Since the election, commentators everywhere have been complaining that “we” lost because the broad left (counting liberals, progressives, and leftists) focused too much on what they dismiss as “identity politics” and not enough on the “working class.” I use quotation marks around both those terms because no one really knows what they mean. I also use them around “we” because it’s hard to discern what Harris’s loss means for different segments of an amorphous political formation whose constituents saw themselves as definitely, absolutely against Trump—but could not state what they were really for.
I’ve been writing little critical bits here and there, on social media, about the problems with this “class only” and “dump identity politics” approach, all the while working on a longer, historically inflected analysis of why it’s counterproductive and only bound to lead to further failures on the political front. My work on immigration gets at some of it, as does my work on abortion. But what I’m writing is a considered, detailed essay that digs deep into some of the biggest political issues and shows how a “class only” understanding is futile and betrays significant swaths of the population who are not just white, cis, and male.
That longer work will be published here after the break, but for now here is a short set of reflections.
On November 15, the New York Times interviewed Bernie Sanders on its news podcast The Daily. Titled “The Democrats Have Lost Their Way,” Sanders here showed all the parts of his character that he has become famous for: he was slightly cantankerous (in the way that only white men are allowed to be), blunt, and seemingly ruthless about the way forward if Democrats hoped to ever win again. Among the most circulated parts from the interview was his point that “There was no appreciation — no appreciation of the struggling and the suffering of millions and millions of working class people.”
This has been taken up by several commentators, and largely translated to mean that the interests of those defined by “identity politics”—trans people, people of colour, women, and other marginalised groups—had insidiously erased the importance of all class-related matters. As things stand, any number of op-eds and briefs now state that the only way to win, moving forward, is to focus on a purely class-based agenda.
The first problem with that analysis, such as it is, is that it misrepresents the Kamala Harris campaign. If anything, Harris made it clear that she had no interests in any identities and that she was only on the side of big business, even offering up Lina Khan as a sacrifice to her friends like Mark Cuban. On immigration, she made a point of emphasising that she and Biden had devised a far more inhumane set of policies, including turning away asylees at the border, and had only been thwarted by Donald Trump. And contrary to all of Trump’s claims—as well as those of many on the broad left—Harris was hardly promising anything at all to trans people, at a time when they are struggling for essential healthcare and resources.
The second and much bigger problem with the “class first/class only” approach is that it positions people with defined “identities” as somehow existing outside class. The reality is that only wealthy people who may be, say, gay or trans or women of colour can afford to live in a world where their identities are separate from their class belonging.
Consider the matter of trans identity and class. For many, perhaps most, trans people, coming out as trans can mean a sharp loss in economic stability and financial resources. Most narratives and reports about coming out emphasise the sense of liberation in finally feeling free to express a particular gender identity, but there’s much less to be found on the costs of coming out. Trans youth are much more likely to have to use sex work to survive, often in dangerous conditions, and adults who come out later in life often find themselves hurled out of stable work and even their families. It doesn’t help that mainstream LGBTQ organisations like HRC prefer to avoid what they think of as unseemly occupations like sex work, and only emphasise the “good” and “respectable” people who can become their literal poster children for the cause (said cause being vaguely defined as “Please like our rich white gays and trans people and let us be.”) HRC, it should be noted, refused to explicitly support Chelsea Manning, and suggested that she was a traitor.
When we position trans people and the issues they face as somehow outside of “the working class” (itself a contentious and, I will argue in future work, fictional category), we ignore the fact that they are also implicated in the economic precarity that marks the American economy. Just as critically, we ignore the fact that there are, imagine that, many trans people who also identify as working class. Yet, if you read the average leftist, you would imagine that, somehow, every trans person is a well-off, even wealthy individual who doesn’t need to worry about housing or healthcare. But Chelsea Manning, for instance, entered the army so that she might get a college education. This is the case for many Americans, including trans individuals who join the military—an institution that operates under an economic draft.
As Nathan J. Robinson succinctly put it to me, in a recent conversation, the use of the word “identity” in this case allows people to avoid admitting that they are effectively throwing trans people under the bus.
