United States: a broken worldview – Identity Politics at a dead end

In the wake of Donald Trump’s victory, the bourgeois press has been engaged in sobering introspection about the decline of identity politics.

[Originally published at communistusa.org]

A Wall Street Journal article titled, “The New Driving Force of Identity Politics Is Class, Not Race,” begins with the following observation:

"New fault lines are emerging in American society based more on class than race. The shift helped deliver the White House to Donald Trump and could continue to alter the political landscape if more Americans identify themselves less in the context of race and gender and more as belonging to a certain economic class."

A similar piece published by the New York Times under the headline, “Why We Got It So Wrong,” puzzles over how an overtly racist, sexist, xenophobic candidate managed not only to win the popular vote against Kamala Harris, but also the majority vote among white women and Latino men, and to gain significantly among Black voters as well, as compared to his results in 2020.

By contrast, Harris outperformed her white billionaire opponent in two key constituencies: Americans who earn more than $100,000 per year, and white voters as a whole. While commentators described Trump’s original victory in 2016 as the “Great Revolt” of an abandoned white working class, his return to power in 2024 is unfathomable for both the liberal press and the American soft left, because the evidence doesn’t fit their narrow worldview.

Everyone has some sort of philosophy or worldview, whether you have a college degree or have worked blue-collar jobs all your life. Philosophy helps us to make sense of the world, to put myriad sensory data into a comprehensible order, and to anticipate the consequences of our actions. But not all philosophies are created equal, and both the liberal establishment and the liberal-socialists have adopted identity politics or “an identitarian mindset” as their guiding principle for the past 60 years. As the above mentioned New York Times columnist put it in the aftermath of Election Day, “Many of us are walking around with broken mental models. Many of us go through life with false assumptions about how the world works.” More succinctly, as the right sometimes says, “woke is broke.”

Among identitarians, it is taken as obvious “common sense” that a female politician will protect women’s rights, a Black politician will uplift other Black Americans, and a Latino politician will put immigrants’ rights on the agenda. This supposedly self-evident truth is always emphasized in the litany of “historic firsts” we should vote for: the first Black president, first woman president, first Black-woman president. Or, alternatively, the first convicted felon, twice-impeached president. The idea is that these capitalist politicians will somehow identify more with others who are also women, Black, immigrants, etc., instead of with other defenders of capitalism. Just one look at Obama’s or Hillary Clinton’s record proves the utter fallacy of this idea.

Unlike the proponents of identity politics, revolutionary communists begin our political analysis on a materialist basis. That is, we start from the real economic and political foundations of society rather than an idealized notion of how people think of themselves, i.e., their “identity.” To paraphrase Marx, men and women’s social being determines their consciousness, not the narratives that they tell themselves.

In capitalist society, the great mass of oppressed minorities are also workers, while only a handful are part of the ruling class. The ruling class’s mutual interests are far more powerful than those linking a Latino worker with Marco Rubio, or a woman worker with Hillary Clinton. Likewise, the executive of the modern state is not a neutral arbiter, but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie. Regardless of a capitalist politician’s personal identity, the capitalist state ultimately must protect the interests of the ruling class, which can only be achieved by exploiting and oppressing the working class.

Democrat Ruben Gallego won even though Latino voters backed Trump by a ten-point margin. Gallego is no friend of the working class but made a stronger emphasis on Latino workers’ economic worries / Image: Gage Skidmore, Flickr

For decades, the Democratic Party was able to rely on women and racial minorities’ votes with the promise of defending their civil liberties. In this election cycle, however, Muslim voters refused to support an administration that gave full-throated support to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Across ten states, 2.6 million voters chose to support both Trump and pro-choice ballot measures. It is unlikely that the majority of these voters believed that an alleged rapist would “protect women,” as Trump promised, but they likewise saw how the Democrats under the Biden-Harris administration failed to codify Roe v. Wade into federal law when they also controlled both houses of Congress.

Some see Trump’s victory as a reorientation to another identity: the working class. White workers in the Rust Belt are not the only ones who feel left behind in Biden and Harris’s “opportunity economy.” A plurality of Hispanic voters (40%) ranked the economy as their top concern, and two-thirds of these voted for Trump. Trump demagogically accused undocumented immigrants of stealing “Black jobs” and “Latino jobs,” and this was likely decisive for winning swing states like Pennsylvania and Arizona. While Trump clearly weaponizes his own sort of “identity politics,” the way he speaks about immigration and foreign policy also appeals to workers’ economic anxieties.

Arizona is a telling example. Democrat Ruben Gallego won his senate race even though Latino voters backed Trump over Harris by a ten-point margin. Gallego is no friend of the working class, but he made a stronger emphasis than Harris on addressing Latino workers’ economic worries. In a recent interview, he even said the quiet part out loud about identity politics:

"At some point these voters are like, OK, what are you offering me? What have you been offering me and what have you not? You’ve been delivering nothing for me the last couple of times, but great, I get to support you because you’re brown. But then I still can’t pay my rent. I’m still living at home."

Workers have attended the school of the Democrats for 12 of the past 16 years. They have learned that class, rather than any other “identity,” determines the policies of Washington politicians. For now, there is no mass workers’ party to give an organized expression to their discontent. Many commentators have described the recent election as a rejection of the “progressive Left.” In reality, it was a rejection of the do-nothing Democrats who promise and fail to defend women, uplift immigrants, and protect LGBTQ rights.

The incorrigible defenders of identity politics are welcome to navel gaze and wonder what’s gone wrong in America. For our part, the Revolutionary Communists of America see bigger opportunities than ever to grow our forces in a country where the working class is actively looking for a party that puts its interests squarely on the agenda.v