party elite. The one that seems to be taking hold is that nominee Kamala Harris was sunk by taking on a variety of identity-focused and unpopular positions in her 2019 presidential campaign that she was never able to shake off — positions that, we’re told, were forced onto her by the Left and party progressives.
“It’s interesting in this Monday morning quarterbacking that’s happening to hear from so many Democrats now, who are saying that they think that an economic message should have been front and center, but that they felt constrained somehow by this focus on identity politics.” CBS News’s Margaret Brennan said to former Bernie Sanders campaign cochair Rep. Ro Khanna. “Do you think this, you know, movement ‘woke’ politics really was incredibly damaging to the Left, because a large part of that came from the progressive wing, of which you are a member?”
“It’s not rocket science, but talking about those [‘kitchen-table’] issues plainly, not from the faculty lounge, but from the assembly line, is, I think, a very important message,” centrist senator-elect Elissa Slotkin told her fellow Democrats after outperforming Harris in Michigan. “I personally think that identity politics needs to go the way of the dodo.”
In the New York Times, Adam Jentleson, a former staffer to Sen. John Fetterman, charged that Democrats were being condemned to a perpetual minority status by “liberal and progressive interest groups” who “impose the rigid mores and…
Auteur: Branko Marcetic
