Don­ald Trump won in no small part thanks to cru­cial votes cast by down­ward­ly mobile white peo­ple across Amer­i­ca’s shat­tered man­u­fac­tur­ing belt. The media nar­ra­tive describ­ing a mas­sive right­ward shift by these vot­ers might be an over­sim­pli­fi­ca­tion. But the fact remains that a big chunk of a demo­graph­ic that sup­port­ed Barack Oba­ma in 2012 vot­ed for Trump or a third par­ty this year, or else stayed home. As a result, a renewed debate over whether to mobi­lize the ​“white work­ing class” is roil­ing the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty (and those to its left). The New York Times framed the ques­tion like this: ​“Should the par­ty con­tin­ue tai­lor­ing its mes­sage to the fast-grow­ing young and non­white con­stituen­cies that pro­pelled Pres­i­dent Oba­ma, or make a more con­cert­ed effort to win over the white vot­ers who have drift­ed away?”

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.

We might instead frame it like this: Peo­ple from left to cen­ter are engag­ing in heat­ed, rarely help­ful and often con­fused con­ver­sa­tions about ​“iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics” that present false choic­es about how to move for­ward. In the wake of Trump’s inau­gu­ra­tion, the debate has become some­what mut­ed as left to lib­er­al resis­tance has coa­lesced into per­sis­tent, mul­ti­fac­eted and enor­mous nation­wide protest move­ments. Dis­putes, how­ev­er, will no doubt reemerge and con­tin­ue to frac­ture the left wing of this resis­tance. While inter­nal debate is pro­duc­tive, a unit­ed front is cru­cial. At issue is not only the future of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty but, more broad­ly, the strate­gies of polit­i­cal resis­tance and social mobi­liza­tion under a Trump pres­i­den­cy and the future of an inde­pen­dent Left that has now set its sights on win­ning power.

Some lib­er­al writ­ers, like Rebec­ca Trais­ter, are con­cerned that appeal­ing to white work­ers will ulti­mate­ly dis­tance the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty from the ​“women and peo­ple of col­or” who make up its base. Mean­while, oth­er lib­er­als, hos­tile to ​“iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics” but by no means left­ists — intel­lec­tu­al his­to­ri­an Mark Lil­la, for exam­ple—argue that ​“Amer­i­can lib­er­al­ism has slipped into a kind of moral pan­ic about racial, gen­der and sex­u­al iden­ti­ty.” On the social­ist left, Shu­ja Haider and oth­ers skew­er ​“iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics” for divid­ing the col­lec­tive ​“we” nec­es­sary for rev­o­lu­tion­ary politics.

The first argu­ment assumes that a focus on class entails a nar­row focus on the griev­ances of white work­ers and the aban­don­ment of a diverse Demo­c­ra­t­ic con­stituen­cy; the sec­ond and third that nar­row iden­ti­tar­i­an appeals under­mine the more encom­pass­ing iden­ti­ty (“Amer­i­cans as Amer­i­cans” per Lil­la; the ​“work­ing class” for social­ist crit­ics) required for a suc­cess­ful lib­er­al or left coali­tion. Iron­i­cal­ly, despite their vehe­ment dis­agree­ment over whether ​“iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics” should be the mobi­liz­ing strat­e­gy, all three posi­tions pre­sume the same neolib­er­al fram­ing of iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics — posit­ing a zero-sum game between indi­vid­ual groups with nar­row and mutu­al­ly opposed inter­ests — that has guid­ed the lib­er­al estab­lish­ment for decades.

