Issue of Economic Inequality Could Bridge Liberal Divides
Since the election of Donald Trump, it’s been en vogue for journalists and writers to ponder if and how “identity politics” — facets of our varied realities tied into our personal and shared politics—are driving the liberal left to the edge of ruin. While writers have also examined how “white” identity politics played a pivotal role in Trump’s campaign and eventual victory (and how that particular strand of politics has been used throughout our nation’s history to steer the political ship), it seems that liberals are chastised most in this regard, perhaps due to the sheer number of vocal interest groups, who are all rightfully ready for change.
And perhaps the struggle for those on the political left, on both a personal and larger, collective scale, is how to balance time, energy, and resources to rectify the wrongs seen here, there, and everywhere. And which should be addressed first, especially considering privileges and resources are often unfairly scattered across the country and globe (and are generally easier to access or retain depending on economic status, race and ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, and other factors)?
Eric Schickler, professor of political science at the University of California Berkeley, wrote a piece in Vox that disagrees eloquently with the assumption that the left should abandon identity politics. In it, he writes that the lesson “for liberals today is not that they should turn away from appeals to the identities of particular groups. Instead, liberalism is at its strongest when its advocates understand that justice for each group is essential to achieving justice for all.”
We agree with that conclusion but struggle to reconcile how it can be accomplished in a way that most equitably prioritizes issues and interests. If justice for each group is essential to all — does that mean some lead the way while others have to wait their “turn”? That makes for a system that’s essentially unfair no matter how you shake it, even when intentions are pure. How does a coalition of sometimes seemingly disparate interest groups on the left unify to win enough control to make progress on the various issues important to the whole?
A separate Vox article by Ezra Klein addresses how there might be a way forward by focusing more on a single, multi-layered issue that inevitably envelopes all people — economics. “The closest thing to a consensus so far seems to be that Democrats need to advance a more economically populist message — one that decries the excesses of Wall Street and pushes policy ideas that could benefit the white working class along with the rest of Americans, like universal healthcare, free college, paid family leave, and a massive infrastructure program,” he writes. (It’s important to note that Vox refers to the “white working class” and does not use the term “working class” as a stand-in to mean only those who are white. Too often, that term is misused, harkening back to an bygone era, even while the working class is rapidly diversifying.)
According to the Center for American Progress Action Fund, “Seventy-five years ago, 89.4 percent of the adult U.S. population was white, with white workers similarly making up 88 percent of the working-class labor force. The share of white Americans in the working-class labor force dropped by about 3 percentage points over the next 30 years, reaching 84.9 percent in 1970. This share has fallen even faster in subsequent years, reaching 58.9 percent in 2015. African Americans now make up 13.7 percent of the working class but only 11.9 percent of U.S. adults, while Hispanic Americans make up 20.9 percent of the working class but 15.5 percent of U.S. adults.” It includes more women than ever, too, and service-sector workers not often considered as part of the working class.
“Solutions to address the real concerns and needs of working-class Americans must take into account the true makeup of today’s working class. The nation’s challenge is not only to bring back industrial jobs to the subset of workers on which Trump and others have focused but also to consider the well-being of the broader working class and to raise the quality of jobs in all industries that employ today’s workers,” continues the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
It’s important at this point to think back on Martin Luther King’s legacy. At the end of his illustrious, all-too-short life, he was working on the Poor People’s Campaign, looking to unite Americans via economic concerns, which were (and are) central to day-to-day survival for so many. He referred to “genuine equality” as “economic equality,” stating, “…we know that it isn’t enough to integrate lunch counters. What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn’t earn enough money to buy a hamburger and a cup of coffee?”
Does this mean we should put on the back-burner all concerns except those strictly economic? Not at all, especially because identity politics and economics are inextricably linked — as demonstrated, again, by Trump’s campaign on “economic issues” that tied directly into racial and gender-based fears.
“The question — is it identity politics or is it class — is very thin, analytically. Because it implies that class is not an identity and it centers white male working-class identity as universal. It erases working-class people of color,” said Roosevelt Institute fellow Dorian Warren, one of the co-authors of Rewriting the Racial Rules: Building an Inclusive American Economy, as quoted in New York Magazine.
Since Trump’s election, we’ve seen an emergence of candidates inspired, perhaps by that feeling of erasure, to run for office. Those who have come to the fore in the past year have surprisingly widespread identities and have run on economic platforms. In many cases, these candidates combined their “identity politics” with local/universal platform issues.
According to the Head of the Roosevelt Institute, Felicia Wong — who was also quoted in the aforementioned New York Magazine article — this type of emergence could be key to future liberal success. “Democrats need to figure out how to combine issues linked to gender, race, and immigration — identity politics — into a more coherent economic framework that reduces the sense that one group wins at another group’s expense,” she says.
It’s not about picking any one issue—or identity—over another. It’s about figuring out how to package it all into a message with economic inequality as the overarching unifier, speaking to the concerns of every person and every group. Without this type of unifying issue and message, it’s clear that making progress on any and all of the issues that intersect with identity politics becomes threatened because of the divisive politics and reactionary policies of the right (when in power). The midterm elections later this year will be an interesting litmus test to see if there’s been any quantifiable progress regarding a build out of an economics-as-bridge sort of strategy.
