Conversations with Normies

I enjoy talking to my brother about politics because he is, for lack of a better way of putting it, far more normal than I am. He is not passionate about politics, but he's not ignorant about it either. He pays some measure of attention because he's a good citizen who cares about the world around him, but it's not something he's independently especially interested in. There are, of course, a lot more people like him than there are people like me, even though there are a lot more people like me talking about politics online. So chatting with my brother feels like getting a sense of the pulse of normie America (even though of course he's not necessarily representative).

In terms of ideology, my brother is probably best described as a moderate Democrat. His line for the past several years has been pretty consistent in saying that there is a universe where he could imagine voting Republican, but it is not our universe because he fully recognizes that the Republican Party in America today is fully captured by insane people. 

So there was never any question that he'll be voting blue come November. But we happened to have a chat about his current political outlook on things. I present these not as endorsement or non-endorsement, but simply because what he said may be of interest to a readership who I suspect is (like me, unlike him) very much not of the normie bent.

1. He loves Joe Biden. One of the first things he said was that he's annoyed and frustrated by the notion that Biden is "the lesser of two evils" or a sort of shit sandwich you have to swallow given the alternative. My brother thinks Biden is great! He thinks he's had a tremendously successful presidency! In particular, my brother gave Biden a bunch of credit for lowering political temperatures and trying to pursue actual solutions to problems rather than demagoguing and grandstanding. 

Admittedly, my brother started off as a Biden supporter -- he was his favorite candidate at the outset of the 2020 primary (back when David was deciding between Booker and Warren). But now he wonders if he's really alone in that assessment, because so much of the prevailing narrative is centered around how nobody actually likes Joe Biden, they at best tolerate him. My brother is a loud and proud "I like Biden" guy.

2. He's lost patience with Israel's Gaza campaign. We're both Jewish, and while neither of us is super religious, we've both stayed involved in Jewish life as adults (and unlike me, he's visited Israel). He was obviously repelled by what happened on October 7 and thinks Hamas is a despicable terrorist outfit. Nonetheless, his take on the current status of the conflict in Gaza is that at this stage it feels to him as if it is no longer (if it ever was) about Israel's security, and now is just unconstrained vengeance being taken out upon the Palestinian population. He has no trust in or love for Bibi, and thinks he needs to go.

3. He's interested in Freddie DeBoer. That was, of all the names, the person he said he'd been reading recently whose work had been resonating with him -- didn't agree with all of it, but found him thought-provoking particularly on matters of mental health and "wokeness". I confessed that I hadn't thought about Freddie DeBoer in ages, so I couldn't really react to it. I suggested reading Matt Yglesias' "Slow Boring"; he laughed because Yglesias and DeBoer apparently despise each other even as they (in his mind) didn't seem too far apart when it came to tangible policy beliefs.

4. He's skeptical about the impact of "woke" trends. He doesn't identify with the efforts to destroy trans health care or anything like that (again -- he recognizes the GOP is crazy). But he did express concern about what he described as "wokeness", even though he also said he thought that term was clearly imprecise for what he was speaking of since it also captures plenty of activity he fully approves of. 

At first, I assumed he was talking about certain cringy performative activities that I could imagine being grating to someone of his views. But he emphasized that it wasn't just a matter of performance -- in his space (the non-profit world), he felt as if impactful programs that were doing a lot of good in marginalized communities were getting short-changed as donor priorities redirected towards initiatives that could more easily packaged as messaging DEI values (even if they didn't tangibly improve as many lives in the communities they purported to be uplifting). So his grief was partially an objection to performance, but with a tangible kick. I recommended he read Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else) by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò; he said he had heard of it but hadn't had the chance to read it.

Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?

I've been reflecting over the past few days about why it is that BDS/anti-normalization causes such existential panic amongst diaspora Jews -- more so, I'd wager, than it does for Israelis. I've written, of course, about how such movements frequently result in considerable regulation and injury to diaspora Jews who actually can be effectively subjected to external policing, so that's part of it. But as I think about it more, the fear comes from a much deeper place. What we fear is living in a community or a polity where people simply do not care what Jews think, and are content to speak upon Jews without being much concerned about Jewish contributions to the conversation.

As is the case in many such fears, this is not an injury that only the Jews have experienced. To take one adjacent example: the Trump "peace plan", constructed as it was with virtually no Palestinian input, was an effort to resolve the issue of Palestine without being especially concerned with what Palestinians had to say on the subject. Unsurprisingly, they were not so keen about being viewed as dispensable to the process of an Israeli-Palestinian accord; in addition to predictably producing a slanted deal, it was also taken -- rightfully so -- as a form of disrespect and degradation. The "deal" was always going to be stillborn, for that reason alone.

In Israel and Palestine, there are plenty of people who cling to the notion that they can "resolve" the conflict without remotely engaging with the perspective of the other, or actually coming to some sort of accord. For Israelis, this is the intoxication of power -- they have the land and the guns and the status quo high ground, and this is the prerogative of dominion. For Palestinians, there is the fundamentalism of despair -- if a negotiated deal is impossibly out of reach and we're stuck in the realm of fantasies, then why not be a maximalist? There's no opportunity cost to going for broke if there is no next-best alternative being passed up, because there aren't any actual alternatives being passed up at all. And of course, for both camps, the allure of unilateralism is bolstered by a resolute sense of righteousness -- why should we have to give an inch to them, when we are right and they are wrong? Where is the justice in being forced to make concessions to the wrongdoer?

Those who adapt this view may, as Abe Silberstein writes, respond to claims that they're being unrealistic by portentously insisting that they are "resisting hegemonic limitations on what is possible." They're not, and most people, at the end of the day, recognize the unyielding if not always convenient truth that a permanent solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict will have to entail some sort of accord or agreement between both parties. Neither side will be able to impose a lasting solution to the situation by force of will alone. Even if you think a two-state solution is dead in the water, a binational state would be roughly 50/50 Jewish and non-Jewish; such a state could only function if there is not just nominal but robust commitment to coexistence and mutual recognition. Neither party is going anywhere, which means that whatever the final status of the land is -- be it marriage or divorce -- it will still involve some agreement on how to live together, each party (if only via necessity) attentive to what the other thinks.

