“When people try to call me the establishment, I look at that as a slur, particularly as an African American candidate.”
So spoke David Crowley during the Democratic primary campaign for Wisconsin governor. The candidate of the party’s centrist wing, he took umbrage that in his race against a democratic socialist member of the State Assembly named Francesca Hong, he had frequently been referred to as the candidate of “the establishment.”
On one level, it is not hard to see why he might have been offended. Crowley’s personal history is remarkable. He endured a childhood marked by chaos and poverty: Both his parents became addicted to drugs, and the family was evicted several times. Crowley bootstrapped himself to a very different life, attending college, becoming a community organizer and entering local politics. In 2020, at the age of 33, he was elected executive of Milwaukee County, a region home to almost a million people and the biggest city in the state. Having clinched the Democratic nomination, he stands a chance, at 40, of becoming not only Wisconsin’s first Black governor but also the fourth ever elected in America.
Yet Crowley was, in almost every way, the establishment candidate. Tony Evers, Wisconsin’s two-term Democratic governor, endorsed Crowley as his successor, and moderate Democrats across the state rallied around him in the crowded and chaotic primary. Over the course of the campaign he focused on affordability, like Democrats all over the country, while also staking out moderate positions on issues like guns and health care. He embraced some progressive ideas, but pitched himself as a common-sense problem solver, not a radical. Race aside, he seems to be a talented centrist Democratic candidate who is a good fit for a swing state.
Which makes the slur comment all the more curious. After all, it’s centrists that have long lectured progressives for being too fixated on identity. That obsession with race, gender and sexuality, the argument goes, alienated white working-class voters and created an opening for Donald Trump’s revanchist politics. Yet here was a member of the party’s mainstream using the language of identity politics to disarm criticism and defend his platform.
In this wild Democratic primary cycle, this topsy-turvy approach has become a new normal. As leftist candidates have scored shocking victories over mainstream politicians, party leaders have leveraged identity in new and surprising ways. Identity has become both a cudgel and a crutch, alternately wielded to police the identities of those who seek to overturn the status quo and leaned on to defend it.
The first move is to cast progressive challengers as illegitimate. It goes like this: Driven by the views of the highly educated but often downwardly mobile white people who make up a majority of the membership of the Democratic Socialists of America, these leftist candidates, with their fixation on Gaza and demands for radical change, are far out of touch with the everyday concerns of working-class Black and brown voters.
The second move is perhaps more surprising. It is to claim for centrist incumbents the authentic identity that is missing in insurgent progressives. Earlier this summer Adriano Espaillat, a five-term New York congressman and the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, was surprisingly defeated in a primary by a young democratic socialist named Darializa Avila Chevalier. Many party figures tut-tutted that Chevalier, a Ph.D. student at CUNY and veteran of the Gaza encampments at Columbia, did not authentically represent the gentrifying but still heavily Black and Latino working-class Upper Manhattan district in the way that Espaillat did. Never mind that Chevalier is a Dominican American daughter of a truck driver.
She was one of three challengers endorsed by New York’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, all of whom won their races. In the aftermath, New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, lamented that a bunch of newcomers had defeated Democratic stalwarts. “Some of the candidates that he has supported are individuals who do not understand the politics of New York City, the cultural differences from district to district, who have not been part of the history and the struggle of some of these districts, and are relatively new to the body politic,” James told CNN. The implication was clear: The newcomers were outsiders; the incumbents belonged to the group.
These fissures within the Democratic Party are playing out ahead of an election that could not have higher stakes for the country. Democratic control of the House and Senate is on the line, in what could be the last hope of a meaningful check on the lawless presidency of Donald Trump. But instead of rallying round their candidates and heeding the call of voters, Democrats are falling out among themselves.
The Democratic Party has an identity politics problem, all right. It’s just not the one you’d think.
It can seem as if identity politics has always been with us — and in some ways, it has. What could be more natural than an alliance of people with shared characteristics and culture, especially in a vast nation largely populated by migrants and their descendants? The surge in immigration from Ireland, Italy and Eastern Europe during the 19th and early 20th centuries helped forge powerful ethnic political machines that shaped many American cities, just as the Great Migration of Black Americans from the South powered Black-led political machines across Northern cities.
And yet this kind of politics has always seemed vaguely un-American, an uneasy development in a creedal nation. Ethnic machines came to be synonymous with urban corruption, delivering blocs of votes on the basis of patronage and other favors. The post-New Deal consolidation rendered this style of politics a mostly Democratic phenomenon. After the civil rights era, the expansion of the social safety net and white flight from cities meant that many of these ethnicity-based organizations withered.
Nowadays, identity politics has become a shorthand for special pleading for political and economic power for minority groups on the basis of race, gender and sexuality. It is a synonym for a series of boogeymen that the right claims are the chief obsessions of the Democratic Party: D.E.I., critical race theory, transgender rights — really anything that can be gathered under the dreaded penumbra of “woke.” Blame for this predicament is invariably laid at the feet of the left.
This is ironic, because the best critique of identity politics comes from the left. In classical Marxist thinking, capitalists exploit identity to divide the working class, using it to obscure a shared interest in overthrowing the system that is the real source of workers’ subjugation. Race and class have never formed a tidy binary, of course, but that provided a basic framework for collective politics. The past decade or so, with its ructions of the Black Lives Matter movement and the rise of Trump, has prompted a new wave of provocative critiques.
In 2018, the political theorist Asad Haider published a slim book called “Mistaken Identity,” a bracing attempt to illuminate how battles over identity undermine the left. He narrated his own bruising experiences as an activist when he was a graduate student at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He joined a protest that sought to stop tuition increases at the public university but was soon dismayed by his fellow activists’ insistence on foregrounding how the increases would disproportionately affect Black students.
