The Albatross of Sectarian Identity Politics

Democrats must still confront the obstacles to becoming a majority party.

Last week, some thirty-plus Democrats from the congressional, state, and municipal levels announced the formation of Majority Democrats, a new group to right the party’s ship and expand its appeal to voters who have either defected to Donald Trump or disengaged from progressive politics. It is the latest effort in a steady stream of new initiatives to rebuild the Democratic coalition, from PAC funds directed toward outreach in former swing states to congressional caucuses dedicated to making economic patriotism and cracking down on monopoly power central to the party’s mission.

While the group’s exact policy stances have yet to be ironed out, Majority Democrats’ orientation suggests a growing recognition of the party’s number one problem. Democrats are in the hole in several regions, and though some insiders still prevaricate about why the party’s standing is so dismal outside of coastal metros, recent data on how much Trump has realigned the electorate no longer leaves any doubt about the challenges before the party.

To be sure, many of these projects seem to disappear from public view after a round of media fanfare (or ridicule, in the case of the party’s ham-fisted plan to reconnect with American men). Democratic-aligned activists, PACs, consultants, and influencers have frantically pressured the party to stand up to Trump in every conceivable domain, and it is sometimes difficult to sift novel but informed strategies from publicity-hungry moves to reboot Democrats’ national image. But Majority Democrats might just indicate the party’s quest to change working-class perceptions of it has entered a more serious phase. By drawing principally on younger Democratic leaders united in their belief that the party went astray in recent years—that it became captive, in particular, to echo chambers divorced from building an effective, majoritarian politics—the group may be poised to lift the party’s fortunes.

The balancing act for would-be party reformers is nevertheless daunting. Enormous resources have been dedicated to sustaining the existing Democratic coalition and its power structure, rather than recalibrating the party’s strategy in the aftermath of the 2010 and 2014 midterms—elections that erased hundreds of previously competitive rural, Southern, and Rust Belt offices from the Democratic playbook. That has fed a pernicious form of groupthink. For at least a decade, it has been an implicit article of faith among Democratic leaders and strategists that their “values voters” were waxing in number, and that ratcheting up the politics of recognition and identitarian affirmation would somehow offset mounting regional deficits.

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The tunnel vision has persisted in spite of several disheartening trends. Most significantly, the so-called coalition of the ascendant seems to have fractured and petered out. Polling suggests Gen Z, the most ethnically diverse generation ever, has become less progressive relative to where its older members and Millennials stood at the height of the anti-Trump Resistance. In nominally deep blue cities, meanwhile, the voting habits of working-class Asians, Latinos, and even younger blacks augur a new type of swing voter—one who might vote Republican (or stay home on election day) if Democrats pander to the Brahmin left instead of dealing with the most salient quality-of-life issues.

Democrats also remain staggeringly unpopular despite the air of corruption and hyper-partisanship surrounding the Trump administration. House Democrats’ favorability has trailed the GOP’s this year, while none of the party’s rumored 2028 presidential contenders appear to enjoy wide support. Such disrepute, importantly, can no longer be minimized as just reflecting the disapproval (and “backwardness”) of blue-collar whites. As the last election cycle painfully demonstrated, the party’s habit of dismissing the concerns of voters who didn’t agree with the party’s direction, particularly on the issues of public safety, border enforcement, and gender medicine for children, didn’t stop with whiter, more rural areas.

Even Democrats who have grown skeptical of identity politics are reluctant to confront the flaws of the party’s overarching strategy—and how much it warped Democrats’ attitudes toward the electorate, beginning with counties that flipped from Obama to Trump. To some extent, this is understandable. One of the great hazards of politics is that temporary momentum can be mistaken for fate. Federal elections were close in the George W. Bush years, and the conservative coalition seemed headed for a demographic crisis despite Karl Rove’s lofty wager that Republicans were poised to dominate. After Barack Obama’s 2008 triumph—and even later, after Trump’s 2016 upset—influential analysts predicted that the GOP was destined to be a regional, rump party. The Democrats, the party of inclusion, were on track to remake national politics to a degree not seen since the 1930s and 1940s.

That assumption never really disappeared despite multiple setbacks. Social media, which thrives on emotional engagement and inflated perceptions of who or what is winning over voters, distorted progressives’ own judgment of whether they were successfully persuading others about the merits of a given cause. Within professional networks, meanwhile, narratives about which positions best reflected the concerns of specific groups became cemented and were often treated as being synonymous with the party’s long-term interests.