But things are different in the diaspora. Here there are not, objectively speaking, all that many Jews. Here, to imagine a world where one no longer need to speak to or think about Jews is not to imagine something impossible or even implausible. It is quite possible, at least in certain communities and spaces, to have a perfectly pleasant, happy, and functioning existence without any meaningful Jewish contribution whatsoever, and so a situation where Jews are not part of one's community is not necessarily a harbinger of dysfunction or chaos.

The BDS/anti-normalization cadre has made a calculated decision that it does not need to hear Jewish contributions. This is not the same thing as saying it actively does not want Jews. It is, for the most part, perfectly happy to have Jews aboard as passengers for the ride. It just means that this movement does not feel as if it has failed or is endangered in any particular way if it doesn't secure Jewish buy-in, and so if it turns out that it is a movement operating mostly independent of Jewish contribution, that does not represent a problem. 

• Morally, this calculation manifests as a view that the correct moral answer to the Israel-Palestine question is "Israel is wrong from root to branch", and while it'd be nice if Jews got onboard the righteous train, their failure to do so does not in any way modulate the right answer to the moral question (which exists entirely independent of what Jews think on the subject). 
• Politically, it is an assessment that their practical campaigns do not need Jewish presence or agreement in order to be functional; they can accomplish what they want to accomplish even if it is perfectly well-known they're doing it over howls of Jewish objection. 
• Finally, interpersonally, it carries an implied belief that there is no real loss felt to the extent one's circle is purged of (most) Jews -- our absence does not register as a cost, or at most is an acceptable one. Relationships with Jews are dispensable.

This belief represents a radical reimagination of the contemporary liberal political landscape -- it is very much not the status quo in the Democratic Party. Right now, the mainstream moral position amongst liberals is that a just solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict must be one that is acceptable to both sides; there is no party for whom it is right to simply see crushed.* Right now, it mostly remains the case that political legitimacy on matters of Israel depends on some amount of non-trivial Jewish buy-in -- it is not the case, as is often alleged, that this buy-in is withheld unless one goes all-in for Likud, but it is true that consensus Jewish redlines against extreme anti-Israel positions do roughly track the line between reputable and disreputable Democratic politics. Democrats believe that hearing from Jews (not just from us, but us too -- "necessary" is not "sufficient") and securing Jewish buy-in is necessary to come to the right decisions on Israel, and that hearing from Jews is necessary to come to politically viable decisions on Israel.

Most importantly, the degree to which Jews are imbricated into the fabric of mainstream liberal politics means it would actually be really hard, on a national level, to extricate oneself from ties and relationships with Jews without immense cost. To a far greater degree than any other diaspora nation, Jews are present all over the place in contemporary Democratic politics -- in Congress, in interest groups, among staff, in policy workshops, and in coalitions. To ask your average Democratic politician to detach themselves from any Jew whose views fail to line up with this radical reimagination is to ask them to divest themselves of countless rooted, meaningful attachments, built over years, which will not be dislodged so easily. These relationships are absolutely not dispensable, and as SunriseDC found out, that degree of embeddedness and entrenchment is quite resilient to challenge. 

Yet, unlike in Israel-Palestine, here in the US this radical reimagination is not an impossible reimagination. It is possible to conceive of. Most clearly, the people pushing this reimagination believe that hearing from Jews and securing buy-in from Jews is not necessary to develop morally correct postures on Israel. And as a matter of politics, the necessity of Jewish buy-in may be true on a national level, but it won't hold in every district or locality (there just aren't enough of us), to say nothing of the advantages in staking out a passionate minority position. Moreover, there is a difference even in how, say, Ilhan Omar orients to the Jewish community -- she does, however haltingly and ineffectually, try to engage with us -- and, say, what I've been seeing out of Imani Oakley (from whom antipathy towards engagement with Jewish community appears to be central to her political identity in a way that is unrivaled by any member of Congress I can think of, Squad absolutely included). I know little about the Newark-area district Oakley is running in (as a primary challenger to Donald Payne, Jr.) or about whether Oakley has any real shot at winning, but certainly she senses that overtly positioning herself in this way is not necessarily toxic.

Finally, the imbrication of Jews across liberal politics is true now, but it is not an inevitable fact of nature. So the reimagination begins by chip, chip, chipping away at the ability of Jews to enter into the room freely -- an ideological litmus test here, a campaign against interfaith work there, all serving to gnaw away those interpersonal connections which serve as hedges preserving relationships where political necessity fails. It is a tide lapping at a cliff-face, and the erosion can be slow even as the progress is steady. The DSA maybe can't expel Jamaal Bowman, and Bowman ("given his community") will not ditch his Jewish constituents so easily -- but what would be high cost in the case of Bowman is low cost when it comes to a city councilor in Des Moines or state representative in Raleigh. Old bonds die hard, but new institutions and spaces and visions that lack decades of accreted history will find it much easier to promulgate norms obstructing the development of new ones. Chip, chip, chip -- intervene to stop the connections from forming at the point of conception, and the roots won't be wide or deep enough to serve as a check if and when there is a moment of reckoning.

Cherrie Moraga wrote years ago of how "so often the women seem to feel no loss, no lack, no absence when women of color are not involved.... This has hurt me deeply."** The Jewish terror is that this reimagined politics is one where it is not even felt as a loss if Jews are not present. Ironically, as much as Israel is the fulcrum for the politics' development, as a much as those who promote it insist to high heavens they're just talking about Israel and Zionism, not Jews, it is Jews-not-in-Israel who will feel the brunt of it, because it is they who are actually in a position to be excluded from communities and spaces and places which had been and otherwise would be their own.

Again, it is not that, for those who promote this reimagination, Jewish absence is an affirmative good, necessarily. It's just that the absence isn't seen as a bad; it is not a failing that needs to be rectified. The people who promote this politics would be happy if Jews sign up for the ride, but they aren't going to adjust themselves a half-inch if Jews instead are registering complaints or seek to alter the trajectory. We are permitted to be passengers (or, perhaps, ballast), but not helmsmen. They don't need us, they will not accommodate us, and their assessment of their own path is implacably indifferent to whether it results in our presence or absence. That is a scary thought indeed.

 * Outside of the liberals, and until recently among many liberals, it was the case that many did believe exactly this -- just of Palestinians: they were the bad guys, and a "just" solution is one where they're punished, to hell what they think of it. I won't say that turnabout is fair play, but the howls of protest demanding "nuance" and acknowledgment of "both sides' legitimate claims" from many Jewish organizations do present a dissonant juxtaposition with the happy acceptance of the decidedly unnuanced and one-sided accounts of the conflict that prevailed for many years to the benefit of Israelis.

