What "identity politics" have the democrats been doing?
this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2025
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There is more to life you know? When will liberals learn.
Edit: I changed the title so that people will understand what I am getting at. It is important to realise that economic anxiety trumps other concerns, especially in the growing wealth inequality and the overt shows of oligarchic rule. As Franklin Roosevelt said: People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.
Not advocating for killing trans people is apparently "identity politics"
But they weren't even really defending trans people in the last campaign. I don't know what OP is talking about.
What is meant by identity politics here? I feel like this term is so nebulous as to be almost meaningless.
Democrats largely avoided identity politics in the last election, especially for Harris/Waltz campaign - whereas the MAGA and Republican camp was full of identity politic attacks on 'critical race theory', 'wokeism', 'antifa', 'DEI', 'woke liberals' and 'leftists' (each of which are undefinable terms to Republicans anyway). Results: they lost, and they still get idiotic posts like this one complaining that they identity-politicsed too hard.
If you have specific examples of identity politics where you think Democrats went too far and lost their audience then by all means, share them - but I'm confident this is just the echoed opinion of some talking head.
Insinuating it's only Democrats playing identify politics.
"Gotta get this DEI woke-ism out of our state!"
In what world are the democrats running on a socio-politically progressive platform? I mean just look at the book bans, the war against trans people, and how the democrats are doing against all that. It would win election, but honestly, Biden has been more left-wing on financial positions than socio-political ones, just see student debt forgiveness, child tax credit, antitrust measures, etc.
Helping with cost of living, housing, health care and education isn't socially progressive?
What kind of society do you live on?
Socially progressive today means specifically civil rights and other similar platforms. Think gay marriage and trans healthcare.
The current Democratic Party might be awful, but that doesn't mean we can't replace them with better leaders.
We need a third party.
As long as the DNC is a privately controlled political party leftists will never hold power over neoliberals or conservatives in the party.
I ultimately agree, but this is a good start
I’m left of liberal but this is stupid. Found a new user to block.
The fact that the US is inherently a two party system is the biggest factor holding them back, in my view.
I'm very glad where I live has an MMP system, meaning a government is usually a coalition, and it's quite possible for a new party to enter politics.
There has to be a grassroots movement to change the Democratic party from within, since a third party winning is practically a challenge. The two parties had an ideological flip after all. It is not like the Democratic party couldn't switch to suit the electoral demands. But, it seems like Americans forgot how to hold their politicians accountable.
"Identity politics" is a right-wing fabrication used to promote the identities of "white" people, bros, cishets, etc.
It's only use and purpose is attacking marginalized groups. Thus the current attempts to reinstate systemic racism/patriarchy to the extreme.
These sorts of dishonest memes are a complete denial of reality. Both "parties" collaborate to promote fascism.
Yes! Focus on cost of living – gas, groceries, rent! Help people¹ out!
¹(white, hetero, cis men)
I am so curious as to how this will go over on lemmy.
Fine. Most people here aren't fans of the current Democratic Party.
Most people here aren't, but too many have a cult-like dedication to the party that makes them say "the Democrats are bad, but we can't do anything except Believe™" at the eleventh hour. Remember how people here felt about the Uncommitted movement and calls for Biden to withdraw from the nomination? Yeah, that's what I'm talking about.
I actually think that was foolish for one reason: pick your weakest opponent to fight in future battles.
Democrats are weak and feckless. The majority of them can't even unify around the active fascist takeover. I would rather be fighting for a better future against them than a fascist proto-dictator who has easily managed to get most of his party to fall in line and kiss the ring.
We killed our weaker opponent too early and made the stronger opponent even stronger.
This logic checks out at a glance, but there are three problems:
1-Not all voters understand or care about this logic. "Biden must step down" and "The DNC must change its platform" were in part warnings that not enough voters would be on board with the lesser evil stuff to win the election, which is exactly what happened. There are multiple factions in the Democratic coalition, not just the antifascist coalition. Normal working class voters, for example, cared about their wallets more than all the democracy stuff (which not without reason seemed to them like an exaggeration), and to Gaza voters arguing for genocide support to prevent fascism was—for good reason—nothing short of a farce.
2-If not then, then when? As we've seen during Biden's term, the same people who were supposed to fight those future battles (see: Bernie and AOC) mostly toed the party line rather than take advantage of the weakness of the DNC to advances their causes. This might've made sense in October, but people had been trying to rally voters against the party since February. The Uncommitted Movement in particular was a golden opportunity for Americans to demand a serious platform from the DNC, but cult mentality took over and the tit for that tat was Abandon Harris. This ties in to #1; this lost Democrats lost a good chunk of voters and activists that just didn't care anymore. Maybe this would be different if America had a strong left that could utilize weak liberal rule, but it doesn't. Conservative rule is actually better for actually building the basis of a strong left that can then thrive during liberal rule. Not saying letting Trump win was a good idea because of that, just that there are stages to this stuff.
3-Democrats, like all liberals, are only weak and feckless when dealing with the right. They can very much unite and fight back when dealing with the left, as seen in the 2016 and 2020 Bernie campaigns, and how they generally deal with progressives. It's kind of obvious when you think about it; as fellow worshippers of capital to them the right is an inconvenience, while the left is an existential threat. If the Democrats were universally weak and feckless progressives would've taken over the party by now.
Again, not saying this meant Trump winning was actually good for America (I'll reserve that judgement until I see what—if anything—comes out of the anti-Trump resistance, but I'm not optimistic), but there were significant flaws to this thinking that ultimately doomed this route of anti-fascism to failure. And either way, disagreeing with this position is one thing but calling dissenters Russian trolls or MAGAs in disguise was pure cult behavior.
You may be right simply by Point 3 alone. It's one i hadn't considered.
Still, if that's true, we'd be fighting a similar kind of adversary, but one that isn't dismantling vital institutions like the Dept. of Education, USAID, etc. I wish we'd had that future to work with, because I worry about the children that will grow up having to deal with the consequences of their parents electing Trump; their paradigm will be shaped by the coming crises.
The fight could have gone on in both scenarios, but now, a lot more people (domestically and abroad) will get hurt in the short and long term, even as the fight does continue.
Anyway, thanks for the respectful reply. You've made some good points, and given that a lot of my side of the discussion is speculative, I don't know that there's much point in going much further. We have to deal with the current situation, awful as it is.
Stay safe. Stay strong. Hopefully we never have to meet on some frontline.
Curious how a dumb statement claiming that the the last Democratic admin's policies were targetted towards only marginalised groups and somehow ignoring the rest of lower income classes and middle class would go.
It'll go down like it is right now - lots of people pointing out how dumb it is.
Reminds me there was not a lot of talk about the environment in the democrats presidential campain. A shame since a radical transition to a green industry can hit two birds with one stone: create many jobs and improve people's living conditions.