The first two weeks of the Trump presidency ought to be engraved in our memories as if in granite. We are witness to three simultaneous crises: a crisis of the working class, which, fractured by race, region, citizenship status and religious belief, lacks political cohesion or organisational representation.

Then we have a crisis of the ruling class, which was bullied and backed into a corner by a megalomaniacal kleptocrat who stole their candy, and who has no respect for the core institutions of class rule or for the stories his class brothers and sisters tell each other about the delights of the prevailing world order.

And a crisis of the state, in which far-right ideologues, autocrats and theocrats, having captured the governing apparatus, are rapidly concentrating power in the executive while bureaucrats scramble toward either dissent and defiance or appeasement and accommodation.

In response to these crises, a highly consequential debate about the direction of the Democratic party rages among academics, pundits and politicians. Sparked by the Columbia University professor Mark Lilla in a New York Times opinion piece, this debate is most active among liberals, but ranges both rightward and leftward as well.

Blame the identity apostles – they led us down this path to populism | Simon Jenkins Read more

The controversy focuses on the role of “identity politics” in Hillary Clinton’s presidential defeat. Essentially, the debate turns on whether the Democratic party and Clinton, in their embrace of racial, religious and sexual minorities, forsook working-class white people, who responded to their abandonment by casting their votes for Trump.

According to this perspective, the journey back from the devastation of 2016 requires that the party take an indefinite break from identity politics to concentrate on winning back economically squeezed white workers. There’s a leftish version of this line – an economic fundamentalism that posits that bread-and-butter issues trump all others. The classic liberal version, seemingly reasonably, demands the subordination of the part to the whole, the interests of particular groups to the national interest.

Both boil down to the same thing: it’s time to subordinate the rights claims of various “interest groups” to an economic agenda that prioritises solving the distress of white workers. Only this adjustment will create the conditions for Democrats to make gains in congressional and state-wide races and retake the White House in 2020. (Or, in the leftish version, only this adjustment will set the foundation for building a successful workers’ movement.)

Where the Democratic party lands on this issue matters enormously. The traction this analysis gains will impact the flow of attention and resources of the party, liberal thinktanks and liberal philanthropy, as well as the focus of progressive organisations. It is likely to determine how the Democratic party positions itself relative to 2018 and 2020, and whether that positioning has the intended effect of creating a sufficiently broad electoral coalition to roll back Trumpism. With so much at stake, it is worth taking a moment to examine what might be problematic about analyses that lay 2016’s rout of the Democratic party at the feet of “identity politics”.

It’s never a good idea to enter willingly into a frame your opponent has constructed to entrap you. The term “identity politics” is part of a whole vocabulary including “thought police,” “politically correct,” and “liberal elites”, whose main intention is to undermine the legitimacy of liberal and left politics. Uncritically adopting the “identity politics” language of the right is the equivalent of dropping our guard and waltzing on to their terrain. Master’s tools, master’s house, anyone? We need to recognise a toxic frame when we see one and refuse to be a party to its proliferation.

Disaffected rust belt voters embraced Trump. They had no other hope | Richard C Longworth Read more

Setting aside questions of language and framing, there is in fact an expression of identity politics core to the evolution of our nation and critical to how we understand the current juncture. White identity and nation-building have been bound together since way before the founding fathers and the drafting of our framing documents. The rest of us have had to fight our way into the body politic. Or, in the case of Indian nations, make the best of a spectacularly unequal and uneasy standoff.

The conceptual contrast between white Christians and “red savages” underwrote relentless territorial expansion and genocide. Between white Christians and “black savages”, the enslavement of Africans and the appropriation of their bodies, their labour, their progeny; between “brown savages” and white Christians, the taking of the south-west; between the “yellow peril” and white patriotic Americans, various exclusions, internments, property appropriations and ghettoisations.

This is not to project the racial sensibilities of today back onto social and political environments that operated on completely different sets of assumptions but to reckon with the degree to which the nation-building project has been, at the same time, a white identity formation project. Until we collectively “get” this, some will continue to deny the white rights subtext of “Make America Great Again”, or be surprised at how powerfully it resonated. Trump’s victory is virtually incomprehensible without a reading on the dynamics of white identity and national formation. The liberal inquiry into the role of “identity politics” in Clinton’s loss is pointed in a direction diametrically opposite to where one might find answers.

This is not an argument against addressing the concerns and economic anxieties of white workers. It is an argument for:

(1) addressing those concerns as a component part of a larger story about the declining fortunes of the class as a whole;

(2) refusing to make concessions to racism, heterosexism, xenophobia, Christian supremacy, or misogyny while addressing those concerns;

(3) being clear that the displacement of white economic anxiety on to black people and immigrants is neither warranted nor wise;

(4) being clear that the postwar deal of expanding economic fortunes for a wide swath of white workers is completely off the table; what is on the table is the search for new forms of multiracial, multiethnic, multigendered worker organising that applies itself to the riddle of how to effectively extract significant concessions from 21st century capital;

(5) understanding that the work of addressing the economic and social concerns of white workers, and winning them away from thoroughly reactionary politics, is not principally an issue of crafting the best messages and communications strategies to produce results in the next election cycle, but a long-term, no-short-cuts proposition to which a battalion of people and organisations will need to devote their lives.

Themes of 2016: the battle to decide one’s own identity Read more

A liberal imagination perversely fixated on the alleged excesses of “identity politics” forgets that social movements of the marginalised are the spark and spur of democracy. The abolitionist movement and the civil rights movement extended democratic rights to the formerly enslaved and perpetually reviled, removing a deep moral stain from the nation. The women’s movement unleashed the potential and talent of half the country’s population.

While the small-minded argue about bathrooms and pronouns, transgender activists, at great risk to themselves, have gifted us with a far more capacious understanding of the evolving spectrum of gender identities and expressions. None of these movements is “done”. Each has advanced not just the interests of a singular identity group, but also the ambit of freedom for all. Most assuredly, the generation that stepped forward in the wake of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown will not stand down just because some liberals are having a panic attack.

We are all navigating treacherous terrain, seeking a way forward. At least some of us know that not a single development over the past period indicates that the way forward requires that we abandon our freedom dreams. To the contrary.