** Cherrie Moraga, "Refugees of a World on Fire," Forward to the 2nd ed. of This Bridge Called My Back (Watertown, Mass.: Persephone Press, 1983), 33

"Jewish" is an Identity

Donald Trump said some racist things the other day, telling a group of non-White female congresswoman to "go back" to the countries where they "came from" (three of the four targeted women are US-born, the fourth is a naturalized citizen).

I know -- Trump, racism, quelle surprise -- but this time it's actually being called out by name. CNN even showed some actual mettle in doubling-down on the label, running the headline: "Trump denies racist tweets were racist". Kudos to them.

Unsurprisingly, quite a few Jewish politicians and organizations have weighed in on the controversy -- in part because we, too, often are targeted with "go back to .... " bigotry, and in part because Trump decided to rope in Israel into his defense of his racist tirade.

Mostly, the Jewish organizations performed as you'd expect. The conservative ones basically backed Trump. The liberal and centrist ones (that's everybody from the ADL to Bend the Arc, Bernie Sanders to Chuck Schumer) were withering and unsparing. The AJC's statement stood out for its limpness, which is entirely on brand for them at this point ("potshots"?). But I want to take just a second to reflect on the statement of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which wrote the following:

“Every American came from somewhere. Time for everyone in #WashingtonDC to drop the identity politics #racism.”

Put aside the false equivalency -- that this sort of racism Trump is espousing is something that "everyone" in Washington is doing, as opposed to being the virtual sole province of Trump and his backers. What's up with the gratuitous -- dare I say "potshot" -- at "identity politics"?

Here's a news flash: the Simon Wiesenthal Center is a self-consciously Jewish organization (as are all the other groups on the JTA list). Which is fine. But Jewish is an identity! When Jews organize around Jewishness to engage in political action -- whether it's to fight antisemitism, advocate for Israel, defend immigrants, combat White supremacy, urge Holocaust education, or what have you -- that's identity politics! It can be done well or poorly, or in service of good objectives or bad, but there's nothing wrong with it in concept. The Simon Wiesenthal Center is one big tribute to the power of identity politics!

I know the Simon Wiesenthal Center hasn't exactly been covering itself with glory during the Trump administration, but this is ridiculous. The problem with what Trump said is that it's racist -- full stop. "Identity politics" has nothing to do with it.

A New Environment Roundup

We're closing the political theory term with a unit on ecologism/environmentalism. In honor of that, a roundup that includes nothing on that topic whatsoever:

* * *

C. Thi Nguyen explains how echo chambers are like cults. The problem isn't lack of competing information per se, the problem is that the echo chamber has built-in narratives for why alternative information sources aren't trustworthy and can be discounted.

Eric Ward is interviewed by Tikkun on the subject of identity politics.

We often talk about a "free speech crisis" on liberal college campuses. But there are a slew of avowedly right-wing (generally Christian) universities that barely pretend to allow for a diversity of opinions on campus.

ICE's Philadelphia office seems out of control.

Two British intellectuals (one whom served on the Chakrabarti inquiry, no less) give a history of antisemitism on the British left -- one that by no means starts with Jeremy Corbyn.

As teachers walk out in Kentucky in a push for higher wages, Governor Matt Bevin (R) blames them for exposing children to drugs, sexual assault, and violence. You'd think if teachers were that important -- not just responsible for educating youth, but also the sole bulwark against them being physically and sexually abused -- they'd be worth paying more.

Stop Caricaturing Intersectionality!

My new post for The Forward's "Sisterhood" blog (and my first time writing for Forward!) focuses on "intersectionality" and how virtually none of its critics understand what it means. It's not about the mythical Oppression Olympics where we race to find the proverbial disabled poor Black lesbian trans woman. It's about understanding the unique experiences that emerge from the confluence of different identities -- that to be (say) a "Jewish woman" is not simply to add the categories of "Jew" and "woman" together. This has much to say about the status of Jews in the modern world -- including the antisemitism we continue to regularly face, which very often intersects with and leverages the other identities we inhabit to devastating effect.

Indeed, if anything the Jewish "problem" with intersectionality shouldn't be that there's too much of it but too little -- all too often, Jewish experience is not included under its ambit (something symptomatic of a larger exclusion within the "identity politics" field). There are exceptions -- I note Marla Brettschneider's recently published Jewish Feminism and Intersectionality, and the column I wrote with Analucia Lopezrevoredo on intersesctionality and Mizrahi Jews -- but there remains much work to be done.

Still unsure if you should click the link? Check out these endorsements in the comments!

• "I daresay the writer could benefit from a chemical lobotomy." -- Gnarlodious
• " Intersectional Feminism.... kind of like Nazism but without the open mind." -- Joshua Seidel (Josh is that weird guy who identifies as "Jewish alt-right", so in fairness he would be the expert on open-minded Nazism)
• "Intersectionality is another loony leftist lie." -- Rob

Tough to argue with that!

Levy's Defense of Identity Politics

Jacob Levy has a truly phenomenal essay providing an old-school liberal defense of identity politics. I really cannot recommend it highly enough. He notes, accurately, that virtually all of the "identity politics are Why Trump Won" commentators are persons who hated identity politics before the election; making their current diagnoses more than a little suspect. He also notes that making sweeping judgments based on 80,000 votes in three rust belt swing states is a precarious thing. But his most important contribution is on offense. Here's a taste.

If you think—as I think any liberal who cares about liberty, whether classical, market, neo-, welfarist, Rawlsian, or whatever, must—that the combination of mass incarceration and aggressive policing amounts to a grave injustice, then you need to be able to think in race-conscious terms. What brought about this crisis? The war on drugs and police militarization, some readers will say. Okay, but what brought about the war on drugs and police militarization? The answer isn’t some simple intellectual mistake. The answer is deeply tied up in American racial politics.

The disproportionate impact of mass incarceration and aggressive policing on African-Americans isn’t some unfortunate side-effect of well-intentioned policies. The politics of drug prohibition, the war on drugs, and the subsequent expansions of police power and imprisonment were never racially innocent to begin with, and it is no accident that Nixon launched the War on Drugs when the ink was barely dry on the formal end of Jim Crow segregation and disenfranchisement.

