Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi at House Speaker’s St. Patrick’s Day Friends of Ireland Luncheon. March 2009 (White House Archive: Public Domain).
Well I thank you for your question, but I have to say we’re capitalists. And that’s just the way it is.
-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi
You know you live in a world that loves neoliberalism when having some people of color who are rich is supposed to count as good news for all the people of color who are poor.
-Walter Benn Michaels
At a televised “town hall meeting” hosted by CNN less than a month after Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi took a question from NYU college student Trevor Hill. Citing a May 2016 Harvard University IOP poll that revealed that a slight majority of 18 – 29 year olds “no longer support the system of capitalism,” Hill asserted that the younger generation was moving left on economic issues. He added that he was very excited by the Democratic Party’s willingness to move to the left on social issues, and that as a gay man he very much appreciated the willingness on the part of Rep. Pelosi and other Democrats to fight for gay rights. What he wanted to know, however, was if there was any way that the Democrats would be willing to move to a more populist left position as a counter to the successes that the alt-right had recently achieved in rallying a populist right. Rep. Pelosi answered by saying,“Well I thank you for your question, but I have to say we’re capitalists. And that’s just the way it is.”
I offer Nancy Pelosi’s answer as exemplary of the attitude of the neoliberal left. It’s exemplary in the sense that it reflects a willingness to champion progressive positions on social and cultural issues, but only in a manner that treats criticism of existing economic arrangements (“the system of capitalism,” to borrow Trevor Hill’s language above) like the third rail of politics.
To be clear, there is a complimentary neoliberal right version of this attitude as well (one that champions conservative positions on social and cultural issues). This likely comes as no surprise given that neoliberal economic policy is often associated with Reagan Republicanism. For a quick refresher on neoliberal economic policy, I recommend taking quick glance at the brief introduction to the neoliberalism section of In Dark Times.
While volumes can (and have) be written about the neoliberal Republicans, it’s the curious case of the neoliberal left that I want to focus on. By curious I mean in the respect that any putatively ‘left’ politics that decouples itself from economic concerns appears curious. Economic equality, working class social policies, social welfare, egalitarianism: these have historically been the bread and butter issues of left politics. But the neoliberal left by and large isn’t concerned with these things.
What the neoliberal left is on board with is anti-racism, women’s rights, and LGBTQIA+ rights–that is, with social justice carefully conceived (i.e., decoupled from political economy). It’s in this respect that it claims to be a left politics. This makes a certain sense. These social justice issues have roots in an earlier progressive politics, in feminism and the civil rights movement, dating to a time prior to this neoliberal disengagement from economic concerns. And yet this economic disengagement reflects a change in the nature and goals of these social justice issues in some fairly dramatic ways. Consider, for example, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign. Frustrated that civil rights gains hadn’t done much to improve material conditions for African Americans, in May of 1967 Dr. King argued that it was time for the civil rights era to transition into a human rights era that entailed tackling poverty–not just African American poverty, but poverty as such. The Poor People’s Campaign reflected this effort to build a broad democratic coalition to fight for economic justice for all people. It was, in short, an anti-racist left politics. By contrast, the neoliberal left, by abandoning this broader struggle for economic justice, effectively inverts Dr. King’s aspirational trajectory rather than advances it. We perhaps shouldn’t be surprised then, that today when we celebrate the life and accomplishments of a ‘neoliberalized’ Dr. King, we don’t attach importance to the fact that he was murdered in the course of supporting a labor strike.
Economic equality, working class social policies, social welfare, egalitarianism: these have historically been the bread and butter issues of left politics. But the neoliberal left by and large isn’t concerned with these things.
In a sense then, the neoliberal left looks like what a ‘left’ politics might look like if it was concocted by rich people–people who, as Walter Benn Michaels notes, tend to become “more liberal” about “social issues” as they grow wealthier, “as long as these social issues are defined in such a way that they have nothing to do with decreasing the increased inequalities brought about by capitalism, which is to say, taking away rich liberals’ money.”