“The insistence that the tuition hikes themselves must be somehow racially biased,” Haider wrote, “forced the movement into a rhetorical corner.” As the movement splintered along racial lines, Haider came to believe that the insistence on centering the particular injuries of one racial group — in this case, Black students — ultimately threatened to undermine the entire movement. Identity politics, rather than making it possible to create solidarity between different groups, simply underlined divisions and forestalled radical change.
This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. In the 1970s, a group of radical Black feminists known as the Combahee River Collective called out sexism, racism and homophobia as barriers to left-wing solidarity. Later that decade, the social theorist Stuart Hall’s famous formulation — “race is the modality in which class is lived” — moved things a step away from the either/or of simplistic materialist analysis. These interventions helped usher in a deeper acknowledgment of how the left must reckon with identity, rather than brush it aside.
Yet somewhere along the way, identity politics in America morphed into a strange hybrid. Structurally, it came to mimic the hierarchical and power-obsessed ethnic politics of an earlier era, but it purloined the language and affect of thinkers like Hall and the members of Combahee. In this new version of identity politics, racial minorities, women and queer people were to be acknowledged and included. The existing power structure would be left in place.
A good example of what this looked like is the Congressional Black Caucus. When it was founded in the 1970s, it became known as the “conscience of Congress” because of its intimate connection to the civil rights struggle — several members had marched with Martin Luther King Jr. and been jailed for nonviolent protest. By 1994, though, more than half of the caucus voted to support Bill Clinton’s draconian crime bill. Those members apparently saw no contradiction between advocating minority representation and supporting legislation that would disproportionately harm Black people.
The philosopher Olufemi O. Taiwo traced this process in a 2022 book titled “Elite Capture.” Taiwo, the son of Nigerian immigrants, draws on postcolonial history to show how elites within newly liberated countries “captured” political, economic and social power. In America, by analogy, members of minority groups ascended to high offices within the political, business and cultural power structure. Once installed, they allowed their presence to be offered as evidence of the system’s fairness and legitimacy. “There’s no hard and fast rule about what kind of person can be an elite,” Taiwo wrote.
Taken together, the two books show how identity politics has been misused by left and center alike. There is a way out of this impasse, however. Taiwo urges something he calls “constructive politics,” aimed at building a broad coalition. Haider, who tragically died last year at the age of 38, ended his book with a call for “insurgent universality.” It is this view, laser-focused on common, concrete problems — child and health care, the cost of groceries, affordable housing — that seems to have seeped into the left wing of the Democratic Party.
It was March 2008, and Barack Obama had a problem. A big one. After a string of stunning upset victories in the Democratic presidential primaries, videos began circulating of fiery sermons delivered by his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
“The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no, God damn America,” Wright thundered in a sermon in 2003. In another sermon, a week after 9/11, he declared that “America’s chickens are coming home to roost,” retribution for the terror the country had unleashed on the world.
Obama, then a first-term senator seeking to become America’s first Black president, had worshiped in Wright’s church for two decades. The pastor had officiated his wedding and baptized his two daughters. His long association with Wright threatened to undermine the sunny, hope-fueled image that catapulted Obama’s improbable rise and unmask him as what many of his opponents suspected he was all along: an angry Black man who sought revenge on white America.
A lesser politician might have simply disavowed Wright and his statements and left it at that. Instead, at a lectern in Philadelphia, flanked by American flags, Obama delivered a homily of his own.
“I am the son of a Black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton’s army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas,” he said. “For as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on earth is my story even possible. It’s a story that hasn’t made me the most conventional of candidates. But it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts — that out of many, we are truly one.”
It was a remarkable speech, and it almost certainly rescued his candidacy. Its power lay in the truth we all know from how we experience our own lives. Our identities are an important part of who we are, but not the sum of our selves. Rather than a way to define difference, Obama’s peculiar identity became an invitation to imagine what can be shared, a transubstantiation of something highly particular into something universal. The union of his multiplicity of identities mirrored our nation’s own imperfect and aspirational union.
Obama was an exceptional politician, of course. But I see glimmers of his ideas about identity re-emerging after a long period of cheap, symbolic identity politics among Democrats. They are perhaps most visible in Zohran Mamdani, a South Asian Muslim of African origin whose parents were raised in different faiths. His refusal to disavow outré slogans of the pro-Palestine movement, even as he chooses not to utter them himself, reads to me less as a politician’s dodge than an Obamaesque effort to hold the unstable elements of identity in a fragile but enduring whole.
This kind of integrated self goes by another name in politics: authenticity. It is hard to define, but voters seem to know it when they see it. In the dueling Midwestern primaries, Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed, the magnetic son of Egyptian immigrants, clearly had some of this quality. He didn’t get tripped up on questions about his faith or abolishing ICE, successfully pivoting questions about such issues back to his core message of getting billionaires out of politics and making life more affordable for ordinary people. He won his race. Wisconsin’s Hong, the less polished daughter of Korean immigrants, stumbled over her more doctrinaire views — her previous denunciation of Thanksgiving as a celebration of settler colonialism was the most notorious — and lost hers.
This gets to the final problem with identity politics, the way it discounts human agency. Ultimately, identity is a set of characteristics you inherit. But what you make of that inheritance is character. Democrats should listen to what voters are telling them: Character counts far more than identity or even ideology. In American politics, parties, political machines and racial groups don’t run for office. Individual men and women do. And it is those individuals, not their identities, that truly matter.
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