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Bernie Sanders recently appeared on the Flagrant podcast, featuring Andrew Schulz and his Indian American sidekick Akaash Singh, along with AlexxMedia and Mark Gagnon (the Black guy and the white guy, respectively: diversity is key here). The show is billed as a “comedy podcast,” which, these days, are just about bros hanging out together and trying very hard to be funny while they scratch their balls and snort their thoughts. Flagrant is pure Brolandia, and its extreme dudosity never seems to ebb. (To be fair, I have only watched this episode, but based on what I saw: I would rather pluck out my eyelashes one by one than watch any more). It suffers from what I have pointed out as the extreme sexism of the bro podcast world: “lefty men have long made it difficult for women to be a part of the left because they only see the latter as sexual playthings or believe that they’re only there to literally wipe up their puke and shit after raucous meetings.”
Flagrant does not seem to identify as “left” but it does appear to want to claim a not-right space, a kind of Left Lite, when convenient. Like many of their lefty bro brethren, they don’t take women seriously. Schulz has spoken about his shift rightwards, explaining that “Democrats were [once] cool, getting their dicks sucked in office” but “now, the president is getting pussy left and right.” Even on the Sanders episode, Schulz suggested one way to make ingenuity and enterprise appealing: “girls gotta start sleeping with teachers,” to which Sanders had no response. (Girls, of course, have neither.) We might recall Stokely Carmichael’s 1964 comment that “the only position for women in SNCC is prone.” He later apologised, and many have claimed that he was impersonating a fictional white reporter, but the words do, unfortunately, reflect the sexism seen in many left circles. There’s a reason why so many women, even in 2025, cycle out of left organising: they are treated as sexual objects whose only job is to suck dicks and wash the dishes after meetings.
In this context, of sexist pigs trying to grasp and convey his socialist politics to a wide, mainstream audience composed primarily of other sexist pigs, Sanders does well enough. Except, of course, when it comes to the crucial matter of what he and so many others on the left dismiss as “identity politics.”
We are now in the Second Age of Trump, so even a “comedy podcast” can’t just be funny: it has to take on the serious, weighty issues of the day. To that end, and to be fair to the four bros, the episode as a whole is what can be described as not-bad and Sanders hits his usual key points about billionaires (although he seems to no longer think that their very existence is a problem), the need for universal healthcare, a stronger educational system, and why we have to ensure that everyone gets what they need in order to thrive. This is what he has done so well ever since he burst onto the presidential campaign scene in 2016, and when he made waves again in 2020. There can be no doubt that we would be infinitely better off with him as president, and that the Democrats sidelined him and made sure he was never nominated. But while a lot of what Sanders has to say is always relevant—and he is still charismatic and eloquent and, bless his Brooklyn heart, strident—there are parts of his politics that have not done well in the years since 2020. A key message that he keeps getting wrong is a perennial schtick on the relevance of factors like race, gender, and sexuality to a larger left project.
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At one point in the interview, Singh asks Sanders if the criticism levelled at him and his followers, that they were racist and misogynistic, had to do with Super PACS. Sanders responds, “No, that was the Democrat establishment…We had a lot of young people, we had people of colour, and they [his opponents] create this kind of myth with the help of the corporate media.” At this point, Schulz steps back in and notes that the Democrats “labelled us the Podcast Bros and said that we were sexist and we were racist and bigoted. It’s almost like it’s the exact same strategy to get you out of there.” Sanders nods affirmatively and responds, “You get to what we call ‘identity politics.’ You’re Black, you’re wonderful, you’re tremendous, you’re gay, you’re the greatest human being on earth. And rather than say, ‘What do you stand for?’ You’re gay, that’s fine, but what do you stand for? Is every gay person brilliant and wonderful and great? No, of course not. Everybody’s a human being. So, the issue is ‘What do you stand for?’ Which gets you back to…class politics in the sense of ‘Which side are you on?’ Are you going to stand with working families? Are you going to raise the minimum wage through a living wage or not? Are you going to fight to guarantee healthcare to all people or not? Are you going to demand that the wealthiest people start paying their fair share of taxes or not? Those are the issues, and no one cares what colour you are, what your gender is, etc. etc.” The bros find all of this vastly amusing, and chortle in agreement with Sanders. No one reflects on the irony of four men complaining about being called Podcast Bros.