In another sense, the neoliberal left looks like the Democratic Party of the last generation–especially after Bill Clinton’s Reaganesque New Democrats moved the party to the center-right. And frankly, it also looks like much of what passes for ‘the left’ in American academic circles since the Reagan-Thatcher revolution of the 1980s.
Viewed in this light the neoliberal left begins to look less like ‘the left’ and more like the market logic of neoliberal capitalism itself. In what follows I want to suggest that this is exactly how we ought to view it. By doing so, certain perplexities about the commitments of what has passed as ‘the left’ for a generation cease to be so perplexing. As we’ll see, there are perfectly intelligible reasons–market reasons–why the neoliberal left champions “social issues” but is hostile to “class politics.” There are perfectly intelligible reasons why the neoliberal left mobilizes the former to obfuscate and sometimes outright attack the latter. In what follows I draw on a growing body of scholarship, ranging from the work of Adolph Reed Jr. and Walter Benn Michaels, to Wendy Brown, Michelle Alexander, and Karen and Barbara Fields, that demonstrate, compellingly in my view, how and why this is the case.
Viewed in this light the neoliberal left begins to look less like ‘the left’ and more like the market logic of neoliberal capitalism itself. In what follows I want to suggest that this is exactly how we ought to view it.
A Note About Function versus Intent
The way things in the world function is often quite different from the way people intend for them to function. Tactics and practices sometimes get repurposed, co-opted, redirected to different ends. That’s a bit of a platitude, I know, but I think it bears acknowledging here because a lot of the social activists who fall under the umbrella of what I’m calling the neoliberal left engage in advocacy work motivated by the best of intentions. I’m thinking here of people who fight for recognition for marginalized communities–women, people of color, the LGBTQIA+ community. Many such activists view identity-based social justice movements–despite their lack of focus on economic justice–as the very substance of progressive politics in America today. However, recognition doesn’t lead necessarily to emancipation. Respect for difference doesn’t lend itself to the kind of political solidarity needed to change the world. And as Barbera Fields argues, the identitarian reification of race, despite its anti-racist intent, likely reproduces oppression more than it destroys it. “Evil may result as well from good as from ill intentions,” Fields reminds us. “That is the fallibility and tragedy of human history–or, to use a different vocabulary, its dialectic.”
It will be important to examine the neoliberal left, not from the point of view of its better intentions, but in terms of the way it functions.
Diversity without Equality
At a functional level, the neoliberal left is an anti-left. It’s a manifestation of what Wendy Brown (extrapolating from Michel Foucault) describes as a neoliberal governing rationality. Regardless of how progressive certain aspects of that governing rationality may appear, functionally speaking it serves the market imperatives of neoliberal capital. I’m not going to deep-dive into what Brown means by neoliberal governmentality in this piece (for a great overview, see my friend Tedd Siegel’s essay Economic Fatalism & Neoliberal Governmentality). For current purposes, we can gain instructive insight into one relevant aspect of neoliberal governmentality by examining the central argument of University of Chicago economist, Nobel Laureate, and neoliberal pioneer, Gary Becker’s influential work, The Economics of Discrimination. Becker made a case against discrimination, not on moral or human rights grounds, but on market-based economic grounds. Discrimination, Becker argued, diminishes the real income of all groups who participate. It’s not just bad for the victim. It’s bad for markets. As you may well know from personal work experience (I certainly do), this bit of neoliberal orthodoxy, in the form of diversity and anti-discrimination training, has been incorporated into nearly every corporate HR program in America.
At a functional level, the neoliberal left is an anti-left.
