Did you ever wonder where the debate over trans-gender bathroom rights came from? Surely there must’ve been some actual incident, some gender-identity 9/11, something horrific enough to mobilize both conservative and progressive activists into their current scorched-earth strategy of political opposition, leaving nothing but worn-out pundits in their wake? Did a gang of drag queens assault an underage girl in a Disneyland bathroom?

Though seldom acknowledged, the debate actually started in Houston from a local anti-discrimination bill: the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO). It passed into law in 2014 with widespread support across city council party lines. Yet HERO was repealed only a year later after opposition groups like the Family Research Council created petitions and fear-mongered over men dressing in drag to assault little girls in the bathroom. Then when North Carolina did its thing, Houston was all but forgotten. Whether or not an actual incident occurred suddenly was beside the point.

Welcome to Identity Politics in America.

Identity politics (IDP) needs no historical context or accuracy to serve its real purpose: keeping the spotlight off events that actually impact voters’ lives.

That’s not to say that we shouldn’t care about the most marginalized in our society or fight for them. 0.6 % of the U.S. population are directly effected by the Trans Gender Bathroom rights conversation but it takes up a significantly higher percentage than that of campaigning, airtime and ink.

There’s no time to hold our elected officials accountable for bad governance. We’re too busy laughing at Weiner’s dick pics and fuming over Donald Trump’s Twitter account.

Meanwhile, not so long ago, a sitting president and his admin deleted 22 MILLION emails at a time of war and barely anyone noticed.

Why do we not care about 22 million emails, yet Clinton’s 33,000 deleted emails received daily coverage for 12 months straight?

And why the endless tweets about “pussy grabbing,” when we hadn’t researched, say, the ramifications of Trump’s economic plans or even insist that he provide one in detail prior to votes being cast? Was that “hot mic” audio incredibly uncouth particularly with the thought that this man could be running the country? To many yes but apparently not to almost 50% of all women that voted in this past election and memories of Lewinsky long past being stoked once again by those that made their careers off that story- identity politics’ greatest hits.

Such hyper-partisan concerns have received disproportionate coverage even when compared to virtually identical events in the recent past. And the gap is widening even further, now that we’re often getting a different headline or tone based on our demographic, geared to rile up our own preferred brand of outrage. It’s an odd blend of personalized factual detachment and obsessive consumption, as infectious for Democrats as it is for Republicans.

The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same…

How did we get to this place?

Take the 2016 presidential election. Have political flip flopping and expediency become more accepted? Did Hillary Clinton lose the election simply because anyone who didn’t vote for her is a sexist, racist, fascist and classist? And how can the most loyal members of Trump’s political base justify his obvious, opportunistic lies? I’ve never heard a response to that question that varied too far from “… but Obama and Hillary.”

Do Democratic party loyalists even admit that Obama and Clinton are also world class liars?

The polarizing effect Hillary Clinton has had on the electorate for decades is the perfect subject to study when discussing identity politics in America. She is one of the few high level government officials to have virtually every moment of her decades in national politics accessible somewhere on the internet. A career in which every word uttered in public would be dangerous for ANY politician, much less one as controversial as Clinton. More on that later.

Shaming, blaming, and scapegoating have become the order of the day as people publicly shout their political ideologies from the mountain tops of social media comment threads, which strangers then climb to conquer your talking point with their talking point. Reproductive rights, gay marriage, policing, religious freedom, terrorism/national security et al.

Snopes and Politifact: Taking Information Out of Its Original Context

Snopes and Politifact further narrow the scope of historic context to deliver verdicts on information such as Mostly True or Mostly False, just so we could, for example, “win” arguments about whether or not Bernie Sanders’ invitation to the Vatican was an endorsement by the Pope.

More recently, Politifact rated the veracity of a “Viral Image of Democratic Senators and ‘Big Pharma” as MOSTLY FALSE for this reason

“The statement contains some element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression, so we rate it Mostly False.”

Double speak like this allowed the identity politics leveraged by the Clinton campaign against Sanders’ to turn voters who “liked Bernie but totally unrealistic” into

“an old commie-freebie-misogynist, whose supporters were not much better than Trump’s,” as identity politics began to get really nasty during the 2016 primaries.

For the first time the Democratic Party rejected progressives (See Nina Turner) even though the party and commenters on Facebook often repeated that Democrats had “the most progressive platform in party history.”

