Le déclin du parti démocrate aux États Unui est le résultat des défaites syndicales et de l’abandon conséquent des classes laborieuses par le parti. Dans un pays organisé en communautés religieusesn on ne gagne pas d’élection avec le seul soutien de quelques NGOs identitaires financé par les riches. Il n’y aura pas de progrès social sans mouvement ouvrier conscient de son rôle de représentant de sa classe.
Interview by Melissa Naschek - The Democratic Party at every level spent years embracing identity politics that mostly served the interests of professionals, argues Catalyst editor Vivek Chibber. We need a return to class.
“If we broke up the big banks tomorrow, would that end racism? Would that end sexism?” As the memories of Hillary Clinton shimmying and cackling during the 2016 presidential election fade, this quote from one of her campaign rallies has an unusual durability. Just as significant as her loss to Donald Trump, her victory over Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary reshaped center-left politics for a decade and established identity politics as a standard tool in the Democratic Party belt.
On the latest episode of the new Jacobin Radio podcast Confronting Capitalism, Vivek Chibber, professor of sociology at New York University and editor of Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy, examines the specter of identity politics that has haunted the Democrats during the last decade. Chibber explains how identity politics promotes strategies and policies that primarily address the interests of elites rather than the vast majority of working Americans.
Identity politics has roots in 1960s fights against racism and sexism. But according to Chibber, the fracturing of the civil rights coalition, deindustrialization, and the collapse of organized labor shifted the agenda away from working-class issues toward a project of professional-class uplift. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Melissa Naschek
As we’re still sort of in this postelection, what-the-hell-just-happened mode, one thing I’ve been thinking about a lot is the conversation that’s developing around identity politics.
For basically a decade, not only was identity politics central to Democratic Party center-left politics, but you couldn’t even criticize it without being smeared as a racist, a sexist, whatever term would work to instantly discredit any criticism while shutting down any critical thought of what that criticism represented. And now that Trump has won again, suddenly everybody’s talking about what a problem identity politics is.
Vivek Chibber
Right. So in order to be able to understand or analyze identity politics, you’ve got to first define it. You want to define identity politics in as neutral a way as possible, so that you’re not seen to be building your criticisms of it into the definition. We want a definition that most people can recognize as being legitimate.
Now, how do most people understand identity politics? Well, I would say there are a couple of things that people associate with it. The first is a focus on discrimination and disparities as being at the essence of race domination.
Focusing on disparities means you look at any occupation, any phenomenon, like housing or medical care, and you ask, Do blacks and whites get equal outcomes? What about Latinos and whites? Similarly, with discrimination, you want to find out if people are getting equal access to goods and services.
The second element is a focus on representation. Do we see black and brown faces and presences in social institutions at a level proportional to their population? These things together — representation, disparities, and discrimination — are probably what most people think of when they think of identity politics.
So why would anybody criticize it? We criticize not because these things don’t matter but because they are most important to and for elite sections of minority populations.
Take the issue, for example, of disparities. Fewer blacks own homes within the middle class than whites do within the middle class. Look at graduation rates. Fewer blacks and Latinos graduate than whites do. Look at corporate boardrooms. There are fewer black managers and women managers than there are white managers or male managers.
Fair enough. Why should anybody have a problem with that line of inquiry? The issue is that, across a number of phenomena, it’s not the disparities in jobs or wages or housing that matter but the very availability of them.
Take wages, for example. You might see at the lower ends of the job market, say at Walmart, that blacks get lower wages than whites do. That’s true. But if you solve that problem, will it take care of the quality of life and the life opportunities for black Americans or Latinos? If you move them from, say, $13 an hour to what whites are getting, which is, say, $15 an hour, will it solve the problem? Well, it makes it better, but it absolutely doesn’t solve the problem.
Why, then, is there such a focus on these disparities if solving them doesn’t solve the problem? It’s that they loom largest for the elite sections of the population, because they’ve already achieved an appreciable standard of living. What they want to get is the full value of their class position. Whereas for the lower rungs, for the working class, they’re not trying to get the full value of their class position. Their problem is the class position itself. Solving the problem of disparities for people in the lower rungs of the job market doesn’t solve their basic dilemmas, because for them the problem is the job itself, the quality of the job itself, the availability of the jobs themselves.
So if you agree, as most people do, that identity politics has to do with disparities and representation, then the problem with identity politics is not that it doesn’t touch the lives of minorities. It definitely helps them somewhat. But it’s hardly a solution. It most directly touches the lives of a tiny elite section of minorities. To move beyond that and deal with the quality of life and life chances of the vast majority of racial minorities, you have to go beyond disparities and look at the actual availability of social goods, not the current distribution of different races, taking that availability for granted.
