The poison of identity politics proves lethal to the left
10 min read
On losing
by Ted M. Coopman
I have run and lost an election, so I am somewhat familiar with thinking you are going to win and that you had a winning message and then losing. Not fun. For losing to be productive, you need to own it. For Democrats, this election was NOT lost:
- Because a bare majority (Trump’s winning margin was 1.6%) of voters were misinformed, disinformed victims of false consciousness, too ignorant to understand their own interests.
- Because we are racist. We have twice elected a Black president and Harris earned a larger share of the white vote than Joe Biden.
- Because we are sexist. A female presidential candidate has already won the popular vote and we have elected 44 female governors in 31 states – 16 of them are Republicans.
- Because we are xenophobic. A majority of Latinos favor deportation of undocumented immigrants.
- Because we are yearning for a strongman.
And while certainly the hangover of inflation and high interest rates were a tough hill to climb, the fault lies with Democrats and vocal progressive activists. When you lose, it is your fault and your fault alone. You may believe you are right, and your social causes are righteous, but politics is sales and if you can’t sell it to the masses (and get them to show up and vote), you lose.
Let me add that I am a self-identified leftist. I have 30+ years as an activist working for causes ranging from free speech and media reform to global justice and environmental causes. I have decades-long card-carrying memberships in Greenpeace, the ACLU, Amnesty International, and a host of progressive organizations. I was a member of two unions.
My argument here is that none of it matters if you can’t get the majority behind you and execute progressive policies. In this regard the Democratic Party as our current only alternative has utterly failed and possibly doomed us all.
The rise of a losing strategy
As an activist and an academic-in-training in the 1990s, I watched in alarm at the rising tide of identity politics and the cult of marginality oozing out of the academy and into activist groups. I was roundly criticized for my concerns, in large part because of my “deficiencies” in gender and race (i.e., male, straight, white). Nothing like being told everything you have ever said or done has no value. Oh, the joys of the hypocrisy of being labeled as an elite by other (mostly white and broadly privileged) elites.
As a concept, identity politics encompasses a wide range of political activity and academic theorizing based on the idea of inherent shared experiences of injustice by members of certain social groups. Instead of organizing around belief systems, class or economic concerns, programmatic manifestos, or party affiliation, identity political agendas typically aim to secure the political (as well as cultural and economic) freedom of a specific constituency deemed marginalized.
The goal is to assert or reclaim ways of understanding groups distinctiveness that challenge dominant characterizations, with the goal of greater self-determination. However, this predisposes that the identity markers of any one group (e.g., race) are stronger than markers that cut across groups (class, economics, religion, etc.). As referenced by William Deresiewicz in The Chronicle of Higher Education, a 2024 Marist poll found that 57% of Latinos surveyed are in favor of deporting all illegal immigrants. A Pew poll showed that 75% of Black respondents and 85% of Latinos are in favor of voter ID laws.
After the Supreme Court banned affirmative action in college admissions at the behest of Asian appellants, Gallup found that 52% of Black and 68% of Latino adults supported the decision. Another Pew poll showed that only 4% of Latinos use “Latinx,” and that of those who have heard of the term, the vast majority reject it.
A central flaw of identity politics is it mimics a racial identity system developed in the post-reconstruction American south as Jim Crow, was embraced by apartheid South Africa, and inspired the Nazi’s final solution. White identity politics was the first identity politics. And in its own catastrophic evil way it was highly successful. But this was in majoritarian systems where the majority took on racial identity as a pretext for oppressing other groups. It is inherently exclusionary.
Its failure for minority communities is that they are, by definition, small, lack resources, and generally need to create solidarity with other minority communities and, most importantly, majority groups to succeed. From emancipation (white guys), to voting rights for women (again white guys), to the Civil Rights Act of 1965 (more white guys plus a few women), to the Respect for Marriage Act of 2022 (heterosexuals + 11 openly gay Congresspeople), it was the majority who codified those rights.
