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As I’ve written here, I’m very busy with a number of projects, so I’ll be writing shorter essays for a little while. What follows is a brief essay on the problems with standard critiques of “identity politics.” I have presented my critiques of the critiques many times (see below for a partial list, and feel free to search for “identity politics” on this website), but it feels necessary to repeat them, often, these days. A note on my use of the term “left”: I have, whenever possible, used the term “broad left” to signify a range of ideologies that include liberalism and socialism. At other times, I have tried to indicate that I do mean an actual, Marxist, utopian left (Yes, I believe in creating a utopia). The problem is that the term “left” is a fuzzy one in general discourse these days, and I am trying to reflect that fuzziness, not replicate it. As my regular readers know: I have been writing about and for a left politics for nearly all of my 250 years on this beguiling and bewildering planet. “A Manifesto” lays out my politics more clearly.
Democrats and many on the left are lurching around wondering how to gain power. In the process, they claim, in many quarters, that the only way to move forward is to jettison and abandon anyone with an “identity” who might represent a “cultural issue.” There are too, too many people to name, but among Democrats, Rahm Emanuel has been beating that drum, Bernie Sanders continues to sneer about immigrants and women, and parts of the supposed left, like Jacobin keep repeating “class first,” the way a novice witch might spin around repeating a useless chant, convinced that it will, any minute now, work and poooof, we’ll all magically ascend into a world without inequality.
Of course, a shallow form of identity politics has, absolutely, been useless and even weaponised by elites. I’ve addressed this several times, as in this interview here and in this essay here. In its most basic form, identity politics has meant a commitment to representation and diversity, which is how we ended up with one of the gayest administrations in recent times and major defence corporations being headed up by women. To be clear: we need better representation and diversity in all parts of our lives, and if that means that defence contractors are women of colour, so be it. That is simply life. The bigger issue, and what we critics of shallow identity politics decry, is that identity becomes weaponised to rationalise the fact that defence corporations are now so diverse that we really shouldn’t worry our pretty little heads about the fact that they are responsible for blasting several populations to smithereens.
Some of that cheap and flashy identity politics discourse is winding down, for the better. In a recent interview with the New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner, Karine Jean-Pierre, former White House press secretary under Joe Biden, tried to evade questions about her exact role in the last presidency by falling back on her identity as “a Black woman who is part of the L.G.B.T.Q. community.” It did not work, and she is being torn apart in both media analyses and on sites like Twitter. On Substack, Lily Sanchez points out that “‘lived experience’ is not a political philosophy.”
But people’s identities do matter, and we do still have to take race, gender, sexuality, and any other number of factors into consideration if we are to think usefully about how to build a better world. The problem with a standard left dismissal of what it sees as “identity politics” is that it ignores a fundamental fact: you cannot separate identity from class and economics.
What exactly is “identity” for the broad left? Whiteness, after all, is an identity—but you would never know that if you listened to critics of identity politics who also talk, incessantly, about the “working class.” In 2016, the left exploded in anxiety about the “white working class” being left behind, and that fear of white people being ignored still runs through the discourse on identity politics. And yet, whiteness, historically a fungible and contested category, is an identity. So, if the left wants to critique what it sees as “identity politics,” it needs to start with the concept of whiteness itself, one that structures all other identities in relation to its mystical, invented self. Which would mean that the left needs to wrestle with the fact that, well, yes, we can critique and scoff at diversity and representation all we want but we cannot ignore the fact that such extremely recent measures (which began sometimes after the middle of the last century) are meant to correct literal millennia of the over-representation of white people in every conceivable segment of society.
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When leftists talk about the working class and how we need to dispense with “identity politics,” they are more often than not evoking a mythical image of a white worker, preferably a miner or a factory employee, who still lives in some vaguely 1950s world. He goes to work every morning with a delicious lunch prepared by his forever aproned wife, and comes back home every evening to a hot meal and his 2.5 children. But who are the working class of today?
Recently, Bernie Sanders praised Donald Trump, saying that he “did a better job” on immigration than Biden. The statement has caused several Bernie bros of my acquaintance to weep and shrivel in horror, but let us put aside, for now, the fact that the nation’s leading lefty leader has actually praised an administration that is currently hunting down dark-skinned people and sending them off to human factory farms. Let us instead consider that Sanders’s words reveal that he does not think about immigrants as part of the working class. Here, all class analysis simply melts away, and immigrants are just bodies that need to be deported in the most brutal way possible. Given the ongoing and rapid escalation of these deportation efforts, actual numbers are hard to come by, but it’s fair to say that a large number of the deportees are farm labourers or employed in fields like landscaping. What does that make them? Repeat after me, Dear Reader: Workers. They are literally, actually part of the working class.
If Sanders were consistent in his socialism, he would be pointing to the current deportation measures as a crime against workers and the working class. But Sanders uses terms like “undocumented immigrants” because he can reduce them to an identity and perhaps show them some white saviour pity and then, when convenient, toss them over to an administration that is literally, actually brutalising and even killing them. This is the problem with the supposed critique of identity politics on the “left”: it is the left, not just a neoliberal left, but an actual socialist left that weaponises identity when convenient and ignores the fact that real people have to live with the burdens and risks of certain kinds of embodiment. No one, least of all any white person, is free of identity, but different people bear the risks of their identities differently.
Another major problem with the left’s selective critique of identity politics is that it ignores certain issues as merely “cultural” when they are in fact nothing but economic issues.
Consider abortion. In a now-famous revelation, Kamala Harris writes in her memoir that Bernie Sanders’s response to her selection as the presidential candidate in 2024 was, “Please focus on the working class, not just on abortion.” This is a common theme among many on the left: that the Democrats’ focus on matters like abortion led to their loss, and that this is not among the economic issues we should worry about.
