Ever since Donald Trump rode a wave of white working class support to defeat Hillary Clinton in last month’s election, a pernicious debate has emerged among progressives over whether the Democratic Party should continue to prioritize “identity politics” or instead reorient its message around economic populism.



Mark Lilla, a Columbia University professor and prominent advocate of the latter approach, argued in a post-election New York Times essay that liberals’ focus on identity has made them “narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups, and indifferent to the task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life.” He called for a “post-identity liberalism” to “concentrate on widening its base by appealing to Americans as Americans and emphasizing the issues that affect a vast majority of them.”

Lilla isn’t a major player in the Democratic Party, but versions of his argument have been embraced by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and Ohio Representative Tim Ryan, who ran unsuccessfully against Nancy Pelosi for House minority leader last month. Meanwhile, some critics say that a politics that fails to acknowledge unique intersectional identities can’t address the distinct challenges the come with them; that politics shouldn’t be colorblind, but color conscious. Others insist it’s impossible to separate identity issues from economic ones.

These are the tetchy waters into which Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress, waded on Monday—despite calling it “a little bit of an unhealthy debate.”

“The Democratic Party cannot turn its back on some of these core values,” Tanden said during a Q&A at her think tank with Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent. “I mean, this is a party that has represented the struggle for civil rights for 50 years, and to turn its back on those fights as we see particular groups under attack—whether it’s Muslims or undocumented immigrants or an effort to disenfranchise minority voters or people of color—would be a travesty.”