And if you think that Black people, women, and LGBTQI+ people “forced” anyone, let alone an overwhelming majority of powerful straight white guys, into action, you fundamentally do not understand power or American history. Each of these social changes involved a lot of hard work to align marginalized groups’ goals with the majority.
Success was achieved because the opening argument was not “you are inherently racist/sexist/[fill in] phobic, any words that challenge my beliefs are violence, none of your accomplishments matter, you earned nothing you have because you stole it from [fill in], your pain and trauma are either meaningless or immaterial compared to [insert chosen marginalized group] and you just need to shut-up and do what you are told.” Not terribly persuasive. Historically, political success involved aligning movement goals with controlling elites and the majority.
You’re doing it wrong and the irony of the colonialist mindset of the anti-colonial left
Broadly, colonialism is control by one power over a dependent area or people. In a textbook example, one nation subjugates another, conquers its population and exploits it, often while forcing the controlling nation’s own language and cultural values upon the conquered people. In practice, a colonial power usually recruits local elites, motivated by greed or power (or simply survival), to put the subjugated area and people’s interests behind that of the colonial power. In the case of identity politics, educated white elites recruit educated members of marginalized groups to execute their agenda.
For identity politics to work, people must internalize the identity description of themselves. While overwhelmingly college-educated and economic elites and activists within marginalized groups internalized the progressive left agenda and a victim mindset, most of those groups rejected it. The people who proport to speak for those communities in colleges and universities, the media, the arts, and nonprofits, share the politics and points of view of other liberal elites, not of those communities. The majority of Black, Latino, and Asian Americans do not share many elites’ politics or ideology.
From defund the police, to immigration, to Latinx, to transgenderism, majorities of minorities refused to internalize a functionally colonialist agenda. For Blacks, defunding or abolishing police and affirmative action. For Latinos, lax immigration and border enforcement. Both groups rejected these agendas for reasons relevant and important to them. Identity is just not a useful way of understanding people’s motivations.
Despite the left’s wish-casting, majorities of Latinos, Blacks, and Asian Americans lean economically and culturally conservative. There is also the problem that a Haitian is not a Nigerian is not a Black descendant of enslaved people. Mexicans are not Venezuelans, Chinese are not South Korean, and Indonesians are not Vietnamese. The categories of Latinx, Black, and Asian American are largely fictions created by educated elites as are the supposed unifying shared experience of those marginalized groups.
Immigrants of all races chose America because they want what’s on offer and don’t share the disdain that America is “bad” and irredeemably racist. Immigrants don’t oppose “white privilege.” Rather, as in previous waves of immigrants, they want the privilege and what it promises to bring to them.
Chasing and catching marginality
The idea that someone can take on a marginal identity, and thus be absolved of responsibility for the excesses and mistakes of American culture and its economy, is deeply rooted in elite universities. Instead of the left elite accepting its ruling class responsibility, it chooses to cosplay marginality as its members cast themselves as among the oppressed classes. In response to broad critiques of “elites” in my graduate school class, I offered the observation that if you are sitting in a Ph.D. program at the University of Washington, you are an elite.
That did not go over well with classmates who were (unlike myself) overwhelmingly products of other elite universities and families with resources to send them there. The fetish of marginality has reached its predictable conclusion. Unfortunately, they dragged down all of us with them.
Race, class, gender (minus the class)
The big takeaway of this election is that when it comes to identities of race, class, and gender, class and its associated economic imperatives, wins. As David Brooks describes, the progressive left has abandoned the class portion of the race, class, gender trifecta because the elite status of economic class is unavoidable. The tendency to explain away economic success as purely a function of built-in inequity and inequality and the refusal to promote the secrets of their own success doomed the progressive left agenda.
The poor want to be middle class and the middle class want to be upper class. Economic success and stability are overwhelmingly the majority’s focus. The non-elite see financial success as an unallied good, not something to be explained away. For the privileged, economic issues are equal to or less than identity and cultural issues because they personally have less economic stress. For the elite, economic issues are mostly conceptual problems, whereas for those of modest means, they are actual problems.