The explosion of activism from 2017 through 2020 blinded Democrats to their underlying weaknesses. In the face of diminishing regional strength, a Democratic establishment eager to demonstrate its commitment to listening to vanguard activists overlooked the preferences of its core voters. In a party that ostensibly respected diversity, millions of voters with a particular shared trait or set of traits were treated as a monolith, thus limiting the space for healthy dissent and alternative theories about building lasting power. Too many smart progressives indulged in uncritical thinking about the political impact of echoing slogans like “defund the police,” taking a laissez-faire approach to border crossings, insisting “the science” was settled on gender medicine for pubescent youth, or encouraging young abortion rights activists to indiscriminately “shout your abortion” (rather than maintaining an emphasis on women’s equality and health). The result, in many cases, is that Democrats have ended up compromising the very constituencies they swore to protect.

At the same time, Democratic leaders mistook the passion of identity-driven activists as evidence there was a strong consensus on the party’s chief priorities. Paradoxically, the intensity of this activism fueled a certain complacency over what kind of policy goals might build the progressive coalition. Post-civil rights, majorities of various minority groups had aligned with the Democrats, the product of a seemingly inextricable link between support for progressive governance and deepening legal and political equality for groups that previously suffered formal or informal discrimination. As the old New Deal coalition waned, the focus and meaning of progressivism gradually changed, its ends less concerned with big societal advances. Legal victories for discrete rights and regulations became the main measure of success.

The pursuit of more ample policy victories in Congress oriented to improving developmental outcomes correspondingly slackened. Outside early battles over the terms of globalization and the period of Occupy Wall Street, political economy had not been at the top of the agenda for party activists. Most of the time, elected Democrats behaved as if economic issues boiled down to tax rates and healthcare access, even though wages, workplace conditions, housing, and living costs mattered as much to working-class immigrants, blacks, and other demographics as they did to struggling whites in Appalachia and the Rust Belt.

This transformation had been noted with some apprehension by veterans of the Sixties New Left well before the social media age. In a 1993 essay, amid an earlier surge in the culture wars, sociologist and activist Todd Gitlin observed a “troubling irony”:

[T]he right, traditionally the custodian of the privileges of the few, now speaks in an apparently general language of merit, reason, individual rights, and virtue that transcends politics, whereas much of the left is so preoccupied with debunking generalizations and affirming the differences among groups—real as they often are—that it has ceded the very language of universality that is its birthright.

Instead, the left in recent years has had trouble going beyond what has come to be called “identity politics”—a politics that is rooted more in group self-assertion than in attempts to create broad alliances…

The intensification of identity politics is inseparable from a fragmentation of what I will call “commonality politics”…

In the years since, that fragmentation was never fully acknowledged, much less countered by the democratic-electoral left. During the 2016 Democratic primary, Bernie Sanders came closest to updating “commonality politics” for the 21st century—to making social citizenship and popular national goals, which isolate the country’s reactionary fringe, the fulcrum of progressive politics. But his mission was thwarted—not only by an establishment in denial about Americans’ deep-seated economic frustrations, but by cultural radicals inherently opposed to a theory of politics that was, in their view, too redolent (or forgiving) of America’s benighted past.

It would be unfair, of course, to imply that most of the people attracted to the activism of recent years weren’t well-intentioned. Millennials following in the footsteps of activists who had weathered the harsh climate of the Reagan era understandably felt it was important to be more vigilant and assertive in party politics and popular media. Trump’s most destructive actions and incendiary rhetoric, along with the cult-like devotion of his biggest supporters, suggested the darkest passions in American politics were recrudescent. In such an ominous environment, it was (and remains) easy to succumb to a Manichean view of partisan conflict.

Yet American society, despite many challenges and shortcomings, has become significantly more inclusive and diverse—affording many a real sense of cultural pluralism and personal autonomy still unknown in many parts of the world. But conceding that too much deprives the ecosystem of professionalized interest groups of its raison d'être. Too much has been invested—psychologically and monetarily—to pull back from the maximalist rhetoric that has shifted political contestation away from the big questions around development and common social rights and toward values and identity.

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The cumulative experience of 2014-2024—the period in which progressive politics abandoned big-tent, grassroots populism for hashtag activism and cultural symbology—should illustrate beyond a doubt the folly of electoral mobilization on the basis of identity politics. But what comes next is less certain. Despite a strong desire from within the party and the electorate for a fresh approach, a discredited theory of politics still commands the party’s operation. Fundamentally, Democrats are still afraid of taming and redirecting the energies of professional activists because that would overturn the mythos the party has indulged about its route to power in the 21st century.

Ultimately, it will take more than a new party organization like Majority Democrats or new electoral tactics to change the tide. But if progressives’ North Star is, in fact, advancing the project of the common good—of imbuing society with a more generous view of its obligations to ensure opportunity, fairness, and justice—they will have to jettison the false narratives that helped fuel Trump’s return. Until they do so, the first and biggest obstacle to a new era of reform will be inside the Democratic Party itself.