How to Move on From the Worst of Identity Politics

Donald Trump’s 2024 victory was about much more than a backlash to left-identity politics. Inflation, among other matters, loomed larger. Still, Trump gained significant ground with Latino, Black, Asian, Arab, Gen Z, and big-city voters. And that, as much as Kamala Harris’s loss, has spurred Democrats to reconsider the role that identity politics plays in their coalition. “Identity politics needs to go the way of the dodo,” Elissa Slotkin, who just won a Senate race in Michigan, said in a meeting of fellow Democrats. “Identity politics did not work electorally, and it failed miserably strategically,” Rahm Emanuel told Politico. “Some Democrats are finally waking up,” the New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote, “and realizing that woke is broke.”

This is a significant shift. At the height of the “Great Awokening,” as white liberals moved to the left of the typical Black voter on questions of race and racism, a faction of progressive intellectuals persuaded themselves that identity politics was the future of liberalism. They had noble intentions: They saw persistent inequalities in society, felt frustrated that change wasn’t happening faster, and so advocated for more and more radical measures to fix what they perceived as injustices. And they changed the Democratic Party. Harris was one of the politicians who appeared to embrace their narrative, in ways that would haunt her later run for the presidency.

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Most Americans agree with progressives that racism and sexism are still problems. But supporters of identity politics were mistaken in assuming that the same majority would sign on to pursuing equity instead of equality. So there is promise in a reckoning: It is necessary to get the Democratic Party back in sync with everyday voters. And America will benefit if either of its major parties rejects politics that treat race, sex, and other identities as the most important things about a person.

But there is peril too: Identity politics is vague and rarely defined. When pressed to say what they’re objecting to, most critics of identity politics can cite examples. But mocking specific excesses––unpopular neologisms such as Latinx, racial litmus tests, the push to shift from LGBTQ to the comically untenable LGBTQIA2S+––doesn’t clarify how to stop them without giving up on worthy political efforts to help identity groups.

“There’s a real risk of overcorrecting,” the Illinois State Representative Kam Buckner warned in a recent opinion article. “Without a thorough critique of what went wrong and a thoughtful path forward, we could end up discarding an essential tool for connection and understanding.” Democrats need a guiding principle. The most promising is equal treatment. Majorities of every racial group value it, likely because they see how much good the civil-rights movement did by rooting itself in this ideal, and how abandoning the ideal could hurt everyone. Violating equal treatment should be out of bounds.

The progressive identitarian attack on equal treatment is explicit and radical in its implications. In a 2020 Vox essay that championed identity politics, Zack Beauchamp favorably quoted the late philosopher Iris Marion Young. She argued that “the specificity of each group requires a specific set of rights for each, and for some a more comprehensive system than for others.” In Beauchamp’s retelling, identity politics was both the savior and the future of American liberalism, and “true equality demands treating groups differently rather than the same.”

But “treating groups differently” is politically unsustainable––try telling a diverse group of Americans who gets the best treatment, who gets middling treatment, and who will be treated worst.

Most Americans prefer a universalist vision: True equality demands treating people the same regardless of their identity group. So no segregated diners, no firing an employee for being gay, no stop-and-frisks that racially profile Black pedestrians, and no college-admissions officers who malign Asian American applicants. When progressive identitarians make the case for “good” discrimination against members of groups that they deem privileged, they sever their coalition’s historic connection to equal treatment and civil-rights law. They also weaken vital, hard-won norms and invite bigoted excesses.

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A useful reckoning would reaffirm equal treatment and its basic corollaries. For example: Stop maligning whole identity groups. And treat all group discrimination as both irrational and wrong.

During Donald Trump’s first run for president, ideologically diverse critics denounced him for saying that “when Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best … They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” The backlash was fueled partly by Americans like me who believe that attacks on groups mislead, divide, and weaken the country.

But even as the populist right ramped up its corrosive rhetoric, the identitarian left was violating similar norms against multiple groups. During Trump’s first term, Harvard was caught assigning lower personality scores to Asian American applicants. Joe Biden declared in 2020 that Black Americans unsure about voting for him “ain’t Black.” In a secretly recorded 2022 meeting, Los Angeles City Council members denigrated Oaxacans and Black people while discussing how to shore up Latino political power at the expense of Black Angelenos. After the October 7 attacks, some Jewish college students and faith-based organizations were targets of anti-Israel activists simply because of their Jewishness. White women are an especially frequent target of left identitarians––these headlines all appeared in mainstream news outlets in the past five years: “How White Women Use Themselves as Instruments of Terror” (The New York Times); “White Women, Come Get Your People” (The New York Times); “I Refuse to Listen to White Women Cry” (The Washington Post); “How White Women Doomed Kamala Harris and the Democrats—Again” (The New Republic); “I Broke Up With Her Because She’s White” (The New York Times); “White Women’s Role in White Supremacy, Explained” (Vox).

Much as Republicans once paid a price when Rush Limbaugh made offensive statements about women, Democrats pay a price when prominent individuals and institutions associated with its coalition heap scorn on a large group of voters. And regardless of the electoral prospects of the Democratic Party, trafficking in sweeping negative stereotypes about any identity group is wrong and contagious.

Embracing “equal treatment for all” will also mean repudiating racially discriminatory practices. Some supporters of identity politics favor crossing the line into discrimination––arguing, for example, that scarce, life-saving vaccines should be given to members of “structurally and historically disadvantaged” groups first, “even if this means that overall life years gained may be lower.”

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Other examples include: a big-city Democratic mayor announcing that she will not grant interviews to white journalists; a first-time-homebuyer program in Washington State excluding applicants on the basis of race; guidelines for access to COVID-19 treatments in New York that included race as a consideration; faculty search committees where the race of applicants is openly and unlawfully discussed as a factor in hiring; progressive activists organizing a day when they tell white people to absent themselves from a public university campus; a large medical institution penalizing a doctor of Filipina descent for “internalized whiteness” after she objected to racially segregated care; subjecting a professor at a state university in Pennsylvania to a racially hostile climate in training sessions.

This trend isn’t Jim Crow or even stop-and-frisk, but it is a concerning step backward. And politically speaking, “equality demands treating groups differently” is a losing message. In California, one of the most progressive states in the country, voters decided that college admissions should be race-blind in 1996. Progressives tried to bring back differential treatment in 2020, and California voters rejected racial preferences again by an even wider margin than before. In 2019, Pew Research Center asked if employers should consider an applicant’s race and ethnicity in hiring and promotions, or consider their qualifications exclusively, even if it results in less diversity. Seventy-four percent of respondents favored considering qualifications alone. Majorities of white, Black, Hispanic, and Democratic Party respondents all agreed on that conclusion.

To do good for the country––and to perform better in upcoming elections––Democrats don’t need to abandon identity politics entirely. Their coalition can celebrate Pride and Black History Month, object to Muslim bans, urge corporations to recruit from racially and ethnically diverse applicant pools, and more, so long as it also rejects the party’s least popular, most harmful identity-politics excesses. If Democrats renounce identitarian stereotyping and discrimination, their coalition will benefit, and America will too.