Clinton’s primary challenger was the only political opponent or pundit that DIDN’T want to leverage Clinton’s email woes, but the base decided the nomination campaign against Clinton was too tough after decades of being in the crosshairs of the right wing hate machine.

“Only a straight white male could be #neverhillary”

“The way he pointed his finger at her is SEXIST!”

“I’m so sick of this ‘progressive purity test’”

“I <3 Obama”

These talking points appeared on Twitter during the day, and were peppering the conversations of Democrats by suppertime.

Sides are chosen, nuance is completely lost.

In our non-partisan, three part examination, I will examine when and why mere differences in political philosophies mutated into all-out hatreds.

Initially, the labels “Conservative” and “Liberal” were created to describe philosophies of “government spending,” not to describe culture or lifestyle. How many times you heard people say:

I’m fiscally conservative but socially liberal?

It’s a phrase that pisses off people from all sides, and perhaps it should: it’s a completely made-up designation that didn’t exist until hyper-partisanship and identity politics became the order of the day. Yet, as seemingly evasive as that self-description seems, there’s a nuance to it that more people seem to be waking up to, even if they can’t quite put their fingers on what’s happening with identity in America. Without declaring political agnosticism, perhaps there is a richer approach than merely adopting the entire ideology of one side or the other?

Now, my intention here is NOT to say that you can’t choose sides, or that we should hold conservative and liberal positions to have equal merit. But I do humbly request from you, my beloved readers, that you approach the following words with intellectual and emotional honesty. They attempt to do the one thing that NEITHER Clinton or Trump could (or would) come close to doing: uniting “We the People.”

An example of the honesty I request are like the claims that many of you make about not being a Democrat OR a Republican, which Politifact would call MOSTLY True, since we all adopted one of these political affiliations at one point in our lives, even if we reject them now. But to me it seems like a lot of people use that rejection as a way to avoid accountability and honesty, as opposed to it being some sort of clarity to the state of political affairs in America.

Even now a fairly large percentage of you that have read up to this point might be wondering who I voted for- as an excuse to stop reading when I “cross the line.” For people who say things like “Putin’s Puppet” I’m sure you’re wondering to yourselves if I was one of the people that would say things like,

“Clinton is not much better than Trump”

or

“Clinton is the most corrupt politician in history”

The Never Ending Existential Threat To Your Friends, Family & Peer Group

Democrats and Republicans in America have functioned together very well through various configurations and bouts of minorities and majorities in the House and Senate, with no party holding power in the executive for too many consecutive terms since the era of Franklin Delano Roosevelt — a Democrat so liberal, he made Bill Clinton look like Richard Nixon.

Yet liberalism has been so demonized in the past 40 years that no nationally campaigning Democrat dared even to say the word “liberal” until Bernie Sanders came along, forcing Clinton yet again to transform her identity, rebranding herself as a progressive for the first time since Wellesley.

The fracas over labels rather than policies proves how far identity politics has separated, scared and driven otherwise apathetic American voters. We use our ballots to protect the “identity of America” from that which we fear, whether it’s transgendered bathrooms or sexist tweets.

I suspect the most polarizing part for most people who will read this is that Democrats are currently in just as deep of a trance as the Trump voter!

CNN BECAME FOX NEWS IN THE 2016 ELECTION

In the aftermath of 2016 election, the foregone conclusion of many people (including me) was that Hillary Clinton was selected in a room of shadowy bankers to be the next president of the United States. This was accompanied by the rise of the “post-fact” paradigm that left Democrats completely disillusioned and discombobulated about who “we ” are and what we stand for as a country. And CNN continues to pander to those viewers.

The endless discussions about sexism and racism shifted a bit, after Trump’s unlikely victory, to focus on his ties with Russia, classified clandestine dossiers, and his endless dissemination of early morning Tweets. It’s enough to fill all 24 hours of the news cycle, even as militarized police at Standing Rock sweep water conservationists out of protest camps.

And where are the rising stars of the Democratic Party?

Trying to help turn liberal voters into “birthers” with the Russian hacker story. Are there Russian hackers actively working against the U.S.? Always.

Did they “hack our election?” By definition, NO.