It’s key to note, however, that it’s a particular kind of discrimination that Becker identifies as bad for markets–the kind based upon non-pecuniary considerations (i.e., those that don’t have to do with money). This includes considerations like race, color, sex, religion, and personality. Becker expressly was not saying that economic discrimination is bad for markets. Quite to the contrary, inequality (and the economic ‘discrimination’ that inevitably produces it) is a necessary component of healthy market competition. That is to say, inequality is not only good for markets. It’s essential.
Neoliberalism is anti-discriminatory and pro-inequality. Per the logic of its governing rationality then, left identity politics as a politics of anti-discrimination (anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-homophobia, anti-transphobia, anti-religious bigotry, etc.) is good for markets. Moreover, its valorization of respect for difference over equality maps neatly along pro-market pecuniary/non-pecuniary lines. Class politics on the other hand is pecuniary in nature. Struggling against economic exploitation, fighting for economic justice, while good for the life prospects of poor and working people, are bad for markets. If you observe just this bit of neoliberal governing rationality alone, you get the neoliberal ‘left’.
What we end up with, Adolph Reed has noted, is a notion of social justice that “meshes well with neoliberal naturalization of the structures that reproduce inequality.” Even radical inequality is perfectly ‘just’ according to this logic, so long as that inequality isn’t based on race, sex, or gender discrimination, and as long as you ‘prove’ this lack of discrimination by demonstrating diversity within the various strata of inequality. It would be considered perfectly acceptable if “1% of the population controls 90% of the resources,” Reed argues, so long as “roughly 12% of the 1% were black, 12% were Latino, 50% were women, and whatever the appropriate proportions were LGBT people.”
In his 2006 book, The Trouble with Diversity: How we Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality, Walter Benn Michaels made a similar point regarding elite academic institutions via a scathingly effective pop culture reference. In the seventh episode of the 15th season of The Simpsons, Homer takes the family Christmas shopping at Springfield Heights Promenade (“That’s the rich people’s mall!”). At the entrance of the mall is a sign that reads, “Our Prices Discriminate Because We Can’t”. Referencing this episode, Michaels argues that American universities have effectively become a rich people’s mall. Minority recruitment and diversity programs ensure that rich kids are enrolled in percentages that reflect the broader population, which of course does nothing to address the grim truth that access to higher education by poor and working class kids, regardless of their ‘non-pecuniary identity’, is increasingly inaccessible.
At the entrance of the mall is a sign that reads, “Our Prices Discriminate Because We Can’t”.
Such diversity programs are not only a poor substitute for economic justice. As Michelle Alexander notes in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, they’re also “the epitome of racial justice purchased on the cheap.” Achieving diversity among elites, whether in the form of an African American CEO or an African American President, can count as a victory for poor people of color only on the hypothesis of a “trickle down theory of racial justice.” A trickle down theory of racial justice works the same way as Ronald Reagan’s trickle down economics–meaning it doesn’t work at all. As Michaels puts in the epigrammatic quote at the beginning of this piece, “You know you live in a world that loves neoliberalism when having some people of color who are rich is supposed to count as good news for all the people of color who are poor.”
A Buried Order of Politics
My own interest in examining the neoliberal left grew out of research that lead to a piece I posted a few months ago entitled The False Dilemma of Class versus Race. That work arose from my attempt to better understand the relationship between economic exploitation and racism–a relationship that is fundamental, well documented, and to my mind obvious. Works ranging from W.E.B. Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction in America and Eric Williams’ Capitalism & Slavery, to Cedric J. Robinson’s Black Marxism and Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, demonstrate clearly that the birth of race and the birth of capitalism are coeval. This is a proposition that is intelligible, by the way, only if we learn the lesson Karen and Barbara Fields hope to teach us: that race is an ideology rather than an essence. In posing such a question, I ran headlong into what I argued is a false dilemma: a suggestion, prominent both in popular culture and in intellectual circles, that I really couldn’t explore the relationship between economic exploitation and racism because class and race are distinct, separate, and largely incompatible issues. Instead, I needed to choose a side. And lest I be accused of racism, I needed to choose very carefully.