As has so often happened in American history, state power expanded in order to persuade white voters that blacks were being kept under control. The appropriation of the language of freedom and anti-statism by those seeking to defend state-level racial tyrannies in the south fools more people than it should, but illiberal state power has far more often been caused by white racism than resisted by it. To think otherwise, one has to think that police and prisons don’t count as instances of state power at all.

Let’s return to [identity politics critic Mark] Lilla:

The moral energy surrounding identity has, of course, had many good effects. Affirmative action has reshaped and improved corporate life. Black Lives Matter has delivered a wake-up call to every American with a conscience. Hollywood’s efforts to normalize homosexuality in our popular culture helped to normalize it in American families and public life.

On the other side of the scale, he puts… the demands on college campuses to allow students to identify the gendered or non-gendered pronouns by which they wish to be addressed. Treating these as comparable in magnitude suggests a deep failure of perspective.

Black Lives Matter has provided the first truly large-scale political mobilization against police violence and mass incarceration since the War on Drugs began. It’s perfectly true that many liberal (very much including libertarian) scholars and analysts have been calling for reform of police practices, an end to police militarization and civil forfeiture abuse, respect for civil liberties, and drug decriminalization or legalization for a long time. It’s true that it’s possible to offer those analyses in a race-neutral way. But given that the policies aren’t race-neutral, it shouldn’t surprise us that opposition to them isn’t either, and that the real political energy for mobilizing against them would be race-conscious energy.

Again, read the whole thing.

Normal Identities

Via Amp at Alas, a Blog, I see a column up by Jonathan Rauch that opposes efforts to pass expansions of employment discrimination protections to gays and lesbians. He argues that such laws are emblematic of "victim" politics -- gays needing protection -- rather than "responsibility" politics, whereby gays actively seek to take on public responsibilities. Gay marriage and service in the military are examples of the latter.

I would never deny the continuing and often harsh reality of anti-gay discrimination, especially for kids. And I would agree with anyone who points out that allowing gays to sue discriminators in federal court is fair and reasonable. (Federal antidiscrimination law, after all, already protects other groups, like Christians, that endure far less social hostility.) But at this point, the right to file federal lawsuits is unlikely to make a big difference in gay people’s lives, and the 1970s civil rights model has become a warhorse in need of retirement.

The next Congress should be the second since 1994 when ENDA is not introduced — this time because gays ourselves have decided to move on. A country of gay spouses and parents and service members and veterans is a country of gay citizens, not gay victims. Ten years after Goodridge is a good time to recognize and celebrate that change.

As Amp points out, this puts the cart way, way before the horse. It reeks of someone who lives in a climate where gays really have made huge strides towards acceptance, without regard for people living in locations where anti-gay prejudice still looms large and really does affect employment (and housing) opportunities. That being said, I think I understand the theoretical impulse here, and perhaps can explain it in a way that explains why it can't apply to gays and lesbians at this stage in the political game.

Take two of my identities: I am Jewish, and I am (former) high school athlete. One of these two identities enjoys protections through anti-discrimination law, and one does not. One of these two identities also is one where I feel concerned about my status as a full and equal member of the polity, while the other elicits no such anxiety.

It may seem odd that the identity that enjoys greater legal protection is also the one whose position feels more fraught. Indeed, the vast majority of our identities garner no specific formal legal protection whatsoever. And it's not because they are not the subject of regulation, even controversial regulation, either. Athletes can face significant regulations (such as mandatory drug tests, or heightened academic requirements), and they may have strong views about the propriety of these ordinances. Lawyers (to take another example) face a massive array of regulations governing their conduct and certainly have no qualms about arguing over them. These arguments, however, occur without the backstop of any formal legal regime recognizing specific protections against unfair treatment for the identity. We fight these battles with nothing more than the normal tools of politics.

Yet this thought does not fill most of us with dread. To the contrary, it strikes us as utterly unremarkable. It is normal that most of our identities will be regulated and protected through nothing more than the normal channels of political and social dialogue. The need for something like anti-discrimination laws suggests a particular aberration from this norm -- recognition of a particularly dangerous or fraught area of controversy where the normal rules cannot be trusted.

For this reason, it is wrong to view the end-game of anti-discrimination work as the enactment of a robust array of legal protections. As one jurist put it, anti-discrimination laws "acknowledge—rather than mark the end of—a history of purposeful discrimination." Hernandez v. Robles, 7 N.Y.3d 338, 388-89 (N.Y. 2006) (Kaye, C.J., dissenting). Or to quote myself:

If one only has protections because one devotes every spare vote, dollar, resource and minute to secure them, one can hardly be said to be an equal. Equality comes when equality is normal — so normal, that you don’ t have to be perpetually on your guard to defend it. So normal that it wouldn't occur to anyone to try and take it away.

What Rauch is trying to get at is the securing for homosexuality the status of a "normal identity" -- one in which their equality is so natural that it need not be remarked upon, and where the natural flow of social and political channels will regulate matters of sexual orientation in a manner which, if not agreed upon by all, at least is not viewed as something extraordinary.

Needless to say, we are not there yet. And Rauch makes a huge mistake by jumping the gun. Indeed, part of being a normal identity is that one can insert yourself into the political process and secure benefits (same as other groups do as a matter of course), so it is antithetical to the notion to throw up barriers to a group's particular political ambitions. That is to say, it is not necessarily the case that a "normal identity" never receives protective measures, it is simply that if they do so it isn't seen as any more remarkable than, say, dairy farmers gaining legislative protections -- we might debate about it or oppose particular proposals, but it is not viewed as a high stakes deviation from politics-as-normal.

In sum, I see the appeal of Rauch's endpoint. He's just wrong to force the issue.

Futurama Teaches All

Adam Serwer lays out conservative allegiance to the Bender theory of discrimination, namely, that the only type of discrimination worth talking about (or even noticing, really) is the kind that affects them. Since most Republicans are White men, this means a huge emphasis on how White guys can't catch a break in modern America. But on the rare occasion that a female or non-White Republican catches hell, then suddenly racism and sexism become a problem. But only then -- it's not like seeing sexist attacks on Sarah Palin suddenly makes them realize launching them against Sonia Sotomayor is wrong or anything.

They also, I have to add, play the game badly, mostly because they believe their own rhetoric about how "discrimination" is nothing but politically-motivated whining. That being the case, they're happy to engage in it when it helps their own political motivations -- but they don't seem to grasp that a discrimination claim actually does have to have some content. So while Sarah Palin certainly did face some sexism, it is clearly untrue that all the troubles she faced could be traced to it (as opposed to the far greater contributor -- her own massive incompetence and egomania).

