The Left gave us what they didn’t want.
Sen. Bernie Sanders recently criticized the Democratic Party’s slavish devotion to an overly-simplistic form of race-and-gender-based identity politics.
“It is not good enough for someone to say, ‘I’m a woman! Vote for me!’ No, that’s not good enough,” said Sanders. “What we need is a woman who has the guts to stand up to Wall Street, to the insurance companies, to the drug companies.”
In response, Quentin James—former head of Ready for Hillary’s outreach efforts to people of color—had this to say, “I like U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders but his comments regarding identity politics suggest he may be a white supremacist, too.”
Sanders. A white supremacist. For daring to suggest that the most obvious sort of race-and-gender tribalism was not a winning strategy for the left.
This baseless accusation is emblematic of a specific problem for Democrats who, having successfully galvanized certain segments of the population into identity-based political coalitions, lost the presidential election because the people outside this group—working-class whites—formed a coalition of their own. The Democratic Party has itself to blame, of course: you can’t cheer for white men to go extinctand then be surprised when they desert your candidate. Or, as Spiked magazine’s Brendan O’Neill put it, liberals essentially did the following:
Via Reason