The same is true of race. Bring up matters like racism and many so-called leftists will scoff at how unimportant all of that is. In a society where class matters have been properly reconciled, they argue, racism will simply disappear. Yet, here again, racism is intertwined with economics. I live in Chicago, a city that is structured and functions like a plantation: getting from the South (mostly Black) or West (Latino/a dominated) sides to the North sides on public transportation can mean two buses and a train and several hours out of your day: the city has historically configured the system so that the darkies don’t blight the existence of all the nice white people in the city (or, wealthy people who are not white and don’t need to get to those parts). If you’re a person of colour of a certain economic class who also needs to use buses and trains to get to work, you’re stuck with either buying a car you can’t afford to maintain or spending hours of your day just getting there and back.
We could look at any number of ways that race is tied to class. Banking itself is a racialized (read: racist) enterprise, and predatory institutions like check cashing and payday loan companies thrive in low-income neighbourhoods mostly occupied by black and brown people. It takes a particularly obtuse kind of leftist—someone who should, theoretically, understand how economics is woven into every part of our lives—to deny these realities and declare that only class matters.
Americans have long hated the idea of class: the very existence of “America” as we understand it depends on a belief that there is no such thing. Today, the American left holds on to the notions of “class” and “working class” the way a barnacle might cling to a rotting ship. There is, on the left, a distinct sense of nostalgia for a time when “we” didn’t have to worry about supposedly frivolous matters like trans healthcare and civil rights, when “we” only fought for workers’ rights. All of this ignores the fact “we” didn’t see those issues because people who dared to come out for any reason—because they were gay or trans—were literally obliterated or, at best, thrust out of their lives and banished forever. “We” didn’t have to think too hard about race and gender if every single one of our workplaces and institutions, like colleges, deliberately excluded African Americans and women. As Lily Sánchez puts it, “We can disregard race—and we’ll still be left with racism.”
The way forward is to first decide what kind of a world we want to live in. If it’s a world where only white, cis men’s existence is validated, well, congratulations, we’re already there. While many on the broad left act like the cultural and political landscape is simply awash with people of colour, women, and trans people (all of which are commingling identity categories, by the way), the truth is that white cis men still rule: consider our next president. (The fact that his cabinet may well be the most diverse one ever does not prove much. Vivek Ramaswamy isn’t there because he’s of Indian heritage, but because he’s a very rich American.)
Sanders and others insist that we need “working class” leaders, but it’s unclear how, exactly, we go about that. Do we make people answer lengthy questionnaires about their family backgrounds? “How many members of your family have worked with their hands?” Do we demand to see their clothes, to determine that they’re union-made? What happens if someone loses their class status, despite coming from wealth and privilege? Do they now become working class? Is “working class” a question of generational identity or is it a question of earning power? Is Luigi Mangone a “working class” figure, as many insist? Is Brian Thompson?
“Working class” is a fungible and meaningless category.
If the left wants to move forward, it needs to stop fetishising the “working class,” a category that it has effectively turned into—oh, the horror—an identity unto itself, untouched by icky matters like race, gender, and sexual identity. If the left is to move forward, it cannot simply leave people behind, excusing itself for its betrayal of them under the guise of eschewing “identity politics.”
In 1992, James Carville helped craft a Democratic victory by constantly redirecting attention away from Republican attempts to bring up cultural and social issues with a simple phrase: “It’s the economy, stupid.” Today, Carville is a fossil from another era, whining about “preachy females” having taken over, and he needs to retire. But we can modify his catch phrase to turn away from all this current discourse about the “working class” and say, instead, “It’s the economic inequality, stupid.”
To focus on this illusory entity we call the “working class” is to latch on to a fictional character that has only ever existed as, at best, a contingent figure: politicians use him—and this is most decidedly a “he”—and ignore him when elected. It’s pointless to insist, as some no doubt will, that the “working class” can also include queer and trans people and women and people of colour, when the whole point of the term “working class” today is precisely to exclude all of those people from class and economic considerations. To keep evoking the “working class” is to embed ourselves in a nostalgic narrative that is dangerous to anyone who is not a white cis male.
The problem of our times is not that we don’t pay enough attention to the “working class.” The problem is that we live in an era of tremendous economic inequality, and that the basics, like healthcare and housing, are only readily available to an increasingly smaller number of people.
It’s the economic inequality that abides, much longer than any of the class categories we dream up or cling to. It’s the economic inequality that needs to end.
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