All three argu­ments are mis­con­ceived because they con­strue iden­ti­ty as atom­istic, and thus mis­un­der­stand the rela­tion­ship between what they call ​“iden­ti­ty” and class. Con­tem­po­rary Amer­i­can cap­i­tal­ism is a sys­tem struc­tured by race, gen­der and unequal cit­i­zen­ship — from hous­ing seg­re­ga­tion to the unre­mu­ner­at­ed sec­ond shift worked by women to the growth of the low-wage ser­vice sec­tor and its impact on immi­grants and women and on men dis­placed from man­u­fac­tur­ing. Those who are mar­gin­al­ized on account of their race, gen­der or immi­gra­tion sta­tus — or some com­bi­na­tion there­of — are dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly more like­ly to be poor and work­ing-class. A work­ing-class polit­i­cal pro­gram should but­tress rather than exclude the strug­gles of mar­gin­al­ized groups.

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.

“ Iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics” vs. ​ “ neolib­er­al iden­ti­ty politics”

Con­tra anti-“PC” cru­saders like Lil­la, the prob­lem is not that lib­er­als are exces­sive­ly focused on the rights of queer and non-white peo­ple — as Lil­la claims in a mean-spir­it­ed aside tar­get­ing trans­gen­der peo­ple, that lib­er­als spend too much time focus­ing on bath­rooms. Nor, in its left vari­ant, is the prob­lem that a uni­ver­sal­ly con­ceived class iden­ti­ty ought to super­sede par­tic­u­lar­is­tic group identities.

Achiev­ing a sense of shared class iden­ti­ty, as social­ists from Karl Marx to E. P. Thomp­son have long made clear, has always proved a chal­leng­ing task. And not just because of the way cap­i­tal­ism dri­ves a wedge between work­ers along lines of race, gen­der, reli­gion and eth­nic­i­ty — from white male-dom­i­nat­ed craft unions’ exclu­sion of women and peo­ple of col­or to white suprema­cy stymy­ing union­iza­tion dri­ves in the South. Cap­i­tal­ism also frag­ments work­ing-class iden­ti­ty by pit­ting work­ers against one anoth­er as they com­pete over jobs and wages, and hier­ar­chizes them by trade and rank. It down­plays people’s role as work­ers and val­orizes their iden­ti­ties as indi­vid­ual con­sumers. Cap­i­tal­ism, and not strug­gles for racial or gen­der jus­tice, is what pre­emp­tive­ly under­mines the poten­tial for shared and cohe­sive class iden­ti­ty among the work­ing-class majority.

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.

The neolib­er­al vari­ant of iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics ascen­dant in recent decades is suc­cess­ful in artic­u­lat­ing and mobi­liz­ing atom­ized iden­ti­ties, but it is an obsta­cle to build­ing broad move­ments ground­ed in sol­i­dar­i­ty because it regards those iden­ti­ties as mutu­al­ly opposed units. This pol­i­tics, adopt­ed as a polit­i­cal strat­e­gy by seg­ments of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic estab­lish­ment and uncrit­i­cal­ly rein­forced by its crit­ics, is rad­i­cal­ly non-inter­sec­tion­al. It assumes that social groups — say, gay or black — are homo­ge­neous mono­liths with uni­form inter­ests. And when class isn’t tak­en into account, social­ist crit­ics right­ly note that ​“iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics” has become a vehi­cle for the inter­ests of elite lead­ers who sub­sti­tute diver­si­ty in the White House and on Wall Street for sub­stan­tive jus­tice. Poor black peo­ple and poor white peo­ple both face increas­ing eco­nom­ic pre­car­i­ty and thus share many of the same griev­ances. Con­verse­ly, wealthy black elites share eco­nom­ic inter­ests with wealthy peo­ple as a whole — inter­ests opposed to those of the much larg­er num­ber of black peo­ple who are eco­nom­i­cal­ly mar­gin­al­ized. The same goes for wealthy women or wealthy LGBTQ people.

The fact of inter­sect­ing iden­ti­ty need not devolve into infi­nite frag­men­ta­tion. Rather, inter­sec­tions can ori­ent indi­vid­u­als and com­mu­ni­ties toward oth­ers pre­cise­ly through those points of par­tic­u­lar­i­ty and dif­fer­ence — nodes that, when linked, can strength­en people’s bonds instead of break­ing them. This debate is not mere­ly seman­tic. For the last 25 years, neolib­er­al iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics has not only hurt poor and work­ing class peo­ple but con­fused the Left’s expla­na­tion as to why it has happened.