But the hyper partisan talking point is embedded into millions of hashtags now and those talking points will have as much of a legal impact as any of the drivel delivered by Fox News for the past 20 years- Nothing in the courtroom or impeachment proceedings. Only in the voting booth and in already abysmal approval ratings.

And that’s why the identity politics game is one that voters can never win and why we must resist the allure of the sexy headline, just dying to be shared. Even from the reputable publications I’ll discuss a bit later and in greater detail.

What happened to Democrats over the past few years?

The cultural hubs and major metropolises of America have a shared vision of a future utopia, when the cultural crimes perpetrated by the “white patriarchy” will finally be cast aside so that we could all live together in harmony, peace and love.

Yet geographically, most of America exists outside these hubs. THIS America was attempting to fortify its own utopian bubble at the behest of alarmists like Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and these two different visions did not reconcile with each other.

As the exploitation of financial conservatism transformed the Republican party to include cultural identities of religion and race, conservative think tanks and corporate lobbies successfully disguised corruption as capitalism, and declared liberals the enemy of their ideology. Corruption then slowly infiltrated the Democratic party with Citizens United money, ensuring its silence on issues of corporate greed. Thus “Social Justice” (divorced from its roots in economic exploitation) became the be-all-end-all topic of discussion. Outraged mobs on social media now shared viral videos of racial and cultural transgressions that shamed “the bigots,” meaning anyone who hadn’t assimilated quickly enough to increases of diversity in their communities.

Identity Politics creates stalemate instead of compromise.

Can’t we fight for equal rights for all, without forcing people who oppose it to pretend they like it when they are outvoted?

I’m starting to think there are some merits, some nuances, to evangelicals’ appeals for “Religious Freedom.” At first I found them ridiculous. But then I started thinking of the “way of the WASP,” which I describe a bit more below, and came to realize that our ridicule actually scared evangelicals into supporting a “sinner” like Trump.

To see things from their perspective (and this is where my request for emotional and intellectual honesty come into play), let me ask: would you bake a wedding cake for a couple who wanted a confederate flag on it? How about a Swastika?

Some angles that were hidden in plain site began revealing themselves to me shortly after the murder of Michael Brown and crystallized when the Trans-Gender Bathroom Rights debate went national. And the above thought has plagued me ever since.

Can one fight, and vote, for equal rights WITHOUT condemning the opposition as “evil?” Can we accept that people disagree with us on these issues, and respect their right to exist?

Let me be clear: minority groups in society should not be discriminated against! And we will continue fighting for equal rights for all.

But as Martin Luther King stated, you cannot legislate morality (and it was at this time that the “Silent Majority” and states rights were born anew. More on that in Part III.)

You can’t force those who have no experience with unfamiliar people or ideas into accepting what’s frightening to them, especially after they’ve been weaponized by right wing media into voting based on those fears. Only person-to-person interaction with new people and engaging with new ideas can melt away such frozen ideologies.

I Stopped Calling People Racists Online Over a Year Ago.

People who were born into diversity still don’t seem to understand that white, Christian power is still the status quo of America, no matter how many times they use the words “systemic racism.” There are many good, decent, loving and altruistic white people (and black and brown people, too) who don’t believe that the system treats anyone differently, and those people were never outcasts in groups of diversity.

But the once sympathetic but ignorant WASPS that hung out with our mongrel groups of black, brown, Jewish, yellow, and Muslim boys and girls that started to really mix together more when I went to Middle School in Santa Monica in the late 80’s/early 90’s were always clowned but cut some slack when they asked,

“Why is it OK for there to be a Black History Month but not a White History Month?”

The ignorant WASPS who we still welcomed then are now shamed and cast out of the liberal bubbles. They are forced to choose sides: either be shamed for their ignorance, despite their sympathetic desires, or be accepted and validated by their uncle Tony, the white nationalist, always handy with a Breitbart article written to magnify their ignorance and fear.

Conservative talk radio and news agitates and inflames. And now, since Trump has been elected, the ratings focus on programming of CNN has shifted from providing news to exploiting White Officer/Unarmed Black Suspect dog whistles. This coddles the liberal leaning outrage culture of today and solidifies CNN as infotainment rather than unbiased news.

