Electoral Politics 101: Campaigns Should Always Be About The Voters— Not The Candidate's Identity

James Galbraith, like his father, John Kenneth Galbraith, was, is one of the world’s foremost economists. Writing for The Nation yesterday, he tackled the question of why Bidenomics Was Such a Bust, even though “the daily mission of Biden’s economists was to improve the lives of the American working class.” Yet polls “establish that a large majority of voters gave Bidenomics a low grade. A sense of failure weighs on [White House economist Jared] Bernstein and his colleagues, despite their good intentions and best efforts. They were repudiated— so say the polls— and for the sake of future policy battles, it is worthwhile to try to understand why.”

First he established that, knowing their own best interests, “if voters are unhappy with the good readings on standard indicators— unemployment, the monthly inflation rate, economic growth— it must be because those indicators no longer connect to their sense of well-being… In particular, low unemployment rates may reflect widespread disaffection with bad jobs; a low inflation rate does not reverse past price increases; and the incomes from growth may flow to profits and capital gains. These indicators are not useless— if they were bad, the situation would be even worse— but a good showing on them is insufficient.

What did happen under Biden was a decline in real incomes— in household purchasing power… While the White House moved quickly to bring down gas prices with oil sales from the Strategic Reserve, it did little to stop firms from padding their margins. Profits surged, as did rents, land prices, and the stock market. The Biden economists had overlooked a fundamental fact, which is that the ultimate benefit of any “stimulative” policy flows to those with market power— to land and to capital— regardless of how it may be distributed at first.

Biden’s policies aimed at industry, infrastructure, and the environment came into play; so did the endless flow of weapons for Ukraine. Whatever the long-term merits (or demerits) of these programs, their political impact was next to nil. Infrastructure goes unnoticed except as an annoying obstacle to the daily commute.  Energy (if it works) feeds into an existing grid and arrives invisibly. American chips and other artifacts of the great “war” with China evoke no pride among ordinary consumers of the smartphone. Why should they? The total growth of manufacturing jobs since 2020 has amounted, so far, to at most a few hundred thousand— scarcely a month’s normal growth of jobs in America. Construction jobs are up by about 800,000— but many of those are filled by migrants. There is almost no visible positive effect on any part of American economic life, outside the market caps of a few companies— which, like all companies, are owned mainly by the rich.

The final and fatal blow to Bidenomics was the support given by the White House to the Federal Reserve, once the central bank started raising interest rates in March, 2022. Early on, President Biden gave his blessing— “Fighting inflation is the Fed’s job”— while also ducking his own responsibility to act against surging prices. Interest rates proved irrelevant to the “inflation fight”— they failed to slow economic growth or goose unemployment— but they froze up the housing market, made life miserable for small business, and undercut the viability of long-term investments, including renewable energy projects. Meanwhile, vast sums flowed in payments to banks on their reserves and to the tiny minority with large holdings of Treasury bills. The Biden economists never challenged these arrangements. They hewed to the craven orthodoxy, dominant among Democrats since the time of Robert Rubin, that the Fed’s independence is sacrosanct. But the entire point of an “independent” central bank is to defeat any economic program that serves the people to the inconvenience of Big Finance.

To be fair, since at least the 1990s all Democratic administrations have been paralyzed by the schizoid division of the party itself. Democrats have come to depend on funding from oligarchs— in banking, technology, entertainment, and other elite sectors. Votes, however, must still be gathered from low-income (and especially minority) communities, who form a large part of what is called the American “working class.” But except in extraordinary conditions this group gets little from the government (apart from pandering to identity), and what it does get—vfor instance, the Earned Income Tax Credit— is often as invisible as possible, to minimize political opposition. The pandemic allowed a dramatic exception, briefly revealing how conditions could be transformed by a radical policy. But instead of capitalizing on this event, Biden’s team steered for a return to normal. Meanwhile, Biden pursued an aggressive campaign of confrontation and escalation in Ukraine and the Middle East, as well as the economic combat with China— unwinnable wars on three fronts.

As for the over-emphasis and over identification of the party with identity politics, this is catastrophic and if the Democrats want to start winning, they need to move away from it— and fast. Yesterday, Conor Friedersdorf acknowledged that “most Americans agree with progressives that racism and sexism are still problems. The day before, I interviewed a young woman running for office in a red area against a longtime Republican incumbent. I asked her about her platform and show started talking about LGBTQIA+ equality. After getting her to explain what “I” and “A” stand for, I asked her if she is personally LGBTQIA+ and she is (“B”). I suggested she focus her platform on the kinds of issues the constituents are most concerned with in her area— high prices at the grocery store, the cost of and access to healthcare, the availability of good jobs that both pay well and give people a sense of satisfaction (instead of dread). She said she agreed that perhaps the voters should come first rather than her own “B” identity.

Friedersdorf noted that “ 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… 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.

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.”

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 applicant 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.