Bill Clin­ton, the archi­tect of neolib­er­al iden­ti­ty politics

Though Trump rode nation­al­ist right-wing white iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics into the White House, the rein­car­na­tion of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty under Bill Clin­ton helped lay the ground­work. Clinton’s mas­ter strat­e­gy of tri­an­gu­la­tion (out-right­ing the Right) cou­pled neolib­er­al eco­nom­ics with mass incar­cer­a­tion and sold both with racial­ly cod­ed rhetoric. This strat­e­gy helped con­sol­i­date the ​“white work­ing class” (at the time, fig­ured as the white mid­dle class because far more work­ing peo­ple iden­ti­fied as mid­dle-class than they do now) as an iden­ti­ty — and as a reac­tionary polit­i­cal constituency.

In the 1990s, Bill Clin­ton employed anti-black racism to appeal to the ​“Rea­gan Democ­rats” who had been exit­ing the par­ty in part due to Repub­li­cans’ by-no-means-entire­ly-South­ern South­ern Strat­e­gy — a strat­e­gy abet­ted by Jim­my Carter’s anti-labor agen­da. This was the very same demo­graph­ic group that Clin­tonites today accuse the Left of appeal­ing to on the grounds of the nar­row sin­gle-issue of class strug­gle. Respond­ing to and draw­ing on the ris­ing con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment, Clin­ton out­flanked the right by back­ing wel­fare reform, the war on crime and a crack­down on immi­grants. He deployed racial­ized and gen­dered lan­guage to con­trast the cul­ture of ​“depen­den­cy” (implic­it­ly asso­ci­at­ed with black peo­ple, espe­cial­ly women) with ​“work,” res­onat­ing with the pre-exist­ing Rea­gan­ite trope of ​“the wel­fare queen” and racial­ly divid­ing the work­ing class between hon­est pro­duc­ers and belea­guered tax­pay­ers on one side and unde­serv­ing poor tak­ers on the other.

The increas­ing iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of pover­ty and wel­fare with African Amer­i­cans, and the stereo­typ­ing of black peo­ple as lazy and sex­u­al­ly irre­spon­si­ble, pre­cip­i­tat­ed wel­fare’s grow­ing unpop­u­lar­i­ty. Per­verse­ly, for­mal racial equal­i­ty facil­i­tat­ed neolib­er­al iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics by blam­ing poor black peo­ple for their prob­lems (what did they have to com­plain about now?) as well as the ascen­sion of a black elite uncon­cerned with the con­di­tion of the incar­cer­at­ed poor.

On mass incar­cer­a­tion, Clin­ton crowed that ​“it’s three strikes and you’re out.” On immi­gra­tion, Clin­ton boast­ed of sign­ing ​“a tough anti-ille­gal immi­gra­tion law pro­tect­ing U.S. work­ers.” Regard­ing wel­fare, Clin­ton con­demned a sys­tem that ​“under­mines the basic val­ues of work, respon­si­bil­i­ty and fam­i­ly, trap­ping gen­er­a­tion after gen­er­a­tion in depen­den­cy and hurt­ing the very peo­ple it was designed to help” (what Paul Ryan would lat­er call ​“offer­ing people…a full stom­ach and an emp­ty soul”).

Peo­ple of col­or bore the brunt of poli­cies, enact­ed at the local, state and fed­er­al lev­el, which dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly sub­ject­ed them to police vio­lence, incar­cer­a­tion, pover­ty and depor­ta­tion — with dras­tic social and eco­nom­ic con­se­quences. At the same time, Clinton’s race pol­i­tics pro­vid­ed him with the polit­i­cal cov­er to push through an eco­nom­ic agen­da that pri­or­i­tized finance over labor and so was detri­men­tal to work­ing class peo­ple as a whole. Of course, the race pol­i­tics were also eco­nom­ic at their core: wel­fare reform pro­vid­ed employ­ers with an expand­ed and unpro­tect­ed low-wage labor force while mass incar­cer­a­tion locked up huge num­bers of sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly dis­em­ployed young men and made them invis­i­ble to the public.

