There was a time when the Democratic Party was imbued with a different spirit. In his 1961 Inaugural Address, President John F. Kennedy concluded his speech with these words: “And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.” In today’s political climate, this patriotic call to national loyalty and service would be condemned by the Democrats as extreme right-wing. In the world of identity politics, “nationalism” is a pejorative term, and the love of country is ridiculed. Even the neo-Marxist rhetoric of class consciousness in the late 1960s was still seasoned with words like “solidarity” and “engagement”, and the coalition formed between the underprivileged in society and their advocates at the universities guaranteed a unity within the Democratic Party. Then all of that changed.
By the 1970s, Kennedy’s vision of service to our country: “ask what you can do for your country” was replaced by the feminist’s phrase: “the personal is the political”. Although the feminist phrase was coined in the 1960s, it did not dominate the thinking of Democrats until the late 1970s when it became the battle cry of identity politics. A more dramatic shift in thinking is difficult to imagine. The Democrats did not simply introduce a new political theory. They redefined the meaning of politics. Henceforth politics was no longer about our nation; politics was about the personal. What affects the individual personally – free choice about abortion, sexual orientation, etc. etc. – became the new definition of the political realm. Thus the Democrats lost sight of the unifying forces in our society and began promoting the specific identities of various groups such as the feminists, the gays, the African-Americans and the Hispanics. Please note that I am not criticizing women, gays, African-Americans and Hispanics. I am criticizing the political policy of emphasizing the individual identities of these groups instead of striving for integration and the pursuit of the common good.
Even today, I am astonished that the Democrats did not foresee the inevitable outcome of this fundamental shift in their thinking. The forces at work in identity politics are centrifugal, and there is no “glue” that holds the various identity groups together. Already in the early stages of identity politics, there were tensions between the African-American feminists and the white feminists, between the heterosexual feminists and the lesbian feminists, and in 2014 an article entitled “Where Are the White Feminists” appeared in The Feminist Wire complaining that white feminists had refused to march in a rally with their African-American counterparts. More recently, the Women’s March in California was canceled out of fear that it would be overwhelmingly “white”. The failure of identity politics could not be more glaring. There is no sense of solidarity among the various groups; each individual group has its own identity and its own concerns. Identity groups are by definition self-seeking, self-interested and self-serving. They have no concept of the common good; they no longer identity with our country as a sovereign nation; and they hold in disdain national expressions of unity such as the Pledge of Allegiance. In truth, the identity politics of the Democratic Party was the end of politics in any meaningful sense.
Since the 2018 midterm elections, the situation has worsened within the Democratic Party as tensions have erupted between Muslim Democrats and Jewish Democrats. One can argue about details – what actually constitutes anti-Semitism etc. –, but the tension is very real and it has been exacerbated by the identity politics of the Party. The Democrats have emphasized group identity to the point that they have no basis for discussing common values between the various groups. The result has been surreal. Democratic Senators have voted against the Pro-Israel Bill, and extreme right-wing voices like David Duke are now endorsing certain Democrats. The identity politics of the Democrats has served to strengthen differences instead of promoting unity, and now the Party itself is in disarray.
It is this lack of cohesion within the Democratic Party that makes the radical socialist ideas of Rep. Ocasio-Cortez so dangerous. On the surface, her ideas seem out of touch with the economic realities of our world. But within a hopelessly splintered political party, any political theory that offers cohesion could be appealing to a large number of voters. The identity politics of the Democratic Party has been a colossal failure, and as far as I can ascertain, the establishment Democrats have no plan for moving forward. Just consider Speaker Pelosi and Senator Schumer. They have no plan for the future beyond opposing the President and winning the next election. It is precisely their lack of vision and resolve about the future that allows Ocasio-Cortez to occupy center stage. The wealthy elite who own the mainstream media are confident that they can control the situation, and perhaps they can. However this will not solve the problem. The Democratic Party is fragmented because of its own ill-conceived identity politics, and it will remain easy prey to the next radical who offers a utopian vision of unity.
Jack E. Brush is a resident of The Villages and a frequent contributor to Villages-News.com.