On that: I would dearly love Bernie Sanders to turn into a pregnant, single woman in her thirties trying to make her way in the world without healthcare, stuck in one low-paying job after another, and living in a state without a single abortion clinic, condemned to give birth to a child she does not want and forced to take care of it until, perhaps, the child grows up and moves away. More likely than not, that woman’s child will also live in poverty for the rest of their life because that is what poverty does: it creates an endless cycle of want and deprivation and successive generations of very, very poor people. The U.S child poverty rate is above 50%.
But for Sanders, these women do not constitute the working class. They are merely and literally vessels to transmit his contempt for “cultural” issues, and he is joined by a vast swath of writers and politicians on the broad left. If these women, working crap jobs and stuck in poverty for all their lives, are not working class, who the hell is? How is abortion not a matter of class when the ability to access it has everything to do with one’s level of income and economic security? The women who attend and sponsor Planned Parenthood galas are not the ones who need to worry about access to abortion: the women serving them their drinks for minimum wage and tips are.
Consider any other factors, like race and trans issues. If you live in a segregated city like Chicago, where public transportation is more or less reliable and efficient based on where you live, and where you live is entirely determined by your race and ethnicity, then getting to work on time is a matter of rising at some ungodly hour and sitting on trains and buses for hours in a day. Race cannot be untied from class: identity is linked to economic opportunities or the lack thereof. Similarly, as I’ve written here and elsewhere, trans people are more likely than most to become homeless and lose vital social and cultural networks because of the instant stigma they often face upon coming out. Their job opportunities may dwindle or disappear and, today, many are facing a backlash that disconnects them from vital and life-saving benefits, including the ability to obtain basic identity documents for travel and more. How, in this context, can anyone separate race and gender identity from class and economic inequality?
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Who gets to be the “working class” and declared deserving of protection from a largely elite set of writers and thinkers that shames everyone who dares bring up race, gender, and other factors? On Twitter, the healthcare writer Timothy Faust points out that “there are one million more home health aides than farmers in the US, earning less than half the median income. However, they don’t seem to come up very much whenever people talk about the working class.” There are approximately 2.3 million home care aides, while farmers number about 1.9 million. (That number may actually be even smaller, because “agricultural producers”—large farming corporations—are often counted as “farmers.”).
Among health care aides, part of the largest occupation in the country, we see wage discrepancies based on gender and race. The majority of them, 87 percent, are women. Of those, Black women are 30 percent of the total number, while Latinas are nearly 24 percent. Unsurprisingly, given these demographics, health care aides are, overall, paid so badly that many have to depend on public assistance. How do “class only” leftists explain away these statistics?
Following the massive and entirely expected defeat of Kamala Harris (one that I predicted the day after she accepted her investiture), the broad left has become obsessed with the idea that “we” failed because we paid too much attention to silly, silly matters like race and gender instead using a class only analysis. This fatal logic is what has resulted in the failure of the left in so many places: witness the rapid near-rousting of Keir Starmers’s xenophobic and racist Labour Party despite its desperate attempts to be more like the Reform Party than even Nigel Farage could imagine. (It will be a Christmas Miracle if Starmer lasts past December.). Leftists mistake the rise of the right as a repudiation of the principles of fairness and equality, when the real problem is that the left, broadly speaking, has so far consistently failed to actually be the left and provide real alternatives. Witness, with shielded eyes and horror, the many interviews that Kamala Harris gave, where she glibly declared that she would not have changed a thing about the Biden administration and then declared, smugly, that her one meaningful difference would be appointing a Republican to her cabinet. She was, she insisted, proud of her working relationship with Liz Cheney. A Democrat declares pride in an affiliation with a Republican who has been declared a monster and is herself begotten of a monster, and yet liberals still wonder why voters did not care for her. But why should voters have voted for a Democrat president who won’t declare any differences between her and her boss or even from a dynastic ogre? Why not just vote in the actual Republican?
The left can, if it chooses, make a case for itself. The problem is that, right now, the “left” is mostly defined by politicians like Bernie Sanders who shrug off the brutality experienced by immigrant workers or the lifelong horror of being forced to give birth, experienced by so many women workers of all races. The problem is that we have an elite set of writers and thinkers mostly prognosticating from the pages of magazines located in the wilds of the Independent Kingdom of Brooklyn, where their only contact with anything experienced by anyone in the rest of the world comes, maybe, through reading groups.
For such people, “identity” is to be scoffed at, something that we should all dismiss and even denounce if we are to be seen as sophisticated leftists somehow able to escape the traps of embodiment. But who, except the most privileged, can afford to do that?
If the left is to move forward, it has to, yes, absolutely, dispense with cheap and shallow forms of identity politics. As we see in many cases, like that of Karine Jean-Pierre, who will doubtless mutter about her intersectional identities in the bowels of some ill-funded libertarian think tank for the rest of her days, that project has been completed. No one is seriously thinking in such obvious terms.
But you cannot separate identity from class and economics. Can the left commit to productively understanding identity within the framework of a dynamic and useful left politics? Or is it doomed, as it seems to be, to trying to ape the right forevermore?
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This essay was revised shortly after publication to include statistics about race and gender in the field of home health care.
For more, see:
Who’s Left?: Towards a Taxonomy of Sorts
On Bernie Sanders and the Left’s Fantasy about Class
On Class, Identity, and the Working Class
On Cat Ladies and Culture Wars
Use “working class” and “identity politics” as search terms on this website.
Image: Egon Schiele, Kauerndes Mädchen, 1910
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