Given the history of American chattel slavery as a matter of fact, wherein certain human beings racialized as black were owned outright so that their forced labor could be harvested to build wealth, this race-class pseudo-dilemma seemed to me quite fantastic. Deprived of its economic context and motivations, America’s history of slavery becomes a story of pure racism, as if elite plantation owners enslaved African Americans, not because there was profit to be made from oppressing them and exploiting their labor, but simply because as white supremacists they hated black people so much. The problem with such an accounting, among other things, is that it lacks anything approaching explanatory rigor. It’s woefully inadequate. As Adolph Reed notes, racism stripped from its broader social and economic contexts functions like “a devil theory: racism and white supremacy are represented as capable of making things happen in the world independently, i.e. magically.”
Not being one inclined toward magical thinking, it was in attempting to make sense of this decommodified and de-economized institution of slavery that it first dawned on me that I might be dealing with what Wendy Brown describes as a “buried order of politics.” As a ruse of capitalism, the salient point here isn’t so much that racism is responsible for slavery. The salient point is that capitalism isn’t responsible. This revelation was, for me at least, the key to cracking the mysterious case of the false dilemma between race and class. By dividing economic politics from identity politics, and as Barbara Fields argues, even by decontextualizing black history from history, identitarian anti-racism (and other forms of identity politics) can be mobilized to both defend neoliberal market arrangements and to mask their exploitive effects.
Walter Benn Michaels notes that this very tactic explains, in the face of all of the social and political unrest in the aftermath of the great recession, “the extraordinaire [sic] eagerness of American liberals to identify racism as the problem, so that anti-racism (rather than anti-capitalism) can be the solution.”
As a ruse of capitalism, the salient point here isn’t so much that racism is responsible for slavery. The salient point is that capitalism isn’t responsible.
In the last election cycle, in fact, we saw this tactic mobilized against the populist right when Hillary Clinton described Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables”. To be fair to Clinton, she only put “half of Trump’s supporters” into the basket: “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it.” She also mentioned another basket. One full of “people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change.” In other words, this was the basket of Trumper redeemables she hoped to woo for votes. Nevertheless, the tactic was deployed as it had to be. Clinton wasn’t facing a member of the neoliberal right (e.g., Jeb Bush, John Kasich, Marco Rubio), who respected the same third rail that she did. She was facing a populist insurgency of the right. And while they’d been told, via an identity politics of the right, that immigrants had stolen their ‘white working class jobs’ rather than global neoliberal capitalism, Clinton couldn’t very well correct the story.
Clinton’s division of Trump supporters into two baskets partially reveals this buried order of politics. Her “basket of deplorables” charge is part truth (after the horrific events in Charlottesville, Virginia last August there should be no doubt that there are plenty of deplorables in the basket) but also part devil theory (i.e., people support Trump because racism!). It functions as a devil theory in two senses. First, it operates as a kind of virtue signaling to the Democratic base–a complimentary antipode to the Trumpian white supremacist dog whistle. Second, it detours the base from heading down the path her vanquished primary challenger (Bernie Sanders) would have lead them down in explaining Trump’s popularity: economic dissatisfaction with the neoliberal status quo. In other words, it’s a way to (reiterating Michaels) “identify racism as the problem, so that anti-racism (rather than anti-capitalism) can be the solution.”
Speaking to the other basket, however, Clinton was addressing, not her own base, but potentially persuadable, economically disillusioned voters. Acknowledging this other basket exists threatens to undermine the devil theory in another way–in this case, an explanation of poverty rather than an explanation of Trump support. There are poor people in this other basket, and due to the sheer demographic majority of self-identified white people in America, most poor people in America also happen to identify as white. As Michaels observes, if there are white poor people, “they are poor not because they are the victims of prejudice; they are poor because of other structures of exploitation.” According to Gary Becker they ought to be okay with their poverty on the grounds that they’re poor on perfectly just, market-friendly grounds (i.e., they’re not victims of non-pecuniary discrimination). The election of Donald Trump suggests, however, that they fail to appreciate this.