Michael Brown was the last time I called someone racist on the internet. I’ve resisted the urge to do so numerous times all the way up to Philando Castile. That’s when it became so clear that inexperienced white people have ALWAYS been afraid that one day an army of “thugs” with saggy jeans was going to rise up and go roving affluent neighborhoods, raping white women and popping a cap in their fella. Then it hit me…

The patriarchy has been petrified about a “black uprising” since the creation of the N.R.A. and klansmen still openly served in police forces, public office and judicial positions of power.

Officer related shootings, along with a black president was a goldmine of identity politics and expedited a wider divide to be exploited between us.

Instead of any one of 100’s of op-ed’s that have been written since Trump was elected exploring these factors, people were spoon fed the simplest explanations related to Jill Sten or “30 Years of Republican Smear Campaigns.”

Trump is the result of exploiting the shaming culture that made “Straight White Male” a term to shame the ignorant, who are often times well-meaning people who just don’t have a lot of experience around the black, brown and LGBTQ (and any letter that maybe added in the near future) communities.

Groups of marginalized people that were once taboo topics of discussion are now being introduced through the public education system as early as elementary school in the liberal bubble cities, even as red state bubbles ban books that discuss these topics.

What Happens to Me if I Disagree With You?

Yesterday, I saw a VICE promo on HBO with images of prepubescent children getting ready to undergo gender reassignment surgery. It was a clip of a little boy sitting on a hospital bed. He was, at most, ten years old.



Should prepubescent balls be chopped off before they even drop?

Would you rail against me and boycott this piece if I asked whether it might not be a good idea for parents to allow children to make lifetime decisions on their physical composition before they’ve even begun pondering life’s other existential questions? Am I transphobic if that concerns me? Am I an irredeemable bigot if I don’t support every facet of the discussion that you do? Will I be boycotted for even posting this hypothetically?

My uncertainty has nothing to do with any negative feelings about transgender people. I think adults should do whatever makes them happy. And you, me or anyone else in the world doesn’t have to understand it to accept it.

Preaching to the Choir

For the duration of Part 1 of this series, anytime I address partisanship/parties, I’ll start with the party I first registered with when I was 18 and to whom I cast my first ever presidential ballot for, Slick Willy Clinton and the DNC.

Yes, I’m starting with you guys. My friends. The ones who have already been demonized as subhuman by Fox News and others for over 20 years. It might seem like I’m picking on you more, in parts but that’s only because how quickly I’ve seen weaponized IDP transform you since the round the clock 2016 election coverage first started in mid 2015- I fear it might be too late already. You should find joy in Part II of this series.



Rush Limbaugh was first born unto television to scare the shit out of conservatives during the Bill Clinton presidency and discussed Whitewater and the death of Vince Foster – conspiracy theories that survived over 25 years to haunt Hillary again in 2016 and are a part of the landscape that leads so many to conclude:

Hillary Clinton is the MOST corrupt politician that ever held office in government.

How do people come to a conclusion like that? How are points assigned? I submit that Hillary Clinton is at LEAST as corrupt as the system of government that she has thrived in. But how would she really score in the rankings of the Corruption All-Stars of American Government?

Do well documented, “conspiracy facts” such as manufactured and exaggerated CIA intelligence sold to Americans about WMD in Iraq by the Bush administration really just fall flat to Republicans unless a hyper partisan such as Alex Jones is discussing it?



Even as Democrats adopted the Russian hacker narrative instantly, which is the very definition of a conspiracy, the most seismic changes within the party platforms on both sides were so easily adopted because of (IDP).



Now, with their fear of Trump’s erratic politics and how much they heart the Obamas, so many seem unwilling to entertain any information that deviates away from focusing on the singular danger posed by that of Trump.

Do they not remember that just a few months ago, it was OBAMA that posed the singular threat and how ridiculous those people were the ENTIRE 8 years?

When liberals talk about the need to protect undocumented workers from Trump, do NOT ask where their zeal was when Obama was deporting more undocumented workers than anyone in history – I did, politely, and got pure venom for my troubles!

Now my liberal pals seem uninterested when I bring up that the Trump/Russian hacker story was “revealed” by the same people that provided us the evidence of “mobile chemical weapons labs” in the build-up to the Iraq war.

Wikileaks partisan hacking, the dividing of our country and the loss of nuance

Wikileaks hacks of DNC campaigns and candidates released authentic correspondence from high level Democrats that exposed such things as bias and conspiracy in the primaries, racist and culturally-biased strategy emails, pay-to-play in government, and even media collusion with political campaigns and advertisers.

