Wayne O'Leary

The Left’s Achilles Heel

For the political left, 2020 should bring the best of times. The conventional laws of politics suggest that Donald Trump will by then be dead man walking, if he isn’t already, dragging his party to its well-deserved fate at the hands of the voters. Yet, a small voice disturbs the equanimity of most progressives with one nagging question: How will the Democrats screw it up this time?

In part, the question arises from the nature of the Democratic Party, its historic ability to turn a silk purse into a sow’s ear; it arises as well from the times we live in, which are made to order for such a disastrous turn of events, leading to a reprise of 1988, 2000, 2004 and 2016.

Ask yourself this: Are you feeling ignored, disrespected, put upon, angry to the point of being unwilling to take it anymore? If so, you’re like pretty much everyone in present-day America. Your malaise, somewhat psychological but for the most part real, can be addressed in two ways through the political system. One way is to deal with the genuine root of the problem, which is economic and related to material inequality and middle-class stagnation of 40 years’ duration; the other is to surrender to the momentary high of social assertiveness and group demands — what has come to be known as identity politics.

The danger for the left is that in 2020 it will choose the latter course, tearing itself apart and opening the door to a continuation of Trump’s reign of incivility, authoritarianism, and top-down class warfare. The signs of that happening are even now all too disturbingly evident, witness the circulation of bumper stickers at Democratic presidential rallies reading, “Anybody But a White Guy 2020.”

Since the 1930s, the Democratic Party has taken the form of a multihued, multicultural coalition of interests, whose racial and ethnic composition has lately been supplemented to include gender classifications. These interests need to be kept working in concert (think: herding cats) to achieve electoral success or passage of any sort of a political agenda, a task the times are increasingly militating against.

In the Depression era, the urban white ethnics making up a crucial element of the Roosevelt coalition — Irish Americans, Jewish Americans, Polish Americans, Italian Americans, and so forth — were able to set aside their differences and coalesce, because they were all poor and working class, and benefited equally from New Deal economic policies (Social Security, unemployment insurance, government work programs, union recognition, wage-and-hour legislation); they were all in the same boat, so to speak, a boat that also contained Democratic-voting African Americans in the Northern cities and white, native-born small farmers in the rural South. Today’s Democratic coalition, such as it is, feels no such pull of class solidarity.

In a culturally disparate, racially diverse, socially splintered country whose component groups are feeling aggrieved, slighted, and sorry for themselves, a political party trying to cobble together a feasible coalition has its work cut out for it; that’s the Democrats’ dilemma. Ideally, the answer should be to appeal to constituencies on the basis of shared economic interests, an approach that defined the Sanders campaign in 2016, but party momentum increasingly seems to be on the side of addressing perceived problems related to social identity.

An article in the current issue of Foreign Affairs by last fall’s losing (but lauded) Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Stacey Abrams, is entitled, “Identity Politics Strengthens Democracy” and calls for making explicitly racial appeals for nonwhite votes. This viewpoint appears to reflect polling by the Pew Research Center in 2017 suggesting that at least among registered Democrats — Republicans and Independents are another matter — racial discrimination is thought to be the main reason African Americans can’t make progress.

Instead of urging support for programs and policies broadly beneficial to the population at large, party leaders like Abrams, as well as a number of Democratic presidential aspirants, are frankly pandering, encouraging constituents to think in terms of a narrow parochialism. The end result is a mindset that (to oversimplify) might be expressed this way: “I’m gay” (or transgender, or a feminist, or Black, or Hispanic, or Native American, or Asian), “what are you going to do for me?” In all cases, one’s “community” supersedes one’s economic class.

Where this attitude is taking the Democratic Party was outlined in bold relief recently by the sudden demand for race-based government reparations to make amends for past slavery and historical discrimination against African Americans, and to close the nation’s black-white wealth gap. Such an initiative, variously estimated to cost anywhere from $100 billion to several trillion dollars, has unsurprising support in politically correct academic circles and among segments of the radical intelligentsia, but it is also favored by presidential candidates Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Julian Castro.

This knee-jerk concession to identity politics, thankfully not yet universal among the 2020 hopefuls, would be, if generally adopted by Democrats, a priceless gift to Donald Trump and the Republicans, who would use it in their own pale-complexioned version of identity politics. The country may be gradually becoming “majority-minority,” but according to the latest census figures (2010), it remains 64% white, just 16% Hispanic, and only 12% black. More than that, while endorsing reparations may be in part merely a ploy to win favor among black Democrats in next year’s early Southern primaries, the policy is a bad one on its face.

For example, shouldn’t historical reparations be somehow applied to the white-immigrant wage slavery practiced by America’s Gilded Age capitalists? And, with a deficit-ridden Treasury, where would the money come from for 400 years’ worth of open-ended slavery reparations, which proponents calculate would equitably require (at a minimum) 60 times the compensation Japanese Americans received in 1988 for their unjust government internment during World War II?

Presidential candidate Cory Booker’s alternative “baby bonds” proposal to provide poor children with federally funded savings accounts, prorated according to family income, is infinitely fairer; it would benefit black Americans without being race-based.

On the other hand, the Booker plan, though inclusive, would not expiate white sin, which race-obsessed reparations converts like New York Times columnist David Brooks consider a necessary purging. At all costs, Democrats can’t allow identity politics to take them down this dead-end road in 2020.

Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.

From The Progressive Populist, April 15, 2019

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