Once we’ve defined it in this way, it’s possible to analyze it in terms of where it comes from, why it’s so popular, etc. And that’s what we ought to be pursuing next.
Melissa Naschek
The Democratic Party has become almost synonymous with identity politics. How did the Democrats get to this point?
Vivek Chibber
Let me start by agreeing that Kamala Harris didn’t run on identity politics. So why is her loss being attributed to identity politics? Is it untrue?
She didn’t run on identity. In fact, compared to Hillary Clinton, Harris steered clear as much as she could from identifying herself as a woman and as a person of color and —
Melissa Naschek
Right. Trump even tried to race-bait her.
Vivek Chibber
Yes, and she didn’t take the bait. So that observation is true, that she didn’t run on it.
Nevertheless, it is also true that identity politics played a big role — although not a deciding role — in her defeat. The deciding role was economic issues. Largely, it didn’t really matter that she didn’t run on identitarian terms. She was going to lose anyway because of economic issues.
But make no mistake: even though the association with identity didn’t cause her defeat, it was a big factor. And to ignore that would be a big mistake.
So how did she and her party become so closely identified with identity politics, and what role did it play? First of all, even though she steered clear of it, the party has been propagating it in a very aggressive way over the past six or eight years. So dropping it at the eleventh hour didn’t fool anyone. And that’s why Trump’s ads were so effective in attacking her as somebody pushing identity politics down people’s throats — the Democrats had been doing it for eight years already.
As with so many things in our political moment, it goes back to the initial Bernie Sanders campaign. The Democratic Party’s answer to Bernie Sanders’s propagation of economic justice and economic issues was to smear him as somebody who ignored the plight of what they love to call — their new term — “marginalized groups,” which is people of color, women, trans people, all matters dealing with sexuality. This was their counter to the Sanders campaign, and they’ve used it assiduously now for eight years.
So, if in the last two months they decided to pull away from it, who do they think they’re fooling? Literally nobody. And that’s why the turn away from identity politics failed, because it just seemed so ham-handed and insincere. Nobody bought it.
As for the deeper question about the roots of identity politics in the Democratic Party, I think it’s a historical legacy in two ways. The first is an obvious one. Coming out of the 1960s, when the so-called new social movements emerged, the Democrats were the party that upheld and supported those demands. Even when they were demands for the masses, not just for elites, this party supported them — unlike the Republicans, who were the party that resisted the feminist movement and the Civil Rights Movement. So that’s one historical legacy.
The second legacy is slightly more subtle, which is that, coming out of the New Deal era, the most important electoral base of the Democrats was the working class, and this class was overwhelmingly located in urban centers, large cities, because that’s where the factories were. After the ’80s, the geographical location of that electoral base didn’t change, it was still cities, but the cities changed. Whereas cities used to be the place where blue-collar workers and unions were based, by the early 2000s, cities became reorganized around new sectors — finance, real estate, insurance, services, more high-end income groups.
The Democrats were still relying on the cities for their votes, but because the cities’ demography had shifted, it had a profound effect on the electoral dynamics. Affluent groups became the base of the party, and race and gender became reconceptualized around the experiences and the demands of those affluent groups.
So the Democrats were depending on a much more affluent voting base than they had in the past. At the same time, organized pressure from working-class minorities and women was declining because of the defeat of the union movement, and the main organizations taking their place in the Democratic Party were the nonprofits and business.
Take the issue of race. In the high tide of liberalism, the black working class had a voice inside the Democratic Party through the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the trade unions, and they brought anti-racism into the party through the prism of the needs of black workers. When the unions are dismantled and trade unionism in general goes into decline, who is voicing the concerns of blacks? It’s going to be the more affluent blacks and black political officials that have come up through the post–civil rights era.
And those politicos, by the 2000s, are spread all across the country. There’s a huge rise in the number of black elected officials, mayors, congressmen, etc. And they now no longer have any reason to cater to working-class blacks because workers are politically disorganized. The political officials end up captured by the same corporate forces as the white politicians — but they get to have the corner on race talk.
By the 2000s, race talk and gender talk has been transformed from catering to the needs of working women and working-class blacks and Latinos to the more affluent groups who are the electoral base of the Democratic Party in the cities. And even more so by the politicos who now have increased in number tremendously, aided by the NGOs that do a lot of the spadework and consultancy for the party. What’s missing is 70 to 80 percent of those “marginalized” groups who happen to be working people.