Identity Politics and Racecraft
In the section above we saw how identity politics, as a “devil theory” is used to shield neoliberal market arrangements from criticism. But this manoeuvre isn’t only a defensive tactic. It’s also employed offensively, as a wedge used by wealthy elites to undermine solidarity amongst poor and working people. Via this manoeuvre, as Karen and Barbara Fields argue (and Adolph Reed echos the charge), identitarian anti-racism–again, often contrary to good intentions–reproduces and continues one of the original functions of race ideology.
Barbara Fields cites a rebellion in Virginia in the 1670s where ”a large class of young (white) freedmen, landless, single, discontented–and well armed” launched a popular rebellion, “plundering the property of the well-to-do”. This rebellion planted “suspicion and fear of the growing white lower class in the minds of the rich and powerful.” Chattel slavery offered a safer means than indentured servitude in providing the necessary free labor that was fueling the birth of capitalism. And as Edward Baptist argues, pulling off this transition without discouraging European immigration required the invention of race. And similarly, forging a republic where men are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, while continuing to provide the slave labor fueling nascent capitalism, also required the invention of race.
Forging a republic where men are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, while continuing to provide the slave labor fueling nascent capitalism, also required the invention of race.
In her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander argues that the original Jim Crow laws were motivated in large part by the same aim. When a late 19th century populist movement began making headway by forming “an alliance between poor and working-class whites and African Americans,” wealthy white elites “raised the cry of white supremacy” in an effort to redirect white worker’s class hostility against their black “competitors”. And the racial caste system of Jim Crow then undermined any further possibility of a “multiracial alliance of the poor.”
In both of these cases–and there are many more like them–racism relies upon the ideology of race (as Karen and Barbara Fields put it, “the first principle of racism is belief in race”). An effective anti-racism, then, ought to involve attacking and undermining belief in the ideology of race. But this isn’t what identitarian anti-racism does. Instead, it reifies and reproduces race and demands that we respect it. Or in Adolph Reed’s parlance, it essentializes ascriptive identity. This is done via the practice of racecraft described in detail in a collection of essays and lectures by Karen and Barbara Fields published under the title Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. Racecraft transforms a practice–what racists do (racism)–into an identity–who the victims of racism are (races). Race and racism, the Fields sisters argue, come from different families of social construction. “Race belongs to the same family as the evil eye. Racism belongs to the same family as murder and genocide.” Race is a “superstition” and a “hoax.” Racism is a “crime against humanity.” And while the pseudoscience of bio-racism has long since been debunked, the reproduction of race continues apace. “Those who create and re-create race today,” Barbara Fields remarks, “are […] the academic “liberals” and “progressives” in whose version of race the neutral shibboleths difference and diversity replace words like slavery, injustice, oppression, and exploitation, diverting attention from the anything-but-neutral history these words denote.”
Racecraft transforms a practice–what racists do (racism)–into an identity–who the victims of racism are (races).
We’ve seen race employed as a wedge tactic again and again, not only by the neoliberal right, but also by the neoliberal left. The working class is white. The “white” working class is racist. Democratic socialists are racists. People who criticize identity politics are racists. And so on.
Weaponizing Identity Against the Left
Heading towards the New Hampshire primary in February, 2016, Hillary Clinton was polling 17 points behind Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Polls suggested that Clinton was especially behind among young voters. So on February 5th, at a campaign event, fellow former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright broke it down for young women.
“We can tell our story about how we climbed the latter,” Albright explained. “And a lot of you younger women don’t think that you have to…that it’s been done. It’s not done! And you have to help. Hillary Clinton will always be there for you, and just remember: there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.”