To the eternal credit of Twitter, Sanders has been roundly criticised on the platform for his comments. The podcaster Francesca Fiorentini has pointed out, in an episode of The Bitchuation Room, that while there is plenty to criticise about an “empty identity politics,” “race and identity are just as much a part of the broader labor movement” as class. She also makes a crucial point: that Sanders is betraying himself as someone out of touch with the times. In 2016 and even, to some extent, in 2020, an empty critique of identity politics might have resonated differently. But the world today is very different, with vastly greater numbers of highly sophisticated voters for whom “identity” has a more complex relationship to matters like class.
I’ve written about a peculiar blind spot of the left many, many times, and especially and most recently in “Class, Identity, and the Working Class.” The left—and by this I mean the actual, socialist, Marxist left, not just people flirting with lefty-ish ideas because they think that might get their dicks sucked at a DSA meeting—remains wilfully blind to what should be a rather basic idea: you cannot separate class from matters like race, gender, and sexuality.
To repeat what I have already written, and here I exert a loud and weary sigh because I am tired of repeating myself, consider the matter of trans identity.
As I’ve written: “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 think 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.”
And:
“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.”
Class in the United States is an odd category, shifting and fungible. There is that famous saying, often attributed to John Steinbeck, that “socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” This is true not only of whomever we define as “the poor,” but of Americans across class categories. And yet, here, we also have to pause and ask, “Who’s working class anyway?” Who, for that matter, is “middle class?” And who are the elites, in a world where someone living on Ramen with six roommates can, in the blink of a cursor, become a billionaire getting his ass kissed by both parties, with the right app or crypto scheme? In the fantasy held by the left, “working class” people look and sound like Marlon Brando in The Waterfront, and they are rendered in idealistic and stereotypical terms as good, salt-of-the-earth types. They are also seen as conservative in their values and this, we are told, is why we must never bring up issues like gender neutral bathrooms, pronouns, racial discrimination and all that silly, silly stuff (watch any one of Sanders’ speeches, and you see him literally waving away all these matters with a dismissive hand gesture). The argument, made implicitly and explicitly, is that these have no impact on “bread and butter issues.” The argument is also that the same “working class” that leftists like Sanders love to fetishise as the salt of the earth, are raging conservatives who simply cannot abide anything non-normative when it comes to sex, race, and gender. A world of fiction and nonfiction by people of colour, trans, and queers people proves otherwise, but reading is elitist, and the working classes simply don’t engage in it, or so we’re led to believe.
How is the loss of housing upon transitioning not a bread and butter issue? Or the loss of healthcare, which is what trans people are currently facing? How is the denial of basic services, like transportation, clean water, and breathable air—all of which disproportionately affect people of colour and poor, single women—not connected to who people are? Chicago, a city that is proud of its many beaches, frequently shuts down lakeshores on the largely Black South Side because of contamination. Its transportation system runs on segregated lines, and who you are can determine where you live because the city, even in this century, functions like a plantation (try making it smoothly from the South Side to the whiter North side in less than an hour).
As for gender: If you’re a poor woman of any colour, your lack of access to healthcare could mean a loss of economic mobility or an absolute end to all your hopes if you get pregnant and have nowhere to go for an abortion. But, again, and unsurprisingly, the burden of the loss of abortion rights is felt disproportionately by Black women who are already shut out of educational and employment opportunities.