Wel­fare reform and the war on crime, though jus­ti­fied by appeals to racist stereo­types, ulti­mate­ly harmed many low­er income and work­ing class whites. As Ian Haney-López and Heather McGhee write at The Nation, racism has been the key tool that Repub­li­cans and neolib­er­al Democ­rats have used not only to advance racist poli­cies but to attack labor and shred social wel­fare pro­tec­tions across the board: “﻿The reac­tionary eco­nom­ic agen­da made pos­si­ble by dog-whis­tle pol­i­tics is respon­si­ble not just for the devalu­ing of black lives but for the declin­ing for­tunes of the major­i­ty of white fam­i­lies.” Wel­fare reform’s pol­i­tics — pre­sent­ing eco­nom­ic suc­cess and fail­ure as a reflec­tion of indi­vid­ual moral­i­ty — would smooth the way for a broad­er assault on the col­lec­tive under­pin­nings of human well-being, from George Bush’s ​“own­er­ship soci­ety” through Gov. Scott Walk­er’s dec­i­ma­tion of orga­nized labor in Wis­con­sin. These well-fund­ed and tight­ly orga­nized right-wing attacks on unions and the poor have been facil­i­tat­ed by the col­lapse of left-of-cen­ter work­ing class insti­tu­tions and the era­sure of class as a point of com­mon interest.

Divide and convince

Clin­ton, of course, still felt black people’s pain. As polit­i­cal sci­en­tist Claire Jean Kim argues, Clin­ton ini­tial­ly sought sup­port from whites by sym­bol­i­cal­ly reject­ing blacks (run­ning against ​“racial quo­tas,” mak­ing a point of pre­sid­ing over the exe­cu­tion of a men­tal­ly-dis­abled black man and rebuk­ing Jesse Jack­son vis-a-vis a mis­lead­ing denun­ci­a­tion of rap­per Sis­ter Soul­jah) and then lat­er employed a strat­e­gy of ​“pla­cat­ing blacks for their rel­a­tive lack of pol­i­cy influ­ence with large­ly sym­bol­ic gestures.”

Clin­ton kicked off his sec­ond term by apol­o­giz­ing for the Tuskegee exper­i­ments (he con­sid­ered back­ing a bill for­mal­ly apol­o­giz­ing for slav­ery, Kim writes, but decid­ed not to: it did­n’t poll well) and launched the One Amer­i­ca in the 21st Cen­tu­ry ini­tia­tive, a nation­al con­ver­sa­tion about race — neolib­er­al elites love con­ver­sa­tions about race — that empha­sized race rela­tions rather than racism and dia­logue over jus­tice. He also appoint­ed, Kim writes, a record num­ber of women and peo­ple of col­or to his cab­i­net, the judi­cia­ry and oth­er positions.

It’s a form of sym­bol­ic diver­si­ty pol­i­tics still very much in vogue, as seen in the Hillary Clin­ton campaign’s behind-the-scenes push to lever­age friend­ly woman and non-white writ­ers to attack Sanders, exposed in John Podesta’s hacked emails. Those emails also showed for­mer Labor Sec­re­tary Tom Perez, an Oba­ma ally chal­leng­ing Bernie­crat Rep. Kei­th Elli­son for DNC chair­per­son, push­ing the Clin­ton cam­paign to change the ​“nar­ra­tive … from Bernie kicks ass among young vot­ers to Bernie does well only among young white lib­er­als” — a nar­ra­tive that, giv­en Sanders’ strong sup­port from young peo­ple of any col­or, was false but res­o­nant for those primed to believe it.