So the Democrats are the party of race, the party of gender — but race and gender as conceptualized by their elite strata. That’s the historical trajectory. And that’s why, within the party, they leaned on this distorted legacy, because it was a form of race politics that fit with elite black interests.
Melissa Naschek
Can you explain further what the civil rights movement was fighting for and why this vision of racial justice didn’t survive the 1960s?
Vivek Chibber
This is a very good example of two different ways of approaching the question of race. The version that has been buried was in fact promoted by Martin Luther King Jr himself and his main lieutenants, especially A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin. Both of them were crucial in pushing for an agenda in the civil rights movement that went beyond simple political rights to insist on what you might call economic rights for black Americans. And famously, the March on Washington was a “march for jobs and freedom,” not just for political equality.
Randolph wasn’t an isolated figure in the trade union movement in his insistence on achieving racial justice through economic demands. The CIO had been pushing this since the 1930s and 40s, and it was very deep inside the Democratic Party by the ’60s.
Why did it go so deep into the party? Not because elite blacks were pushing it, not because black electorate politicians were pushing it — there weren’t that many of those. It was because black workers were able to find a voice for themselves and some political influence through the trade union movement. The CIO probably did more than any other political organization for working-class black Americans.
It wasn’t just Randolph and Rustin but also King. It’s important to remember King came out of the Christian socialist tradition himself. All of them insisted then that the anti-racist agenda has to also be an agenda of economic redistribution, of having jobs, of having housing, of having medical care. It must be this broad agenda.
Now, two things happened here that were crucial. There isn’t a lot of scholarship on this, so we have to rely on anecdotes and what little analysis there is. But Bayard Rustin famously said that, after the Voting Rights Act was passed, the black middle class largely dropped out of the movement.
Why did that happen? Probably because they had got what they wanted — they got the ceiling on political participation lifted. They had the promise of political equality. But if we turn to economic demands, they were much less interested. They already had decent economic resources. They were much less interested in fighting on that front. But these were the very issues that were really pressing for the vast majority of black Americans — housing, medical care, employment, decent education. And none of this could be achieved without economic redistribution.
The problem that Rustin and King face after 1965 is not just that the black middle class drops out of the movement. The problem is that once you change the focus from political rights to economic redistribution or economic expansion, the degree of resistance from the ruling class also changes. Capitalists will be more likely to give you political rights because that doesn’t directly affect their economic power. But once you start making demands that actually require economic resources, the resistance is also going to be greater, which means your strategy has to change.
So the problem is, first of all, that one chunk of your movement — the black middle class — has dropped out just when the resistance from the business community is going up. Your coalition has narrowed. Second of all, there’s no way a fight for redistribution will ever be won by the black working class alone. Even if you could organize all the black workers, the fact of the matter is that, in 1965, black Americans comprise around 12 percent of the population. It’s a very small minority of workers going up against the most powerful ruling class in the world. In order to have any chance of succeeding against this class, to the point where they’re willing to give you your economic goals, you also have to bring in the white working class. There’s no way around it.
So even if all you’re worried about is the fate of black Americans, you have to turn it from a black movement to a poor people’s movement. Because if you don’t bring in the white workers, your race goals will not be met. That’s what King realized. Even if you’re just concerned about race justice, you now have to be a universalist. You have to be somebody who puts class politics as the instrument toward race justice.
But they come to this realization at the worst possible moment. The unions are starting to go into decline, progressive forces are on the defensive, austerity is setting in. Eventually, the black elites take over. Up until the mid-1980s, the Congressional Black Caucus was still a somewhat social democratic force. But after the ’80s, black politicians largely become beholden to corporate interests themselves.
By that point, the King-Rustin vision of race justice has been replaced by the black elite and the black middle-class version of race justice, which leaves black workers, and later Latino workers, out of the picture altogether. And you get what we today call identity politics.
Melissa Naschek
In the ’70s, the labor movement started to go into decline, and what began to replace it were nongovernmental organizations, sometimes called nonprofits. What role did the replacement of labor unions with NGOs play in the rise of identity politics and the elite capture of racial justice?
Vivek Chibber
It has played a role. There is a view, and it’s pretty popular in the press these days, which paints NGOs as the culprit, as if these are the entities that have pushed for this kind of narrow identitarian agenda. I would not put it quite that way. I would say they’re the foot soldiers, but the generals are and have always been the large donors. This will never change. As long as the American political system is run on money, the basic direction of both parties is going to be set by big money. And that’s the case right now as well.
