In 2016, it certainly seemed like the Bernie Sanders-Hillary Clinton split was defining a dynamic that would last for a long time: class-focused socialists bent on dramatic change opposed by centrists who weaponized identity politics to try and stop that change. It was very common for people to assume that this would be the battlefield for the American left-of-center moving forward. I did.
But that really hasn’t happened. The socialist left has almost entirely capitulated on its resistance to the dominance of identity politics in progressive spaces. Many of the identity-skeptical leftists I knew have adopted the identity language they once mocked. Some have simply gone quiet. And I think the reason is obvious: constantly being called racist for supporting Bernie really scarred them. It turned out that a lot of them really weren’t about that life. They were used to calling people racist, not to being called racist. And all of the bluster about how much they hated Clinton faded in a world where Trump was president. 2020 sealed the deal. People saw the great social and professional cost people were paying for even the most tepid criticism of the upheaval in the post-George Floyd moment and folded, fast. This dynamic has been exacerbated by the fact that most of the socialists that have been minted since Occupy Wall Street are very low-information, people with no backing in socialist history or theory. We were recruiting thousands of converts who were long on snark but who had no history of activism of grounding in leftist principles. So there wasn’t really anything for them to give up; they had no real socialism to abandon.
...The fight now is over the attempt to mandate this pinched vision of what the left is, to make identity liberalism literally the only left-of-center position. The insistence is that there is only identity politics or conservatism.
And so it goes: The rich continue to get richer and the poor poorer. As he goes on to say--
When you treat your political tendency like a cool party where people hang out, rather than as a vehicle to prompt change, you can’t tolerate anyone harshing the vibe. I have been an activist for my entire adult life and all of my political opinions are an expression of my peculiar form of Marxism, but since I’m identity-skeptical I must be called a conservative.
This faux Left is a feckless, impotent, smug Left, which, as I said in my previous post, is playing into the hands of the reactionaries insofar as it pushes the white working class and the so-called moderate suburban moms into the hands of people like Youngkin and DeSantis. With a Left politics that has come to define the Democratic Party like this, perhaps the only thing that will ensure that the Dems hold the White House in '24 is Trump's winning the nomination and running for the office from prison.
See also my "What It Means to be on the Left".