On the democratic party – Nicholas Lemann in The New Yorker:
‘The question of the Democrats’ future is usually framed as a struggle between progressives and centrists—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Pramila Jayapal, promising increased turnout among young voters, versus Abigail Spanberger and Elissa Slotkin, promising to appeal to swing voters, with Biden caught in the middle. Republicans this year are featuring the progressives’ cultural agenda in their negative ads, while Democrats, at least in competitive races, are distancing themselves from it. When I requested an interview with Obama about the Party, he declined, but his office sent a list of suggested reading, which included a New York magazine article by Jonathan Chait, called “Political Correctness Is Losing.” (In a recent podcast, Obama said that identity politics leaves a lot of voters “feeling as if you’re not speaking to me and my concerns.”) Yet it’s an oversimplification of the Democrats’ challenge to say that if they can simply jettison a few high-relief positions associated with the left wing of the Party then all will be well. How many of the Party’s elected officials have actually called for abolishing the police or for teaching critical race theory in public schools? “In American politics, every generation of Republicans will have a new euphemism for race,” Patrick Gaspard, a veteran Democrat who worked on Obama’s Presidential campaigns and is now the president of the Center for American Progress, told me. “For a minute, it was critical race theory. It’s usually crime, and now it’s crime again. Critical race theory is effective when people don’t see you in their community—when they can believe things about you. Look at places with a diminishment of power—economic power, political power—and you find that people recognize that through a prism of culture. You can take the teeth out of these cultural issues by being constant, by being attendant.” Among Democratic professionals I spoke to, there was a conviction that the Party had made itself vulnerable to Republican cultural appeals aimed at white working-class voters by not having paid enough attention, throughout the past few decades, to those voters’ economic well-being. In particular, the Clinton Administration’s enthusiastic embrace of free trade and globalization, over the strong objections of the Democrats’ traditional union constituency, created a weakness that Trump exploited. “I think the largest newspaper in the country to editorialize against nafta was the Toledo Blade,” Sherrod Brown, a Democratic senator from Ohio and a stalwart union supporter, told me. “I got a letter from a woman who said, ‘I can’t believe you went to Yale and you’re against nafta.’ That kind of shit went on.”’
Read the article here.
Nafta (globalization) and all kinds of identity politics have been used by the hard-right, the extreme-right and friendly fascism in many countries to hit the moderate left (and moderate right). They succeeded in many places, Germany is still an exception, but for how long?
The idea that if the leftists start hating identity politics and nafta the voters will flock back is as far as I’m concerned naïve.
What hard-right is giving the voters is the joy of perversity, the joy of being outside the accepted boundaries.
It’s easier to find a sexy pope than a sexy humanist.