The way I would understand it is that even during the New Deal era, and even when unions had some power, the Democrats were always beholden to the corporate class. It’s just that, because labor had some real leverage, business had to take their interests into account. Even though the Democrats were a corporate-dominated party, they had to give some room to labor just out of a practical necessity — and their main patrons, the capitalist class, were willing to do so. That’s the moment at which a different conception of race justice, that it fundamentally has to do with the needs of working people, became the dominant one.
After the 1980s, because the unions are in decline, the corporate dominance of the party is unchecked. Because it’s unchecked, the demands for working-class interests of any kind — black, white, women — are now pushed to the background. Consequently, you have the reconceptualization of race and gender along elite lines, an agenda set by elite women and elite minorities.
This is where the NGOs come in. Once corporate donors have set those basic parameters, you have to articulate a program and electoral strategy consistent with that corporate vision of race justice and gender justice. Who do you turn to? You don’t turn to the unions. First of all, they’re disappearing and, anyway, you’re happy they’re not there. You don’t want them around.
What you turn to is organizations that use the language of race and justice but whose articulation of it is consistent with the suburban voters and high-income voters you’re catering to. That’s the nonprofits. That’s what they’re all about.
They’re also foot soldiers in a second sense. You don’t have unions anymore to do door knocking, to do your propaganda campaigns. The Republicans have the church. Who do the Democrats have? It used to be the unions who did the legwork for you. They’re gone. Now the nonprofits step in to some extent because they have the manpower to help you with the electoral work. ACORN [Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now] was a great example of this in the 1990s.
These are the people, then, who you turn to for the day-to-day electoral work and articulation of your program. And they are filled with kids coming out of East Coast liberal arts colleges and the Ivies. They don’t want to go into the corporate sector because it’s evil. They want to do do-goody kind of work. The whole appeal of nonprofits to college graduates is they think they’re doing God’s work fighting for social justice. But crucially, the elite conceptualization of race and gender fits naturally with their own class instincts. They’re true believers. And there’s nothing better than having well-paid true believers doing your legwork for you because you don’t have to micromanage them.
So there’s really no question of NGOs ever calling the shots. What they do is they take advantage of an opening and they push it. I don’t want to in any way ignore their role. It’s really important. Nonprofits have done untold damage to what’s called progressive politics. But they are simply walking through a door opened to them by the real holders of power, the corporate class.
Melissa Naschek
Now we’re at an interesting point where the Democrats have used this strategy to great success, at least in crushing the Left. But it’s having a huge negative impact on the perception of the party and its willingness to fight for the downtrodden. Given how discredited identity politics has been, at least in the way the Democratic Party has practiced it, what kind of relationship should the Left have to identity politics?
Vivek Chibber
The Left should very aggressively and actively fight against social domination of any kind, whether it’s along the lines of gender, race, or sexuality. But it has to do it in a way that expands beyond the interests of the wealthy and actually addresses the interests of working people, whether it’s working women or working-class minorities.
The Left should take advantage of this opening to restore race and gender justice to what it was in its glory days in the 1960s, when it was actively a component of the working-class movement. This was when the Left actually moved the needle on racism and sexism in this country, when it actually affected the lives of millions upon millions of racial minorities and women.
I think people like Bernie Sanders and union leaders like Sara Nelson and Shawn Fain — who’s been behind the incredible resurgence of the United Auto Workers — are already doing this work. They are saying that we need to address the incredible race and gender disparities in this country. But the way we do it is by building cheap housing that’s high quality, by making health care a right, by addressing the fact that poor schooling and poor jobs lock people of color into poverty for generations. And the way out is not by confining ourselves to increasing representation and combating discrimination, but rather by addressing the quality of the jobs and the availability of basic goods.
To do that, we have to extricate the movements from the grips of the professional classes and the elites more generally. It’s been so long. There was a time when socialists used to look with contempt at the attempts of narrow elites to take over these movements. My dream is for the Left to regain the moral confidence and the social weight to do that again. The only way that will happen is if socialists become the voice of the Left rather than academics, politicos, nonprofit spokespeople, and media celebrities. And these socialists need to come from these communities of working people, women, and minorities, because they will have the confidence to tell those more bourgeois figures to step back. These newer leaders will come from those sectors of the population that they’re fighting for.
We have to continue to promote working-class candidates in elections. We have to continue to try to build trade unions. We have to continue to make sure that they are the ones expressing the demands along these race and gender lines, so it doesn’t come from professors, from media celebrities, from politicians, because they will always steer it toward narrow elite ends.
