Much as it was after the 2016 presidential election, the conventional wisdom in the wake of the 2024 presidential election has been that identity politics is a dead end for the political left. And inasmuch as “identity politics” means the cynical appeal to narrow group interests, then this wisdom is well taken — although one might also observe that narrow appeals to group interest helped Donald Trump win a second term to the White House.
But if held too tightly, justified disdain for particularism — for rejecting the appeal to general interest so that one can cut the electorate into thin slices — can be counterproductive. “Policies and rhetoric framed in the interests of the working class as a whole are crucial,” Michael McCarthy, an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, writes in Hammer and Hope magazine. “But organizers have always known that in order to build a movement, you need to address specific yet important concerns that affect only some parts of your coalition while also speaking to the issues shared by everyone you want to draw into your base.”
It’s important to remember, McCarthy argues, that the American working class isn’t unitary. Workers are segmented by familiar identities such as race, gender, religion and ethnicity, as well as by immigration status, education and the many ways that capitalism generates difference and differentiation across the system. “Similar to the way a city can have both food deserts and extraordinary food waste,” McCarthy notes, “the working class encompasses credentialed workers who have job protections and good wages, people in rural and urban areas with concentrated poverty whose work is poorly paid and precarious and undocumented workers in the shadows earning below the minimum wage because of their citizenship status.”
It might seem that in the abstract, you can simply appeal to a collective stake in good wages, decent health care, affordable housing and fair conditions of employment. The reality of segmentation and differentiation means, however, that “the abstract class structure does not determine the form working-class politics takes.” Workers may come to egalitarian politics through appeals to nonclass identities; they may be repelled by egalitarian politics by nonclass identities; they might see themselves as workers, but they may define this in nonclass terms.
There’s no ignoring that nonclass identities shape material interests. It is fashionable, in certain circles, to treat transgender rights as a supposedly woke distraction. But discrimination and exclusion are why transgender people are more likely to experience poverty and homelessness in their lives than most other Americans. You can’t attend to the interests of the working class if you aren’t attentive to the conditions of their lives, which are shaped as much by their identities and social positions as they are by their class status. As McCarthy writes, “Working-class people aren’t defined only by the burden of capitalists gaining more and more at their expense; a wide range of things matter to them, too, and some are specific to their sectors of the working class.”
A politician who hopes to build a coalition of working-class voters has no choice but to devise a message and appeal that speaks to the particular but connects to the general — that sees the many ways that working-class people organize themselves and tries to tie those movements and interests into something like a cohesive whole. A native-born store clerk has different needs from an immigrant slaughterhouse worker. But they have a shared interest in a world in which their lives are not shaped by the arbitrary power of their employer. The difficult trick is to connect the two people in ways that neither conflate the particulars of their situations nor obscure their common concerns.
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