Black faces in high places, the neolib­er­al take on ​“some of my best friends are black,” still pass­es for racial jus­tice in many cir­cles. Or as a New York Times head­line put it recent­ly: ​“Trump Diver­si­fies Cabinet.”

After the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Party’s crush­ing defeats under Rea­gan, Bill Clinton’s ver­sion of iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics did win mod­est plu­ral­i­ties of white work­ing class votes and tem­porar­i­ly slowed their slide to the right. But this strat­e­gy sac­ri­ficed the future of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty — not to men­tion the lives of many who were impov­er­ished or impris­oned — for short-term elec­toral gains. In the long run, Trump and the Repub­li­can Par­ty reaped the fruits of Clinton’s pur­port­ed genius: It was the Right, of course, that would ulti­mate­ly prof­it from the Democ­ra­t’s appeal to white reaction.

Bill Clin­ton addressed work­ing-class whites as whites rather than as peo­ple who shared eco­nom­ic inter­ests with work­ing-class black and brown Amer­i­cans, all while under­min­ing both their qual­i­ty of life and their main source of polit­i­cal pow­er: orga­nized labor. The finan­cial and eco­nom­ic poli­cies his ver­sion of iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics abet­ted caused the per­cent­age of work­ers who were union mem­bers to con­tin­ue its slide dur­ing the Clin­ton era from 16.1‑percent in 1990 to 13.5‑percent in 2000. This was ulti­mate­ly self-defeat­ing: Labor unions served as both the insti­tu­tion­al under­pin­nings of white work­ing class ties to the Demo­c­ra­t­ic coali­tion and the frame­work for inter­pret­ing their lives through the lens of their class interests.

Clinton’s strat­e­gy was intend­ed to woo white vot­ers by sev­er­ing the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Party’s per­ceived alle­giance to black inter­ests, but it didn’t stop the right from mak­ing its Nixon­ian case to white work­ers that the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty rep­re­sents an elite-under­class alliance set against hard-work­ing and tax­pay­ing (read: white) Amer­i­cans. Instead, by high­light­ing diver­si­ty while push­ing an anti-work­er agen­da, the strat­e­gy frac­tured the Demo­c­ra­t­ic coali­tion and facil­i­tat­ed the right-wing’s ascen­dance. When the cred­it bub­ble popped and Clinton’s eco­nom­ic gold­en age was exposed as a fraud, Trump was lying in wait to explain what went wrong.

Neolib­er­al iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics today

Oba­ma mod­u­lat­ed the Clin­ton mod­el with­out break­ing it. He offered mod­est reforms to the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem, orches­trat­ed both mass depor­ta­tions and then pro­tec­tions from depor­ta­tion for some immi­grants, boost­ed finan­cial reg­u­la­tion while fail­ing to attack Wall Street pow­er head on. He com­mu­ni­cat­ed his poli­cies not through the lens of par­tic­u­lar iden­ti­ties or class but rather by por­tray­ing Amer­i­ca as unit­ed by hope — some­thing along the lines of what Lil­la pro­pos­es. It was the friend­lier, cathar­tic inverse of George W. Bush’s post‑9/​11 mes­sage that Amer­i­cans stood togeth­er in their vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty before and sto­ic resolve against terrorism.

For Oba­ma, this approach reaped polit­i­cal rewards — he left office with an approval rat­ing of 59 per­cent — but the lack of a coher­ent pro­gram (com­bined with restric­tive vot­er ID laws and ger­ry­man­der­ing) allowed the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty to be wiped out at the state and local lev­el. Over the last eight years, the prob­lem with the par­ty has­n’t been embrac­ing iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics too fer­vent­ly, as Lil­la con­tends, but not con­struct­ing a tru­ly inter­sec­tion­al iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics aligned with a con­crete, broad­ly con­ceived and clear pol­i­cy pro­gram that can win elec­tions with­out a unique­ly skilled com­mu­ni­ca­tor in the White House.