To many progressive young women who supported Senator Sanders, the triangulation of Albright’s accusation seemed to point directly at them, and they didn’t appreciate it. Albright later apologized, explaining that she did not intend to tell a large number of voting women to go to hell. Nor did she mean to imply that women should support political candidates on the basis of gender alone.
The next day, February 6th, 2016, Gloria Steinem appeared on Bill Maher’s HBO TV show Real Time with Bill Maher. Steinem argued that there was a serious gender and race gap between support for Hillary Clinton and support for Bernie Sanders, with most women supporting Clinton. When Maher countered that this was not true of young women, that in fact young women “really don’t like Hillary,” Steinem explained, “When you’re young you’re thinking where are the boys? The boys are with Bernie.” Maher and his audience seemed momentarily dumbstruck. How could a Second Wave feminist icon like Gloria Steinem utter such a starkly condescending (if not outright misogynistic) insinuation about the political motivations of young women? The next day Steinem posted on Facebook that she had “misspoke”.
“When you’re young you’re thinking where are the boys? The boys are with Bernie.” -Gloria Steinem
One week later, on February 12, 2016, the Congressional Black Caucus endorsed Hillary Clinton for President. Several members of the Caucus made speeches, including legendary civil rights leader and Representative from Georgia’s 5th congressional district, John Lewis. What Lewis wanted Democrats to know was that during the entirety of the civil rights era he never managed to bump into Bernie Sanders even once.
“I never saw him,” Lewis announced. “I never met him. I was the chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee for three years. From 1963 to 1966. I was involved in the sit ins, the freedom ride, the March on Washington, the march from Selma to Montgomery, and directed the voter education project for six years. But I met Hillary Clinton. I met President Clinton.”
Sanders supporters were outraged by what Lewis seemed to be implying, insisting that Bernie Sanders had been a bona fide activist during the civil rights movement. Some cynically quipped that despite the fact that Lewis somehow didn’t happen to see him among the roughly quarter of a million people in attendance, Sanders had attended the March on Washington in 1963. Later that month the Chicago Tribune produced an archive photo of 21-year-old college student Bernie Sanders being arrested at a Chicago school segregation protest. Finally, some Sanders supporters pointed out that according to her own autobiography, Living History, in 1964 teen-aged Hillary Rodham had been a young Republican Goldwater Girl, supporting the presidential bid of a conservative Republican Senator who voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The next day Rep. Lewis clarified that he hadn’t intended to express doubt “that Senator Sanders participated in the civil rights movement,” adding, “neither was I attempting to disparage his activism”.
These statements from Albright, Steinem, and Lewis, together with their following day mea culpas, reflect a willingness as loyal DNC foot soldiers to leverage their considerable clout to support the Clinton election machine. They also illustrate the way in which the Democratic Party uses identity politics as a weapon against the left. And given the timing, this weaponization was clearly orchestrated.
These examples also fit into what journalist Briahna Joy Gray describes as the “Bernie Bro” narrative–a narrative that “attempted to paint Sanders supporters as disproportionately sexist (and Sanders himself as borderline bigoted).” “[I]n a world in which personal identity has become a shorthand for “progress” (see e.g. Obama), and “white man” has become an epithet,” Gray writes, “Bernie’s identity was an easy target.”
Gray, herself a Sanders supporter and a woman of color, notes how the Bernie Bro framework has the effect of erasing leftist women and leftists of color:
“It’s disorienting to see white (and black) liberals calling leftists of color sellouts, Uncle Toms, “coons,” house-slaves, and well, white people, all in the name of anti-racism. But the Bernie Bro framework tells us that all the racists are at the fringes of the political spectrum, while the middle remains pure. Progressive women or leftists of color therefore present a kind of glitch in the matrix. The solution? Deny our existence. Leftists of color are regularly told—by white liberals!—that we are white and/or secretly racist.”
But the Bernie Bro framework tells us that all the racists are at the fringes of the political spectrum, while the middle remains pure.