Quote of the Evening

Sherry Gorelick, Response To Finkel & Muraskin: Focus On The Lessons, New Politics No. 43:

If we build on Marx's perception, in his essay "On the Jewish Question," that the supposedly secular State in Christian society is deeply Christian, we can begin to understand what Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz has dubbed "Christianism." In her essay, "Jews in the U.S.: The Rising Cost of Whiteness" (in Names We Call Home: Essays on Racial Identity, ed. Becky Thompson & Sangeeta Tyagi [New York & London: Routledge, 1996]), Kaye/Kantrowitz says "In the U.S., Christian, like white, is an unmarked category in need of marking. Christianness, a majority, dominant culture, is not only about religious practice and belief, any more than Jewishness is. As racism names the system that normalizes, honors and rewards whiteness, we need a word for what normalizes, honors and rewards Christianity," an invisible, taken-for-granted system of domination that affects Muslims and other non-Christians as well as Jews (and, one might add, atheists and other secular people regardless of origin).

Via Ignoblus.

Also of note: Gorelick is anti-Zionist Jewish socialist writer. Honestly, I find that welcome: I'm not a fan of anti-Zionism, but if you're going to swing it, it has to take more seriously what Gorelick calls "Christianism" in the Western schema than do most anti-Zionist writers (Jewish or not).

Civil Rights Roundup: 09/01/08

Your daily dose of civil rights and related news

I wasn't planning on doing this today, but tomorrow I'm taking my girlfriend to the airport and likely won't have time to post. So tomorrow will be my holiday, and today you get a roundup.

In a whole new level of cattiness, Republican lawmakers in California tried to block courthouse improvements in retaliation over the judiciary's gay marriage rulings.

The anti-affirmative action forces in Arizona have admitted defeat.

The recent economic downturn is hitting Hispanics particularly hard, as they are being forced from full-time to part-time jobs.

Rev. Jeremiah Wright traveled to Houston as a guest preaching, delivering sermons focusing on sexual abuse.

Gregory Rodriguez in the LA Times: Identity still matters.

Rep. Brian Bilbray (R-CA) wants to end birthright citizenship.

The California Supreme Court has upheld the death sentence of a man convicted of a racially-motivated murder.

A Rutgers University report finds that American workers are in worse shape than they have been in some time.

A young woman was kicked off her football team by the state of Georgia, solely on account of gender.

Immigration ordinances have gotten so strict in Denver that Latinos are afraid to drive downtown.

How I Read Rev. Wright

After I wrote my well-received post on Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Black Conservatism, my former history professor contacted me and asked if I would like to lead a seminar on it for his African-American history class this term. I happily agreed. But when I met with him a few days ago, he said that we might have to change the topic. "Wright is old news," he said.

But it seems he spoke a bit too soon. While Obama's resignation from the Trinity Church was not precipitated by Wright but by comments from Rev. Michael Pfleger (who is not completely unknown to me but with whom I am far less familiar with), it certainly has brought back into the limelight the Black Liberation Theology that Trinity preaches.

The knowledge of politically engaged people is, as a rule, wide but not deep, save for a few issues. I include myself in this. Even though I consider myself relatively engaged, my knowledge of most issues is basically what a reasonably intelligent person would glean from reading The Washington Post or The New Republic. That's enough for me to feel reasonably okay talking about Iraq, or foreign policy, or economics, but it's more accurate to say I possess information rather than expertise. It is rare that I would feel confident second-guessing the "factual" coverage on these issues, for example.

By contrast, I do consider myself to have a pretty deep knowledge of Black Political Thought -- to the degree where objectively I simply have a stronger background than most of the mainstream media coverage of it. I've read from most major American Black political thinkers, left and right: Fredrick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, George Schuyler, Stokely Carmichael, Huey P. Newton, James Cone, Derrick Bell, and Clarence Thomas (the only major missing name is Thomas Sowell). I'm sure economists want to gouge their eyes out when they see how the mainstream media covers budget questions, because I'm feeling the same way about how Black Political thinking is being utterly butchered throughout this whole campaign season. Unlike most people, I've actually read more of Jeremiah Wright than you'd get on YouTube or CNN clips. And having both that direct exposure to his works, as well as the background in Black Political Thought (and Liberation Theology specifically) to put it in context, makes all the difference in the world. It bothers me that people who have no relevant background in the field, have done no reading of the thinkers in question (not even Wright himself -- let alone Cone or Carmichael!), feel so confident in making assertions on the subject. Do people do this in economics? I ask this seriously -- I would not, I think, venture such bold opinions on an economics question, because I know I am no economist. Yet it seems when the subject is Whites talking about Black Political thinking, this restraint does not apply. And that is worrisome -- it implies that Whites assume they automatically (by virtue of being White?) possess all the relevant knowledge by which to cast judgment.

A while back, I received in the mail two collections of Rev. Jeremiah Wright's sermons: What Makes You So Strong (1993) and Good News: Sermons of Hope for Today's Families (1995). I was supposed to review them, but never got around to it -- so consider this my review. Over the past several months I've been perusing them, and it has created a strange disjuncture between the portrayal of Rev. Wright and his Trinity Church, and the actual words he's spoken and commitments he's made as a pastor.

I obtained the books as part of a project I am working on regarding Black Political Thought, and I opened them expecting Wright to be a pulpit-version of the controversial founder of Black Liberation Theology, James Cone. But quickly, I discovered that this was not the case. Though he has a doctorate, Wright is not an academic theologian. He is a minister, and as such his concerns are more localized. The vast majority of his sermons focus on personal and collective uplift. It is, in this sense, quite (Booker T.) Washington-esque -- strikingly so, when read (as I did) side-by-side with Washington's writings. He wants Black parents to demand their children succeed in school. He urges Black families to stay together -- and that Black men show commitment to their spouses and children. He works against the scourge of drug addiction and gang violence. Whatever relationship that has or does not have to White racism is not his primary concern.