Enter Hillary Clin­ton. She and Bill, as Hillary’s defend­ers are quick to note, are not the same per­son. But it is obvi­ous that they are the most pow­er­ful polit­i­cal part­ner­ship of our gen­er­a­tion, and each has been the oth­er’s top advi­sor. Hillary, after cling­ing tight­ly to her hus­band’s cen­trist image for years in the White House and the Sen­ate — and then recy­cling his racial­ly cod­ed rhetoric in her 2008 pri­ma­ry con­test against Oba­ma — rec­og­nized that Bill’s dog whistling was no longer a win­ning strat­e­gy in a Demo­c­ra­t­ic pri­ma­ry. In the cur­rent polit­i­cal con­text — marked by the emer­gence of Occu­py, the Move­ment for Black Lives and Bernie Sanders — — she shift­ed course to appeal to an increas­ing­ly left-lean­ing par­ty elec­torate. How­ev­er, rather than artic­u­late a com­pre­hen­sive and encom­pass­ing cri­tique of Amer­i­ca’s rul­ing polit­i­cal-eco­nom­ic régime (which, to be fair to Clin­ton, was a nigh-impos­si­ble task for a lead­ing mem­ber of that régime), she built a new appeal on the foun­da­tions of the old neolib­er­al iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics that tech­no­crat­i­cal­ly reduced indi­vid­ual groups to dis­parate data points with zero-sum interests.

At New York mag­a­zine, Trais­ter argued that Hillary Clin­ton ​“did not repeat her husband’s Sis­ter Soul­jah strat­e­gy and instead empha­sized themes of fem­i­nism and racial equal­i­ty through­out her campaign.”

It’s true: 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.

Dur­ing the Clin­ton era, it was the Left, bat­tered and divid­ed in the wake of Rea­gan, that unsuc­cess­ful­ly protest­ed police bru­tal­i­ty, mass incar­cer­a­tion, wel­fare dec­i­ma­tion and cor­po­rate rule. Dur­ing this year’s pri­ma­ry cam­paign, how­ev­er, Hillary Clin­ton turned this his­tor­i­cal debate on its head, sug­gest­ing that it was the Left that opposed the establishment’s embrace of racial jus­tice: Sanders’ pro­gram for class strug­gle, she warned, not only failed to attend to racial, gen­der and queer jus­tice but was also inher­ent­ly hos­tile to them.

“If we broke up the big banks tomor­row, and I will if they deserve it…would that end racism?” Clin­ton asked at a Neva­da ral­ly. ​“No!” the crowd cho­rused. ​“Would that end sex­ism? Would that end dis­crim­i­na­tion against the LGBT com­mu­ni­ty? Would that make peo­ple feel more wel­com­ing to immi­grants overnight?”As Matt Karp writes at Jacobin, Clin­ton staked her cam­paign on an ​“alliance between the Upper East Side and East Flat­bush,” appeal­ing not to work­ing class peo­ple of any race but to a nar­row sliv­er of mod­er­ate sub­ur­ban Repub­li­cans who she incor­rect­ly believed would be the swing vote turned off by Trump’s vul­gar­i­ty. As for­mer Penn­syl­va­nia gov­er­nor and DNC Chair Ed Ren­dell put it, ​“For every one of those blue-col­lar Democ­rats he picks up, he will lose to Hillary two social­ly mod­er­ate Repub­li­cans and inde­pen­dents in sub­ur­ban Cleve­land, sub­ur­ban Colum­bus, sub­ur­ban Cincin­nati, sub­ur­ban Philadel­phia, sub­ur­ban Pitts­burgh, places like that.”

That did­n’t work out so well.

The Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty elite, with an eye toward demo­graph­ic trends, com­pla­cent­ly believed that class pol­i­tics were unnec­es­sary because there were too few white work­ers and work­ers of col­or had nowhere else to turn. But demog­ra­phy is not des­tiny. Peo­ple of col­or, ham­mered by eco­nom­ic cri­sis and mass incar­cer­a­tion, were stuck with vot­ing Demo­c­ra­t­ic or stay­ing home — and many did the lat­ter. Obvi­ous­ly, most black peo­ple won’t join a Repub­li­can Par­ty that has become unapolo­get­i­cal­ly white suprema­cist. But as weak black turnout — though com­plete data is not yet avail­able, sharp declines have been report­ed in pre­dom­i­nant­ly black Philadel­phia, Mil­wau­kee, Wash­ing­ton, D.C., New York City, and St. Louis neigh­bor­hoods — makes clear, the par­ty can­not depend on black vot­ers unless it changes the con­tent of pol­i­cy to address racial and eco­nom­ic injustice.

Oba­ma now appears to be a charis­mat­ic inter­reg­num in a par­ty oth­er­wise ruled by a scle­rot­ic elite that lacks polit­i­cal vision and even the will to gov­ern. Seg­ments of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty lead­er­ship don’t want to learn any lessons from Hillary Clinton’s loss save for some throw­away lines about need­ing to bet­ter hone their eco­nom­ic mes­sage. Oba­ma, for one, put the blame not on eco­nom­ic poli­cies but on mes­sag­ing. It was, he told Rolling Stone, ​“a com­mu­ni­ca­tions issue. … What­ev­er pol­i­cy pre­scrip­tions that we’ve been propos­ing don’t reach, are not heard, by the folks in these com­mu­ni­ties.” Oba­ma, of course, is sell­ing his com­mu­ni­ca­tion skills short: no one does it bet­ter. The prob­lem is the pol­i­tics that Democ­rats have been try­ing to sell. As Eliz­a­beth War­ren put it last Novem­ber: ​“That’s where we failed, not in our mes­sag­ing, but in our ideology.”

Dur­ing the pri­ma­ry, Clin­tonites com­plained that Sanders’ strat­e­gy would side­line the inter­ests of women and peo­ple of col­or. Now, some allies of Oba­ma and Clin­ton (though by no means all) are intent on block­ing a lead­er­ship bid from Rep. Kei­th Elli­son, a black Mus­lim close to Sanders who seeks to refo­cus the par­ty on eco­nom­ic jus­tice to mobi­lize the work­ing class of all races. The oppo­si­tion stems from a heady cen­trist stew: on the one hand, dis­com­fort with Ellison’s alle­giance to Sanders-style class pol­i­tics (the pol­i­tics that sup­pos­ed­ly side­lines iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics) and on the oth­er, uneasi­ness with putting a black Mus­lim a the par­ty’s head.

The only path back to pow­er is a coali­tion that rep­re­sents a durable major­i­ty of Amer­i­cans. That coali­tion can­not be led by the Clin­tonites whose immis­er­at­ing and racist white iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics facil­i­tat­ed Trump’s elec­tion. If the Left is to take the lead in the fight and, ulti­mate­ly, pre­pare to take pow­er, it needs to dis­card the long-run­ning debate over iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics. As we have shown, pit­ting race, gen­der and sex­u­al­i­ty against class is mis­con­ceived and dan­ger­ous­ly divisive.

A rad­i­cal iden­ti­ty politics

Clin­ton­ian iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics has pro­voked, under­stand­ably, a vig­or­ous back­lash on the left, lead­ing some social­ists to con­clude that antiracist pol­i­tics is the ide­o­log­i­cal hand­maid­en of neolib­er­al eco­nom­ic policies.