Prior to the DNC Wikileaks dump that was released prior to their convention, the Clinton camp spent MONTHS denying anyone could’ve gotten into her emails.

Yet, it is clear beyond a shadow of a doubt that ONLY DEMOCRATS were targeted for publicly released hacks.

Still, the conservative and liberal masses were made to believe ONLY one of two narratives without hedge, nuance or any sort of historical context to debunk the simplicity of their narratives…

Either

Hillary Clinton, The DNC and liberals have been exposed as the main threat to America and its values,

or

Hillary Clinton, The DNC and liberals were the innocent victims of a foreign power interfering in our elections to benefit from a desired result from a sympathetic and possibly compromised candidate.

From the unfettered and anonymous forums of 4Chan that remain uncensored by liberal shaming mobs to the never ending FB comment threads that chain us to identity politics and political ideologies, I will attempt to put the events of today into a sequential historic context that should make it pretty clear how the fuck we got here.

This piece is part 1.

Part 2 will examine the identity politics that define the modern day platform of the Republican Party and its constituents and how the party transformed into what it is today starting with the advent of the Television.

Part 3 will examine the identity politics that define the modern day platform of the Democratic Party and its constituents and how the party transformed into what it is today starting with Bill Clinton’s presidency.

I will attempt to show that our current political paradigm is the culmination of this collaboration between politicians and a media that has been consolidated by 6 mega-corporations that own almost all of the radio, TV and print newspapers you consume.

6 Companies Own MOST of the Media YOU consume including…

Seen anything strange from the Washington Post lately? Hopefully you have. Fake News couldn’t be more obvious to most of us. But what is worse, Fake News, or a media that is constantly omitting key details from news stories and sensationalizing others?

Quick facts:

The Washington Post- This paper was bought in 2013 by a holding company of the non-social media overlord of the internet, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, for $250 million. Soon, Amazon might be one of these 6 companies.

The Wall Street Journal – The most respected financial rag in the world was bought by News Corp (Fox News/Rupert Murdoch). But who is News Corp owned by now? Huge multi-nationals corporations like General Electric, who are involved in military contracting and invested in energy companies, who also own such flagship media companies such as 49% of NBC Universal (51% owned by another media giant, Comcast), which also owns, Time Warner, Disney, Sony and Fox New’s parent company, News Corp.

Is there just a small chance that there could be an agenda, bias or conflict of interest in the news produced by this entity? If you accept that there probably is, then you can’t even call programming produced by this entity “News” by definition.

Even though nearly all of television was owned by three networks when television was born, we had a free press during a time when it was accepted that racial culture in Television was distinctly whitewashed, and that daily newspapers were the news authority.

Now, how often does cable news invoke race and culture?

To what lengths will failing newspapers go to try to stay alive and keep interest in an age when people (and sometimes news desks) get their news from Twitter?

Both parties have had decades of experience leveraging the identity politics and wedge issue playbook to get elected and re-elected, now with the assistance of special interest groups like Moveon.org and the Family Research Council, think tanks like The Brooking Institution and The Heritage Foundation, and the consolidated media that receives BILLIONS throughout the course of a presidential and mid-term election cycle since the 2010 SCOTUS ruling on Citizens United (a court whose identity and politics will forever be associated with Chief Justice Scalia, who is already receiving Reagan-esque canonization by the GOP).

For the most extreme examples of a think tank’s influence on government, check out the policy ideas of the now defunct but renamed and rebranded, Project for the New American Century (PNAC). Sound familiar?

Project for the New American Century: How the 24 Hour News Cycle Delivers Less Information

A great example of how identity politics and the media who exploit it seem to purposely remove historic context so that this PNAC that includes the father’s of the New World Order in which 10 of it’s 25 original members became part of the administration of George W. Bush. Context and history hardly cited when Alex Jones labels Obama and Hillary Clinton with the label of the Global Elite and the N.W.O. Are they part of the “global elite”? Of course they are – anyone in a position of power that high is.

Post 9/11 Color Coded Terror Alerts Reveal the Hyper Partisan

It seems like there is a new existential threat to address everyday. Each threat we face is neatly divided down party lines, or at least, that’s what the news media would have you believe. What gets lost in the emotional appeal of resistance is nuance because when nuance is introduced people become confused and wonder, “Are you with us or against us?” when “us” used to mean ALL OF US and “them” meant those that sat high in positions of power.

