Economic benefits and “identity politics” – the never-ending controversy continues

It's post-Presidential-election time. That also means its time for New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall to trot out another tired retread of his decades-old mantra about how the Democrats need to become more conservative in order to win in the future. As he puts it, the Democrats need to heed “the calls coming from Democratic pragmatists [also known as “corporate Dems”] for centrist retrenchment on such issues as immigration, policing and the promotion of diversity, equity and inclusion.” (1) In Pundit-Speak, this means: just pay attention to the white voters and forget about everyone else.

I’ve posted about Edsall in the past. In 2021, for instance:

Thomas Edsall is a capable reporter who has ironically done some important stories on the far right. I say "ironically," because at least since his 1992 book Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics, he comes back again and again to trolling liberals for seeking the votes of people of color. …

Chain Reaction basically argued that whichever of the two major parties was perceived as the most hostile to minorities and especially African-Americans would dominate US politics indefinitely. It was kind of embarrassing for him when Bill Clinton won the Presidency in 1992. Edsall took to the pages of the New York Review of Books to try to explain what happened (What Clinton Won 12/03//1992)

The "Democrats Can't..." piece [of Oct. 2021] basically drags similar tired tropes into 2021. The basic idea is that Democrats are losers because too many white voters are upset that the Democrats are too popular among voters of color. There's a new twist here, which is handwringing about increased percentages of black and Latino voters won by Trump in 2020. (2)

In a follow-up piece, I talked about Edsall’s take on “critical race theory,” aka, CRT. Remember that one? CRT was the successor label for “political correctness,” a weirdly inverted concept that Rush Limbaugh popularized as a synonym for “scary black people.”

Sometime over the last year or so, CRT seems to have been ousted from that role and replaced by DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion). Which, of course, is also Republican-Speak for “scary black people and scary wimmin, too.” Go a little way down that rabbit hole and you come across familiar time-(dis)honored tropes. In this case, the idea is that Jewish German Commies back in the 1930s invented Political Correctness, which begot Critical Race Theory, which begot DEI. Keep going and you wind up with the Illuminati and the Knights Templar and the Elders of Zion and God-only-knows what other dingbat fabulations.

Edsall has carved out a niche of presenting a respectable-enough-for-the-New York Times version of this nonsense. Because he has also done some genuinely good reporting in the past about crackpot rightwing groups, we can’t give him the excuse that he doesn’t know what he’s doing with this schtick. His 1992 book Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics was published during the Bush 1 Administration, when the press corps was largely convinced that anti-black politics would be the sure ingredient for success in American politics for the foreseeable future. This guy has been promoting this stuff for over 30 years!
Edsall’s latest foray in the vein is, “How Democrats Can Regain the Upper Hand,” in which he writes, that the Democratic Party is “to the left of the mainstream.” (2) That would be the mainstream which polls show look very favorable on policies like national health insurance (Medicare for All), abortion rights, and a higher national minimum wage. Of course, Edsall drags in “the party stance on transgender rights,” the latest version of the endless Republican efforts to generate a moral panic about something, usually with a connection to public schools. (Tampons in boys’ bathrooms!)

Corey Robin posts this on Facebook (paragraph breaks added):

While the left prepares to wage is perennial favorite war—is it class or is it culture, is it economics or is it identity—we should be aware that segments of the Democratic Party are preparing a different war: on both the economic left and the cultural/identity left.

If you read this Thomas Edsall column today (in the comments thread) it's very clear that a lot of centrist Dems and their horse whisperers think that the reason the Dems lost was because of the left, tout court. The task is to do what Bill Clinton did in 1992: turn right on both economics and culture. Edsall even refers, positively, to the need for another Sister Souljah moment. (Edsall, by the way, played a critical role, back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, in helping this argument along, as some of us might remember. Adolph Reed and Julian Bond did a lot of excellent work to counter it.)

And make no mistake (to cite a favorite Clintonian phrase): These centrist Democrats will use the idea of the working class the way Clinton did. They'll sound as if they want to do some economically progressive things and that's why trans people need to be sacrificed, but they'll do nothing progressive at all. Everything, everyone, will be sacrificed. And we'll be left with ashes. Don't fall for it. As a counter to the Edsall column, read this n+1 piece by Joel Suarez, also in the comments. (3) [my emphasis]

The Suarez article to which he refers gives a more substantive analysis of the current state of US politics at the moment. He makes an important point about how the macroeconomic picture of the US economy in 2024 didn’t have the positive effect for the incumbent Democratic Administration that one would conventionally expect:

“The US economy is currently near perfect.” So wrote the economist Jennifer Harris—“the quiet intellectual force behind the Biden administration’s economic policies,” according to the New York Times—in a tweet posted in mid-July. The tweet has since been deleted, but Harris’s view was hardly idiosyncratic at the time. In the months before Trump’s victory, not just elected Democrats but countless wonks and columnists were celebrating the Biden Administration’s macroeconomic successes: sustained low unemployment, strong GDP growth, falling inflation, and rising wages. This is the stuff of economists’ dreams—and as close to fulfilling labor’s long-held hope of full employment as the country has come in nearly half a century. Under contemporary US capitalism, this is about as good as it gets. …

On November 5, the American electorate offered one kind of answer. A majority voted for Trump, and cited the economy and immigration as deciding factors. The puzzle, from the vantage of Biden advisors and allies like Harris, is why. The topline economic indicators are no mirages, nor should their implications for workers’ lives be dismissed. No other developed country has emerged from the pandemic with a better record of GDP growth, inflation, and employment than the US. Workers continued to get laid off and fired, but the hell of prolonged unemployment has been largely avoided. All this is nothing to scoff at. The problem is that it’s only part of the story. [my emphasis] (4)

This is an obviously important point. I’ve never assumed that statistically good economic performance means a near-inevitable win for the incumbent Presidential policy. But virtually every politician since 1800 or so in the United States has assumed that it’s important to provide economic benefits of which a majority approve. It does appear that inflation in retail food prices (which may not be fully reflected macro statistics) and the rising cost of housing combined with relative high mortgage rates affected voters’ perceptions in the post-COVID economy in ways which many observers underestimated.

But the macroeconomic statistics for the last couple of years were impressively good.

Ruy Teixeira – sad to say - gives a somewhat lighter version of the Edsall argument in this appearance with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. Stewart has another podcast that takes a mostly serious turn, while the Daily Show goes for a lighter edge, even though it also presents material like this. Stewart pushes back pretty hard here on the some of the frankly lazy arguments Teixeira makes. (5)

The Boston Review published an article by Rick Perlstein 20 years ago analyzing Edsall's perspective with twelve others commenting on Perlstein analysis, including Teixeira himself, Robert Reich, Stanley Aronowitz, and Adolph Reed. Jr. One of Perlstein’s key arguments, backed up by historical analysis and poling data from the time, is that the Republicans had been successful in building Party identification among voters. But support for their party’s actual policy positions actually remained very low.

If this analysis still holds, it means that Trump was able to attract voters who identified with him more than with his party and voters that were loyal to the party brand. Another implication is that the Democrats’ incessant, obsessive focus on bipartisanship gives a sharp advantage to Republicans, simultaneously enforcing the Republican brand image as legitimate while neglecting to build the Democratic Party identity. The last Republican Presidential candidate to make “willingness to reach across the aisle,” i.e., bipartisanship, a notable part of his branding was John McCain in 2008. And he lost to an African-American candidate that had a distinctly liberal image.

Of course, once he got elected, Obama started talking about a Grand Bargain in which Republicans would agree to raise more taxes from the wealthy while the Democrats would agree to cuts in Social Security and Medicare. This blurred (or even smeared!) the Democratic branding while giving brand image of the Republican Party – which went into Tea Party mode immediately after the 2008 election – a boost.

This view would also suggest that the “resistance liberal” strategy of making the NeverTrump Republicans heroes and Kamala Harris so strongly emphasize her appeal to Republicans in this year’s Presidential election – even to Liz and Dick Cheney – probably did more harm than good for her campaign’s brand image and her party’s.

Notes:

(1) Edsall, Thomas (2024): How Democrats Can Regain the Upper Hand. New York Times 11/20/2024. <https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/20/opinion/democrats-left-center-trump.html> (Accessed: 2024-21-11).

(2) Thomas Edsall trolls the Democratic Party (Part 1 of 2). Contradicciones 10/29/2021. <https://brucemillerca.blogspot.com/2021/10/thomas-edsall-trolls-democratic-party.html>

(3) Robin, Corey (2024): Facebook 11/21/2024. <https://www.facebook.com/corey.robin1/posts/pfbid0b3ey3WU4ivTJqLzDrsy6Jmfvt544TZpFHLqHKD6SvrboR9PQTC4t7JyDdgbK6aETl> (Accessed: 2024-21-11).

(4) Suarez, Joel (2024): As Good As It Gets_. n+1 11/15/2024. <https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/as-good-as-it-gets/> (Accessed: 2024-21-11).

(5) Ruy Teixeira - "Where Have All the Democrats Gone?" The Daily Show YouTube channel 11/19/2024. <https://youtu.be/XGdSSJ6uVHw?si=AQ_dYe7cUTn98q2r> (Accessed: 2024-21-11).

(6) Forum: How Can the Democrats Win? Boston Review 06/01/2004. (All the “Responses” are dated earlier.) <https://www.bostonreview.net/forum/rick-perlstein-democracy-forum/> (Accessed: 2024-21-11).