At this point it should come as no surprise to us that the “pure middle” that Briahna Joy Gray describes in the quotation above maps to the centrist sweet spot of the American political spectrum. This pure middle is the political home of the neoliberal right (the Reagan-Bush Republicans) and the neoliberal left (the Clinton-Obama Democrats). Bearing this in mind, I want to return one last time to NYU student Trevor Hill’s question at the opening of this essay. Is there any way that the Democrats would be willing to move to a more populist left position as a counter to the successes that the alt-right recently achieved in rallying a populist right? The Bernie Bro framework tells us no, because the populist left and the populist right are crawling with racists and only the virtuous center remains pure. But this answer is disingenuous. Nancy Pelosi was telling the truth. The real answer is no because “we’re capitalists. And that’s just the way it is.”
Coda: The Center Does Not Hold
Speaking of “glitches in the Matrix”, last month a 28-year-old Latina named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez defeated 10-term incumbent and Democratic caucus chair Joe Crowley to win the Democratic primary bid to represent New York’s 14th Congressional District. A self-described democratic socialist and member of the Democratic Socialists of America, Ocasio-Cortez refused to take corporate PAC money and funded her campaign solely on the basis of small individual donations. She ran on a robust progressive-left platform, including Medicare for All, a federal jobs guarantee, free college tuition, the abolition of ICE, housing as a human right, and support for LGBTQIA+ rights.
With Ocasio-Cortez’s primary win, the Bernie Bro framework has begun to break down. In an article published in The Intercept on June 12th Glenn Greenwald observed that the DNC’s tactic of weaponizing identity politics that was on full display during the 2016 election cycle is conspicuously missing from the 2018 midterm cycle. There are several reasons why.
First, the kinds of identitarian attacks that stuck to “angry white man” democratic socialist Bernie Sanders just don’t seem to stick to “young Latina” democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. That’s not to say establishment Democrats didn’t throw various shit at the wall to see what might stick. Despite her strongly issues-based campaigning, Joe Crowley, for instance, tried a reverse-psychology Jedi mind-trick by accusing Ocasio-Cortez of trying to make the campaign “about race.” Similarly, on Twitter Greenwald cited a case where Ocasio-Cortez was attacked for “supporting two leftist male candidates over neoliberal opponents” in Kansas on the grounds that one of the neoliberal candidates was a Native American woman.
But this is only the tip of the iceberg. After the Women’s March on Washington in January of 2017 many women vowed to run for office to oppose the Trump agenda. And many of those women are now in primary challenges running to the left of Democratic incumbents. And suddenly the party of diversity and inclusion–the pure middle–is “inexplicably” rallying around its straight white man incumbents. Cynthia Nixon would not only be the first female governor of New York, but also the first openly LGBT governor. And yet the Democratic establishment, including Hillary Clinton herself, is rallying behind Andrew Cuomo. Has Clinton forgotten that there is a special place in hell for women who don’t support other women? Greenwald also points out that Chelsea Manning would be the first ever transgender senator. And yet when she announced her intention to challenge straight white male Benjamin Cardin of Maryland, “centrist Democrats maligned her.”
This seeming about-face on social justice still shouldn’t surprise us. Since weaponizing identity politics isn’t working on women and people of color, neoliberals on the right and the left have rended the veil to go after the left (which has been dormant for a generation) straight on. Former FBI director and registered Republican James Comey has pleaded on Twitter. John McCain’s daughter Meghan had a meltdown about socialism on The View. Former Democratic Vice Presidential candidate Joe Lieberman went off on socialism in the Wall Street Journal. And California Democratic Representative Maxine Waters recently stated emphatically, “The Democratic Party is not a socialist party.” At least the neoliberal left’s anti-leftism is out in the open now. Just remember, if and when the dust settles and they try to remind you how much they care about social justice, that Nancy Pelosi told it to us straight in a rare moment of candor: “We’re capitalists. And that’s just the way it is.” .