Fear mongering, morality meddling, outrage inducing grandstanding and globalized statements easily converted to sound bytes that let citizens know exactly who’s responsible for the downward trajectory and quality of their lives is nothing new. Genuine outrage is so easily induced now, it’s almost impossible to discuss a well covered issue in anything but terms defined by pundits and journalists who were given their talking points by a political think tank.

Twitter, Facebook and Buzzfeed deliver breaking news so quickly that once reputable, now struggling newspapers, publications and news desks sacrifice sourcing, research and risk retractions (WaPo) just to stay afloat and relevant, risking decades of reputation just to keep up. Or is it something more…

Identity Politics, the Corporate Media, Citizens United and the 2016 Presidential Election

The 2016 presidential election really kicked the partisan demonization of candidates and their base up a notch. The historic amount of money paid to partisan news outlets during the 2016 presidential election to produce two candidates with historically low approval ratings came in at a whopping $2.65 BILLION, and a total of $6.8 BILLION across all federal races according to the Center for Responsive Politics. And that number would’ve been even higher if Trump hadn’t been given unlimited free time on cable news, and if he hadn’t cut costs by hiring Cambridge Analytica (BREXIT) as his campaign management, to fuck with our emotions.

Two parties, dozens and dozens of candidates for various national political offices in which both “sides” talked about either “waste in government” or “helping the less fortunate” mentioned VERY little about the money wasted to discuss pussy grabbing, trans gender bathroom rights and whether Bernie Sanders and his supporters were a hyper sexist, progressive version of the Tea Party, which splintered the GOP and fractured into 2 parties a decade ago. Many pundits claimed that political party donors and corporate oligarchs, the Koch brothers, fractured the GOP on purpose. It’s a pattern we’ve seen again and again with all of our grass roots movements, from the FBI and The Black Panthers to Occupy Wall Street.

On the left, the Democratic Party and its surrogates have chewed up a lot of airtime beating into the voter consciousness President Trump’s candid comments caught on tape about pussy grabbing. It was the issue most discussed when explaining why Trump wasn’t fit to hold that office. This even as Joe Biden, the most prolific public pussy grabber in recent history, in a government that has historically been filled with expert pussy grabbers, was becoming immortalized by a medal ceremony for being the loyal “First Friend” of our first black president.

Watch the videos below, and imagine what he acts like when the camera is off! Even though I’m going to stay away from too much speculation and anecdotal evidence wherever possible, one thing that we must begin to do if we have any chance of taking our country back is to start believing our “lying eyes” and start defending each other, no matter what party we are affiliated with, or how well-executed the plan is to turn us against each other.



Begin watching this video at 10:44 for immediate impact. Search “biden groping” Not to excuse Trump but to make you think about what the news covers and doesn’t cover and why.

What is the Purpose of Identity Politics?

Issues like climate change are piggybacked off of cultural differences until every single issue, both big and small, becomes divided along party lines by politicians with a CLEAR corporate agenda and the corporate media they spend their ad dollars with.

Disguise that personal liberty power grab as a fight against immorality on one side, and fighting for the freedoms and rights of the vulnerable by suppressing speech on the other. Wrap it in fear, offering a protective legal blanket, fighting against damaging sexual perversion or identifying stereotypical defects in foreign and domestic cultures that dehumanize the individual to condemn an entire group – a fight against that which erodes the very fabric of American society and family!

Welcome to identity politics 101.

Only time and Freedom of Information Act requests retroactively reveal the rhyme and the reason behind today’s talking points, such as Russians interfering in our elections and infiltrating our government, or whether George Soros is funding all the liberals who protest everything, from Trans Bathroom Discrimination to the State of Israel. While CNN runs endless stories of broken headstones in Jewish cemeteries, outraged liberals scream “anti-semitism!” at the same time that “Zionist,” a word MLK called inherently anti-semitic, becomes a regular part of the vernacular.

Janky Smooth defines Identity Politics (IDP) as: An issue or set of issues that polarizes along cultural, religious or economic lines. Those lines are redrawn into political lines when a politician discusses (often grandstanding) the issue, often to create a political “line in the sand” that can be campaigned on/campaigned against using party demographics

Coming soon: Identity Politics Part II

Words: Danny Baraz