You would not know if you limit your reading to the liberal patriot, but the action these days in the identity policy is completely on the right. Important to white South Africans while expelling colored immigrants, dismissing black and female leaders from our armed forces while putting the Pentagon in the hands of a white nincompop, stripping the government’s archives of black realization files and heroism while retaining the stories of the pre-désegregation standard, Donald Trump.
Admittedly, Trump could not have been re -elected last year by the votes of white people alone. He understood that he needed stoke and exploiting the antipathies of a wider band of voters. He accomplished that by incessant attacks against an amorphous cultural elite, attacks which he has degenerated since his entry into office, as attested by the teachers and students of Harvard.
While Trump has taken white nationalism and the war against cultural elites at their highest levels for a very long time, he cannot make any pretension of invention or even resurrection. These themes swirl around the American right for decades, even centuries. In the early 1960s, Alabama’s segregationist governor George Wallace not only helped blunt a white reaction against movement and civil rights laws, but also invented the expression “pointed bureaucrats” to create an image of their efforts to unite influenced standards (in their efforts to under. Wallace’s game book was quickly resumed, although with a less incendiary terminology, by traditional Republicans from Nixon to Reagan via bushes, as well as inspiration to the warriors of culture in the 1990s – the most important Buchanan and Newt Gingrich boss – which fixed the terms of the 21st century speech.
The real causes of the distress of the working class should not be so difficult to solve for the Democrats.
During these years, Democrats have also fallen into mentalities and identity practices. After all, the major egalitarian advances of the 1960s were undertaken precisely to include groups, mainly blacks, historically excluded from the promises of American democracy – the right to vote, employment, housing, social security and minimum wage, as well as representation. The law has concluded that entrusting the armed forces to a highly experienced black man – Biden’s defense secretary, Lloyd Austin – was the result of the race for positive action, while restoring him to a very inexperienced white man – Trump Pete Hegseth’s defense secretary – has marked a return to the meritocracy of the race. But decades of attacks against positive action have paved the way for such Trumpian substitutions. In addition, during the six decades which followed that Wallace made its doors on the sharp heads, these sharp heads became major actors in the country center and developed a distinct policy and discourse which often accentuated the gap that had opened between them and a working class that stagnant or downward.
Electorally, the white identity of the Republicans, both encouraged and attenuated by their attacks against the cultural elites, allowed them to capture enough votes in the working class to put Trump back to the White House and win the two chambers of the Congress. The groups benefiting (both truly or so-called) of the identity policy of the Democrats have failed to constitute an electoral majority, while the moderately populist economy that the Democrats have preached and sometimes practiced did not put them at the top either. Despite his inability to offer tangible advantages, the republican punch certainly resonated with angry and frustrated voters who understood that economic prospects – IE, life prospects – they were confronted were much more limited than those of the generation of their parents. Nothing that traditional democrats had proposed touched one of this anger, or even get closer.
But for their current and completely justifiable anger against Trump, the Democrats are simply not identified as the angry party. In the hundreds of discussion groups, public opinion analyst Anat Shenker-Osorio led With swing voters, she confirmed this vision of party identity. In addition to asking directly on what words these voters associate with each party, she asked which animals they think when the parties are in mind. For Republicans, these animals are lions, tigers and sharks. For Democrats, they are turtles, slugs and deer in the head fires.
This last characterization is clearly specific to the shock of Democrats in the face of Trump’s opening salvs – in whom practically everyone was taken in the headlights (with the heroic exception of the mainly named democratic judges). But the disparity between the global characterizations testifies to what Democrats must do.
Although the repudiation of certain eccentric cultural norms is clearly in order, I do not see how such repudiations really tackle the entirely understandable anger that the Americans of the working class feel to their prospects of life diminished in the economy of today. The fact that the Republicans were able to persuade many of them that the culprits behind their limited options are immigrants or beneficiaries of positive action constitutes a huge indictment of the Democrats. The change in income in the last half -century of investment wages, the decline of unions, the increasingly user -friendly character of the tax code, control of business policy of companies and banks, political distress always rising from the rich – democrats, and legitimately and the power of work, and should not be hard and the middle of the race of Democrats.
It is not as if there had not been a slogan ready for this form of policy of democratic identity. I think “we are the 99%” will do very well. As a politician and politics, it is the route of the Democrats in power.