Are there issues with a certain and very reductive form of identity politics? Yes, and anyone who has tried to mobilise people around social justice is all too aware of how quickly the people I like to call “identity trolls” can take over and destroy any efforts at organising: everyone is triggered, there are tears and much wailing over the smallest and often invisible slight, entire meetings dissolve into nothingness, and, eventually, a fierce Substack post critiquing everything and everyone involved goes up to the tune of at least a thousand likes. I was once at an event after which someone insisted that an entire group of people had been insulted. They said that one of the participants, in the named minority community, was deeply wounded and had raised the issue. Said individual was deeply perplexed: they had seen and felt none of the oppression claimed on their behalf. The complainer went so far as to follow a group of us (those they said had enabled the insult) into the restaurant where we had gone to grab dinner, and stood at the table proclaiming, “I am offended on behalf of the thousands and thousands who cannot be here.” So, yes, there is in fact a certain brand of identity politics that is silly, pointless and often weaponised by real-life trolls, certainly.
But none of this is insurmountable if organisers know how to work around such people, and none of it excuses Sanders and the dudebros chuckling at his very basic and misguided criticism of identity. He’s right to point out that being gay or Black means nothing if someone is not also on the side of, say, healthcare for all. But his sneering contempt—and that of the dudes—implies that anyone claiming either one of those identities is somehow automatically privileged. Queer radicals like, oh, this group, have consistently pointed out that, yes, gay elites have certainly made it clear that healthcare is not a concern for them, and that gay marriage effectively silenced and swallowed a vibrant call for universal healthcare among AIDS activists.
Who is working class? Who is middle class? In the last few months—barely five of them—massive numbers of people in relatively comfortable and long-term careers in the public sector have seen their jobs and healthcare disappear. They face uncertainty and even penury, and absolute, daily fear of never making it back to a stable living. Are they still middle class? As for the elites: the amount of money it now takes to even be called “rich” has risen to such an extent that a mere multi-millionaire is, eh, just ordinary. To appear on the Sunday Times’s Rich List, you have to have a net worth of at least 350 million pounds: that’s nearly 500 million dollars. That’s just the entrance fee. In a time of such massive wealth accumulation, what does “middle” even mean?
In 1992, James Carville spearheaded a massively successful Democrat victory with the slogan, “It’s the economy, stupid.” It was a brilliant and effective tactic, and shut down the right’s attempts to distract voters with cultural issues and the demonisation of the most vulnerable, including the poor and working class.
By 1996, the Clintons, in their joint presidency, had “ended welfare as we know it,” viciously turning upon the very voters they once claimed to stand for. Millions of people were thrown off support systems, and new laws also successfully criminalised immigrants, creating the massive pool of undocumented people who are now being hounded and kidnapped off their streets. (Bill Clinton would boast about all of this in 2006.) More recently, Carville, who sounds like an angry gremlin, periodically froths at the mouth about how “wokeness” and an attention to pronouns brought us a Democrat loss, avoiding the fact that Kamala Harris couldn’t provide a single good reason why anyone should vote for her, other than the fact that she was not Trump. His rabid screeds against wokeness are not that different from Sanders’s constant evoking of “identity politics” as the problem, and his claim that only attention to the working class will save us.
Why separate class from everything else when no single individual can ever exist outside the complex and often shifting and sliding interplay between various identities and economics? The only person who can claim that is someone like Sanders: a white, cis male who can afford to get on a high horse and look down on everyone else who has to contend with being trans and poor, or with being, imagine that, trans, black, and newly unemployed, or a woman without access to an abortion clinic, forced to raise a child whose education and food she can barely afford.
It’s time for lefties like Sanders to stop making identity the problem, and to stop propping up the myth of class as, yes, an identity that somehow remains untouched by anything else. To borrow from Carville, it’s economic inequality, stupid.
Too many parts of the left have long stopped thinking about the complexities of life in the 21st century because they remain fixated on 1950s ideas about salty, working class men. A true left moves forward, understanding that people don’t occupy isolated, single categories. A true left leaves no one behind.
Class is a fantasy. Inequality is the reality.
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Image: Georgia O’Keefe, Morning Sky, 1916.
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