Does Wright discuss White racism? Absolutely, though not at the once-every-three-words clip that Fox News implies. But the context is not "hate Whitey." It's really more, to be crass, "screw Whitey." As in: White folks aren't going to solve your problems (why on earth would you be foolish enough to trust them to? Have you noticed a kind of pattern in that regard for 250 years of American history?). You have to solve your problems (Clarence Thomas has cited this same logic as his reason for embracing a libertarian-conservatism, saying "It reminded me of the mantra of the Black Muslims I had met in college: Do for self, brother."). And that's the bigger theme: personal responsibility and racial uplift. Wright tells parents they have the "right to demand excellence" as well as obedience from their children. He urges that interdenominational disputes in the Chicago religious community be cast aside because

You need every last one of those preachers. We need one another. We have enough crack cocaine in our community and enough ignorance in our community to be working from now until Jesus comes. Those aren’t your competitors. Those are your companions.

This, incidentally, is why Trinity has forged relationships with Louis Farrakhan, who for all his faults (and they are a legion) has done tremendous work in terms of criminal rehabilitation and drug treatment -- the same reasons why conservatives such as Robert Novak, Dan Quayle, and Jack Kemp urged Republicans to ally with Farrakhan in the mid-90s.

Sometimes, "screw Whitey" takes the form of turning the other cheek to White insults. Whites say Blacks don't have a history independent of White America? But Blacks do have such a history -- proud and glorious. Whites call their speech differences "dialects" but Black linguistics "bad English." Bogus. Wright believes that racial pride is a precondition to racial uplift -- you have to love yourself in order to make something of yourself. It is a profoundly conservative observation, indeed, precisely the mentality White Conservatives have been urging Blacks to adopt for years. It is a mentality that Whites hold tensely -- we want them to not depend on us, but still trust us and love us. But there is not much ground we have to demand the latter two qualities. White Conservatives want Blacks to be only partially independent because they see it only with regard to the broader White political project of small government; it requires no severance with broader American society or norms. Blacks, if they so choose, will declare independence because that's what they feel they need to do with survive -- and that remains just as true with regards to American society as it does American government. This is not hateful. There is nothing hateful about surviving.

So no, reading Wright's sermons, I never encountered anything that was hateful to Whites. I found a lot that urged Blacks to ignore Whites, and admonishments (backed up by considerable history) not to depend on Whites, but nothing that was incitement to violence or bigotry (unless it is bigotry on the part of Blacks to not put their stock in White magnanimity). Now, one could argue that the collections I read are biased -- that they would not contain Wright's most inflammatory material. There's a little to that (the "God damn America" sermon, for example, was not there -- I believe it was delivered after the books were published), but ultimately I find that prospect doubtful for at least four reasons. First, the books were published in the early- to mid-90s, well before anyone could have predicted that Wright would have the attention of the entire media. Second, the books do contain plenty of condemnations of White racism, it just isn't the focus. Third, Wright's claim to fame as a public figure when he was writing these (i.e., before he became "Barack Obama's pastor") was as a Black Liberation Theologian -- he had no incentive to downplay his radicalism in his published works. And finally, if there is one thing we know about Rev. Wright, it's that he does not exactly view discretion to be the better part of valor. Outspokenness is a pretty well-established character trait of his -- there's no reason to believe he'd pull his punches in his collected sermons.

The elephant in the room, of course, is the "God damn America" Jeremiad. This is, in many ways, an apex of Wright's preaching -- it is not an outlier, but, like the sermon delivered by Rev. Pfleger, nor is it simply the repetition of the dominant themes of Trinity's sermon (Of course, I'm 100%, absolutely positive that Michael van der Galien made that statement after a good faith analysis of a solid, representative cross-sample of the last 20 years of Trinity's sermons. It would be horribly irresponsible to say such things without having even looked at the evidence.).

Jeremiads are interesting -- they have a long and distinguished pedigree in the Christian tradition, and one defining feature of that pedigree is that the targets of the sermon are never keen on being so identified. Conservative pastors launch Jeremiads all the time, condemning America for being too tolerant of homosexuals and abortion. Wright's Jeremiad condemns America for being too tolerant of racism, sexism, and homophobia (Wright, incidentally, has been a key leader in trying to rid the Black Church of its homophobia -- a serious problem for which he deserves great accolades for tackling). For my part, I do not know how effective Jeremiads are (don't they usually get ignored until God Herself starts raining down the hellfire?). But I certainly do not object to the point that America needs to be awakened as to the reality of racial injustice here. And I do not believe America possesses some inherent quality making as immune to damnation. We, as everyone else, have to earn our blessings.

Recall what I said earlier -- about how Wright is urging his flock not to hate Whites but to ignore them. That is the linchpin of this sermon as well. It is crushing to be told you have to love your abuser -- physically, emotionally, spiritually. America has abused Blacks (physically, emotionally, and spiritually). Why should they praise America? "What, to the Negro, is the Fourth of July?" (as Fredrick Douglass so memorably put it). Why should they count on America to look out for them? It hasn't, and Wright believes, it won't. God damn America represents spiritual and psychic release from an abusive relationship. Freed from the shackles of having to love their abuser, Blacks can love themselves and lift themselves.

One might gather from all of this that I agree with Rev. Wright on every point, or at least every point I've discussed hitherto. I do not, although my position is more complicated than that makes it out to be. I've noted that, as a White person, I cannot ethically place anti-racism practice as "screw Whites". I have an obligation as a White person to break down the belief that engagement with Whites is a waste of time. But the bridge must be over my back -- I have precisely zero credibility with which to demand such engagement. So in that sense, I would hope that Rev. Wright would come to see Whites as a partner in the project of uplift, but I cannot "disagree" with him if he does not see us so.

Having made that concession, I can still indict certain strategies for Black uplift as unwise or even potentially immoral (as I've done, for example, with regards to his words on AIDS). But the basic acknowledgment of autonomy and self-determination: that Blacks have the prima facia right to determine how they want to pursue their project of liberation, has to come first. And part of allowing Blacks autonomy in this project means allowing them to say "screw Whites -- we're doing this alone."

Daily Dose of Young

Well, I don't give Iris Marion Young to you daily. But if I did, you'd be smarter for it.

According to Young, "perspective" is derived from the fact that differentiated people, by virtue of their varied social position, have "have different experience, history, and social knowledge derived from that positioning." She conceptualizes perspective as a "starting point" for how we think about political affairs, but not an end -- it sets up our vantage point, but does not determine what we decide to look at or how we interpret what we see.

Here, Young explains why -- notwithstanding the fact that everyone, by virtue of their unique background and experiences, has a different perspective -- it makes sense to think about perspective in terms of group positioning. She also stresses that saying that people might share a perspective (or at least a similarly positioned one) is not the same thing as saying they will reach the same normative conclusions about what principles flow from that, or what their political interests are.