Spending resources chasing debt relief for college students baffles and angers the vast majority of college loan recipients who have paid off their debts as well as those hundreds of millions who did not benefit from a college degree and higher standard of living that accompanies it. Likewise, immigrants who fought their way through the arduous process of legally immigrating are not very accepting of those chose to immigrate outside the legal process.
A post-election survey from Democratic polling firm Blueprint found that a major reason people did not support Kamala Harris is, she “focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues than helping the middle class.” Only inflation and illegal immigration ranked higher. Among swing voters, it ranked first. It is no coincidence that a closer look at the progressive left agenda (e.g., college debt relief) shows it disproportionally benefits those elites who promote it (also see Deresiewicz).
While you can argue the nuances of individual cases, it is the broad perception of basic fairness and reasonableness that ruled the day.
Another class blind spot is segregating class by race or any marginalized groups. In filtering by identity and perceived systemic victimization, marginalized communities are the victims of an oppressive system resulting in their economic disenfranchisement. The white working poor are seen as not having such systemic impediments.
The perverse result is that the age-old trope of poverty as a marker of laziness or lax moral standards (unworthiness), while seen as racist when applied to narrowly defined victimized and marginalized groups, is an accepted bias when applied to the white working poor. As defined unoppressed “privileged” white people, their economic and social conditions are of their own making.
While progressives would vehemently deny such bias, the focus of their policy actions and rhetoric signal it to the white working poor. In a perverse twist, the effective Jim Crow project of undermining class solidarity amongst the poor via identity politics persists, but this time the perpetrators are those seeking to lift minority groups. Identity politics is a toxic cocktail that poisons all who try and wield it.
Theater of the oppressed
The activist progressive left has internalized a fantastical world divided into two simplistic groups – the oppressors and the oppressed. Who “deserves” to be in each group is decided by those who view themselves as better, smarter, and morally superior. While “technically” in the oppressor class (largely white, financially secure, and educated) they are banking on absolution for championing the causes of the defined (by them) oppressed.
“Oppressors” are inherently evil or hopelessly misguided, and always to blame. The oppressed are always right, always justified in any actions, and completely blameless. This tragically simplistic mindset is how you get the belief by some that those Israeli children, as well as attendees at a music festival, were occupiers who deserved to get slaughtered, and that Hamas was justified in doing the killing.
There are certainly bloody hands all around and the slaughter of civilians never justifies the slaughter of civilians. However, the tragic irony is that Hamas has gleefully killed anyone in Gaza who protested them, was gay or trans, or did not adhere to the protesters’ ideology. In other words, those like the elite college protesters who position themselves as champions of the oppressed.
Domestically, the theater of the oppressed translates into the position that those who steal, riot, or vandalize are justified and their targets deserving. All this is absent any serious analysis. At its core, this simplistic way of thinking is colonialist and racist because it imposes an identity on a group without its consent to serve a particular external elite ideology. It denies the elite-defined oppressed the dignity of individual agency. It empowers those few elites within a group to speak for that group even if race is the only aspect they share.
Next: How the regressive left and toxic identity politics articulates in Eugene.
Western Exposure is a semi-regular column that looks at issues and challenges from a West Eugene perspective – a perspective that is often ignored or trivialized by city leadership and influential groups and individuals largely based in south and east Eugene.
Western Exposure rejects the fauxgressive party line, performative politics, and “unicorn ranching” policy in favor of pragmatism focused on the daily experiences of residents and small businesses in Eugene—and West Eugene in particular.
Ted has been involved in neighborhood issues since 2016 as an elected board member, and now chair, of Jefferson Westside Neighbors and has 30+ years experience as an activist and community organizer. He earned a Ph.D. in Communication (University of Washington) and served on the faculty at San Jose State University from 2007 to 2020.
Ted’s research on social movements, activist use of technology, media law and policy, and online pedagogy has been published and presented internationally and he taught classes ranging from research methodology to global media systems. He and his spouse live in Jefferson Westside with an energetic coltriever and some very demanding and prolific fruit trees.