Pro­po­nents of neolib­er­al iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics eschew an empha­sis on class nec­es­sary to enact broad social and eco­nom­ic trans­for­ma­tion for obvi­ous rea­sons: such a trans­for­ma­tion threat­ens the polit­i­cal-eco­nom­ic order they pro­tect and rep­re­sent. But anti-iden­ti­tar­i­an social­ists suf­fer from a sim­i­lar short­com­ing, if for dif­fer­ent rea­sons. By fail­ing to engage exist­ing col­lec­tive iden­ti­ties or hop­ing to argue them out of exis­tence, anti-iden­ti­tar­i­an social­ists also fail to rec­og­nize pol­i­tics and peo­ple as they are and thus how they can be mobi­lized for change. Racial or gen­der iden­ti­ty is not inher­ent­ly hos­tile to uni­fied class iden­ti­ty; iron­i­cal­ly, how­ev­er, the alien­at­ing polit­i­cal pos­ture of anti-iden­ti­tar­i­an social­ists may help to ensure that they are.

The pit­falls of equat­ing iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics with neolib­er­al iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics were appar­ent at a Novem­ber event in Boston, dur­ing which Bernie Sanders fell into the trap of knock­ing ​“iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics” — thus unfor­tu­nate­ly rein­forc­ing its nar­row meaning.

But what he sub­stan­tive­ly said was­n’t a crit­i­cism of iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics full stop but of such pol­i­tics in its neolib­er­al guise.

“It is not good enough for some­one to say, ​‘I’m a woman! Vote for me! … What we need is a woman who has the guts to stand up to Wall Street, to the insur­ance com­pa­nies, to the drug com­pa­nies.” He also said that hav­ing a black CEO was a good thing but not so great for black and Lati­no work­ers if they were exploit­ing their work­ers. From a stand­point of inter­sec­tion­al­i­ty this state­ment need not offend: If group inter­ests are not mono­lith­ic but instead con­sti­tut­ed by mul­ti­ple sets of pow­er rela­tions, then know­ing one vec­tor of an individual’s iden­ti­ty (gen­der, or race) does not tell you much about who they are or what their inter­ests might be. This fact should be uncon­tro­ver­sial on the left.

Pun­dits sup­port­ive of estab­lish­ment Democ­rats were nev­er­the­less aghast. One charged that Sanders wants ​“the left at-large to take up the man­tle of the white work­ing class — eras­ing in the process the unique mar­gin­al­iza­tion faced by women and peo­ple of col­or, who more often live in pover­ty than their white and male counterparts.”

Rad­i­cal iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics do no such thing.

Mar­gin­al­ized and exploit­ed groups form col­lec­tive iden­ti­ties in response to shared con­di­tions of dom­i­na­tion — often in direct oppo­si­tion to the iden­ti­ties imposed upon them by elites. To trans­form pow­er rela­tions, we must build sol­i­dar­i­ty between mar­gin­al­ized, exploit­ed and exclud­ed groups. That sol­i­dar­i­ty must be premised upon but not lim­it­ed to com­mon inter­ests so as to pre­empt efforts to divide workers.

Despite the online ran­cor, there are count­less exam­ples of rad­i­cal inter­sec­tion­al orga­niz­ing: cross-fer­til­iza­tion between Black Lives Mat­ter and Fight for $15 (as described in Sarah Jaffe’s recent book); the Move­ment for Black Lives plat­form , with its explic­it empha­sis on sys­temic racism and eco­nom­ic exploita­tion; hotel work­er union­iza­tion efforts spear­head­ed by Lati­na women; or mul­ti-racial and urban/​rural coali­tions to demand health­care as a human right.

Build­ing effec­tive mass pol­i­tics requires the artic­u­la­tion of forms of iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics that are durable and con­ducive to sol­i­dar­i­ty. This does not mean that there are no ten­sions between the demands of dis­tinct groups or between dif­fer­ent strate­gies and tac­tics to advance those demands. 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.

A protest against Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s pick for Labor Sec­re­tary, fast-food CEO Andy Puzder, out­side the Mia­mi Depart­ment of Labor on Jan­u­ary 26 shows what rad­i­cal iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics can look like. (Pho­to by Joe Raedle/​Getty Images)