To be sure, each person has his or her own irreducible group history which gives him or her unique social knowledge and perspective. We must avoid, however, the sort of individualism that would conclude from this fact that any talk of structured social positions and group-defined social location is wrong, incoherent, or useless. It makes sense to say that non-professional working-class people have predictable vulnerabilities and opportunities because of their position in the occupational structure. The idea of perspective is meant to capture that sensibility of group-positioned experience without specifying unified content to what the perspective sees. The social positioning produced by relation to other structural positions and by the social processes that issue in unintended consequences only provide a background and perspective in terms of which particular social events and issues are interpreted; they do not make the interpretation. So we can well find different persons with a similar social perspective giving different interpretations of an issue. Perspective is an approach to looking at social events, which conditions but does not determine what one sees.

Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000), 138-39.

So, for example, all gay people in America (save Massachusetts) share a "position" in that none can marry the partner of their choice. That does not mean that they all share the same ideas of what moral principles should be brought to bear on that issue (what Young calls "opinions"), or what they imagine the effect or importance that reality has on their life prospects (what Young calls "interests"). Two gay people could start from their relatively similar perspective, and radically differ on what moral principles they apply to it, and/or what interests they imagine they have regarding gay marriage. But nonetheless, they operate from a different standpoint than straight people, who necessarily don't "see" the problem of marriage inequality in the same way (even if they adopt the same interests or opinions on the matter as individual gay people).

Perspective matters because it can bring agenda items to the democratic table that might otherwise go un- or under-noticed, or offer new ways of conceptualizing a problem that the dominant perspective may be less likely to see. To talk about needing to include the gay perspective, or the Black perspective, is not to say that we are committed to a particular conception of their interests or ideologies. Elsewhere in the book, Young cites the example of the Pittsburgh Courier, an African-American newspaper. Though its news stories deal with a wide array of topics, and its editorial pages host political opinions ranging from right-wing libertarianism to left-wing socialism, it still identifiably comes from an "African-American perspective." It adopts an outlook that operates from the vantage point of where African-Americans reside in our social hierarchy, but still recognizes that people from that position can have widely variable interests and opinions.

Because people experience many social problems and controversies in different ways, it is important to insure that relevant groups are represented in discussion of those issues, even if we (rightly) assume that not every member of that group will have the same idea of how to respond to these issues.

UPDATE: An excellent example I just thought of illustrating this is my good friend, Clarence Thomas. Like many Blacks, Thomas interacted with the institution of affirmative action. He shares the position of his fellow African-Americans who also have reaped whatever benefits and hindrances that are the upshot of that institution -- particularly, the feeling by some Whites that he is less qualified as a result of being a "beneficiary" of it. Now, as is clear, that can lead to a variety of opinions on the subject -- Thomas considers AA actively harmful and wishes to abolish it, many other Blacks believe the problem is the White prejudice against AA graduates (flowing out anti-Black prejudice generally), not the program itself. The perspective, in other words, clearly doesn't determine one's ultimate opinion. But even granting that, it would still be absurd to the extreme to say that we should debate the question of affirmative action without consulting/representing those whose social position has given them this specific perspective on the matter.

Black Conservatives in Large and Small Caps

About a year ago, I penned a post entitled "Taking Thomas Seriously", about the particularly political ideology held by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. In it, I noted that both liberals and conservatives misunderstood Thomas' orientation because they tried to map him onto "standard" (White) political categories. Thomas is a conservative, yes, but specifically he is a Black Conservative, which is a very particular philosophical tradition that does not perfectly align with plain old vanilla White conservatives.

Not all Black conservatives are Black Conservatives (that is, there are conservative Black people, such as Ward Connerly, who I would not identify as part of the Black Conservative tradition), and, more importantly, not all Black Conservatives are conservative (in that, on our "traditional" left/right axis, some would be placed on the left). However, because most people, particularly most Whites, aren't familiar with Black Conservative ideology, it leads to significant misunderstanding about where its adherents are coming from when they do show up on the national stage. All this is preface to point out that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, he who has nearly derailed Obama's campaign, is a Black Conservative. To be sure, he's not a conservative (needless to say, capitalization matters in this post). But he's not a "liberal" either -- his political alignment doesn't comfortably fit onto models premised on White ideological positioning. Black Conservatism, like Black Liberalism, is not wholly divorced from "standard" Conservatism and Liberalism -- but at best they intersect at odd angles.

Black Conservatism essentially operates off the premise that racism is an ingrained and potentially permanent part of White-dominated institutions. As a result, Black Conservatives essentially tell Blacks they can only rely on themselves to get ahead in America -- counting on White people to be moral or "do the right thing" is a waste of time. Politically, this means building tight-knit communities that emphasize the patronizing of identifiably Black institutions, with the end result being social independence from White America. In this, it mixes at least partial voluntary self-segregation with a significant aversion to external dependency, with Whites and White institutions being defined as outsiders who can't be trusted. Every dollar that flows out of the Black community and into the hands of White America is a dollar that is in the control of a group that, at best, has a unique set of interests that can't be counted on to converge with those of Black people. Contained within this school are thinkers as far-ranging as Derrick Bell, Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, Clarence Thomas, Huey P. Newton, and Malcolm X. Black groups and leaders who were/are not Black Conservatives include W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, the NAACP, Thurgood Marshall, and yes, Barack Obama.

Black Conservatism holds obvious parallels with traditional paleo-conservatism (hence the name): the mistrust of outsiders, looking out for one's own people first (and concurrently, self-reliance over dependency), lack of faith in high-minded moralism and ideology. But since African-Americans are a minority people in the United States, some other qualities are grafted on which are less familiar to majoritarian conservatism: most notably, the nation is considered to be an outsider, making the ideology significantly less inclined towards patriotism than the average White conservative. The "anti-American" elements, normally associated as a far-left belief, actually are a closer relative to conservative xenophobia: the analogy would be White American Conservative: United Nations :: Black American Conservative : United States. Each represents a distant governmental body, run by outsiders, which represents a putative threat to group autonomy. The mistrust of authority, often characterized as a left-belief, becomes a right-ward belief once its conceptualized as mistrust of foreign authority -- within their own communities, Black Conservatives often create very rigid hierarchal models (particularly on gender issues). Ultimately, though, what Black Conservatives preach is independence: As Marcus Garvey, an key Black Conservative writer in the early 20th century put it, "No race is free until it has a strong nation of its own; its own system of government and its own order of society. Never give up this idea."

