Vivek Chibber
Yes, and she didn’t take the bait. So that observation is true, that she didn’t run on it.
Nevertheless, it is also true that identity politics played a big role — although not a deciding role — in her defeat. The deciding role was economic issues. Largely, it didn’t really matter that she didn’t run on identitarian terms. She was going to lose anyway because of economic issues.
But make no mistake: even though the association with identity didn’t cause her defeat, it was a big factor. And to ignore that would be a big mistake.
So how did she and her party become so closely identified with identity politics, and what role did it play? First of all, even though she steered clear of it, the party has been propagating it in a very aggressive way over the past six or eight years. So dropping it at the eleventh hour didn’t fool anyone. And that’s why Trump’s ads were so effective in attacking her as somebody pushing identity politics down people’s throats — the Democrats had been doing it for eight years already.
As with so many things in our political moment, it goes back to the initial Bernie Sanders campaign. The Democratic Party’s answer to Bernie Sanders’s propagation of economic justice and economic issues was to smear him as somebody who ignored the plight of what they love to call — their new term — “marginalized groups,” which is people of color, women, trans people, all matters dealing with sexuality. This was their counter to the Sanders campaign, and they’ve used it assiduously now for eight years.
So, if in the last two months they decided to pull away from it, who do they think they’re fooling? Literally nobody. And that’s why the turn away from identity politics failed, because it just seemed so ham-handed and insincere. Nobody bought it.
As for the deeper question about the roots of…
Auteur: Vivek Chibber