Virtually all the controversial statements said by Rev. Wright make the most sense as expositions on Black Conservative ideology. His disclaimer of the pursuit of "middle-class-ness" is a term of art; he's flaming Black people who are more concerned about looking good to White people than they are about insuring the health of their own community -- including those who haven't yet moved up the ladder. His extraordinarily grim predictions about the state of racism in America are textbook Black Conservative arguments, as are his efforts to break down the idea that America is a particularly moral government that can be trusted (rightly, when he notes that America too has engaged in state-sponsored terrorism in Latin America and supported it in South Africa; wrongly when he alleges that we infected Black folk with the AIDS virus).

I'm not saying I agree with all of his points -- I'm not a Black Conservative, and as I outlined in the Thomas post, I'm not sure that a White person can morally adopt the premises of Black Conservatism. But we can't understand what we're yelling about until we properly position it within its philosophical school. This is why I feel confident in asserting that Obama and Wright are not of a political kind -- they operate from totally different ends of the Black Conservative political spectrum. Obama is an integrationist, the very act of running for President means that he believes that there is a space for Blacks in our hitherto White-dominated government, and all of his speeches, policies, and writings have indicated he believes that there is hope for an America that is not separated and divided on racial lines. All of these positions would be derided as doe-eyed idealism by a true Black Conservatism. And if there is one thing Obama can't be accused of, it's of being too much of a pessimist.

UPDATE: Welcome, Andrew Sullivan readers! One thing I wanted to get at in this post, but didn't get to, was how Wright's remarks fit into a particular model of Black theology, which I also identify as fundamentally in line with Black Conservatism. Wright's Jeremiads differ not at all from classic White Evangelism, except in who they condemn.

Ultimately, as I told Andrew, the interplay between Black Conservatism and Liberalism is, I believe, representative of the Janus-face in the Black political psyche. All but the most hardened Black Conservatives would, I believe, admit that they would prefer a world in which racism had ended, where people of all backgrounds could live in trust and harmony. They just think of it as an idyllic fantasy; one that distracts Blacks from the every day need to survive and flourish in a world where the fantasy is not the reality. And Black Liberals, in their more despondent moments, wonder if the Conservatives are right -- if their long struggle is ultimately futile; if White people ever will truly accept Blacks as equals, brothers and sisters. Wright is more than Obama's crazy uncle -- he's the other side of Obama's message of hope. Obama represents those Blacks who still have faith in the ability of America to ultimately overcome racial stratification. Wright represents those who can no longer believe.

UPDATE #2: I wrote a follow-up post to tie up some loose ends -- primarily how Clarance Thomas' vein of Black Conservatism fits into this model (basically, I leaned too heavily on separatism as the defining element of Black Conservatism, when its really skepticism of America overcoming racism on the basis of moral appeals).

What If?

The Geraldine Ferraro flap is actually old terrain in this campaign. Responding to the same charge (that Obama wouldn't be where he was today if he wasn't Black), Cass Sunstein rejoined:

I have no idea how Obama would be regarded if he were white. (He might be regarded as this generation's Jack Kennedy; the two have a similar quickness, youth, charisma, and capacity for humor.) But for any successful politician, there are many necessary conditions for their success. Would George W. Bush be president if his last name were not Bush? Would Al Gore have become vice-president if his last name had not been Gore? Would Senator McCain be a serious candidate for the presidency if he had not been held prisoner in Vietnam? Would Bush, Gore, or McCain be where they are today if they were African-American or Hispanic? (What kinds of questions are these?)

This time around, Klein applies the what if machine to Ms. Clinton:

[I]f Hillary Clinton were a black man, it's unlikely that she would have been a national political figure for the past 15 years, as it's unlikely that she would have married another man from Arkansas, and unlikely that the country would have put an interracial, same sex couple in the White House. But so what? This is an election, not Marvel's "What If?" series.

The candidates are who they are. Obama is a fantastic candidate as a Black man. Clinton is a fantastic candidate as a White woman. It's impossible to know where they'd be if their identity axes were differently located. But that's true of all our politicians. We just only seem to care when they're not White men, because those are the "strange" politicians.

Of course, if I believed there was anyway to transubstantiate personality wholesale onto another identity, it would seem more likely that someone from a traditionally politically marginalized group -- Black or female -- would be more likely to become a successful politician if they were a White man, because they'd have all their talent, drive, and ambition, but wouldn't have to deal with dumb questions like this. Maybe we should ask ourselves if every White male candidate is talented enough so they'd still be seen as a contender even if they were a Black woman.

Identification, Please

Thank you Ann Friedman:

It's high time we acknowledge that every candidate has an identity: a race, a gender, a cultural background. It may not make or break every voter's decision, but a candidate's identity is always an electoral factor -- even when that identity is white and male. Clinton's female supporters and Obama's black supporters don't get enough credit. They are making tough decisions on how to reconcile their political beliefs with their gut reactions upon seeing someone who looks like them up on the dais. In fact, all Democratic voters are wrestling with this. Very few Americans have ever had the opportunity to vote for anyone other than a white man for national office. After so many years with "white male" as the default political identity, we're all suddenly forced to think about how much a candidate's race, gender, and background should matter.

Let's make this election about the issues, everyone says -- and rightfully so. Our presidential nominee should be chosen primarily on the issues. But most of us don't separate issues from identity as cleanly as we'd like to believe. When it comes down to it, everyone is an "identity politics" voter. The problem is that phrase, as commonly used by right-wingers and some on the left who are tone-deaf on issues of race and gender, has the effect of cutting down the political choices and involvement of women, people of color, and gays and lesbians.

After all, Clinton and Obama and their supporters aren't playing "identity politics" any more than John Kerry's supporters did in 2004, or George W. Bush's did in 2000. It's absurd to suggest that the Andover-Yale-Harvard-bred Bush adopting a swagger and thickening his Texas accent, or John Kerry riding a borrowed Harley onto The Tonight Show set, was anything other than identity politics. And after several early primaries, as it became clear that white men most strongly supported John Edwards, nobody accused them of playing identity politics. Nope, that distinction is reserved for people who have historically not been in positions of political power. In short, you can't be a white guy voting for another white guy and still play the identity game.

See also me, back in November, on this same issue.