Part 2:  How Donald’s identity politics trumped Hillary’s
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By William C. Shelton

(The opinions and views expressed in the commentaries and letters to the Editor of The Somerville Times belong solely to the authors and do not reflect the views or opinions of The Somerville Times, its staff or publishers)

A narrative gaining credence is that Donald Trump’s victory represents the triumph of his economic populism over Hillary Clinton’s identity politics. A more accurate reading, I think, is that Donald Trump could not have succeeded without alloying economic populism with 48 years of Republican identity politics.

Over that period, Republicans represented their political gains as the result of promoting more persuasive ideas. In fact, their ideas were always disproven by reality.

Tax cuts on the wealthy did not produce sustainable economic growth. Trade deals rewarded participating countries’ elites while their poor and working people grew poorer. Disinvestment from infrastructure, research, and education crippled our economic vitality. Deregulation led directly to the great recession.

The driving force behind Republican gains was the cultivation and manipulation of identities, beginning with the Nixon southern strategy’s political realignment of the former Confederacy. Ronald Reagan continued it, launching his presidential campaign in Neshoba County, Mississippi, where White racists had murdered three civil rights workers. His message and its intended audience were unmistakable.

Newt Gingrich’s vaunted “contract with America” had little to do with his successful campaign to retake the House of Representatives in 1994. His strategy was identity politics.

Beginning in 1990, his GOP Action Committee had instructed its network to memorize a list of “optimistic positive governing words” such as “common sense,” “freedom” and “principled” to describe Republicans, and a list of such “contrasting words” as “excuses,” “pathetic” and “stagnation” to disparage Democrats.

Over the ensuing decades the GOP was able to elaborate and proliferate this strategy through an expanding system of political operatives, fundraising operations, friendly evangelical leaders, and media demagogues. Trump became the Republican nominee because his sixteen competitors competed on ideological purity, while he manipulated identity.

Meanwhile, the Democratic establishment increasingly made identity-based appeals to African American, Latino, LGBTQ, and women voters, while collaborating on policies that increased economic hardship for working Americans, regardless of their identity.

Although Democrats controlled the presidency for sixteen of the last twenty-four years, and both houses of Congress for four of them, living-wage jobs gradually disappeared. Median family incomes declined. Housing, healthcare and education costs steadily increased. Life expectancy among White working-class men decreased.

The local institutions in which people find wholeness continued to fall apart as well. As I suggested in Part 1, when extended families disintegrate, communities unravel, and patriotism becomes less credible, humans need something to fill the identity vacuum.

The Republican network was there to coalesce into shared identity the shared bitterness of White rural and working people who felt economically and culturally abandoned. Once identity crystalizes, facts become much less important.

“Identity” in this case means a set of mutually reinforcing ideas about who people like us are, and who those not like us are. Trump appealed to voters who see themselves as honest and hardworking, but who are ignored, disrespected, and denied what is rightfully theirs.

Many of them feel that their faith is being ridiculed as well. And Democrats like Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton, who themselves rejected gay marriage five years ago, play into this when they squander substantial political capital on matters like restroom fights.

Identity politics are indispensable to empowering oppressed groups. But they are less helpful in establishing common cause and common purpose across an electorate whose essential needs and hopes have much more in common than they have differences.

And they are counterproductive when key groups are excluded, especially in an age of declining motivation and opportunity to experience empathy. Hillary Clinton’s campaign appearances involved a series of shout outs to certain identity groups. The absence of white working voters in this political bonhomie did not go unnoticed by them.

Sadly and ironically, this celebration of “minority groups” reinforced perceptions nurtured by right-wing media. The narrative is something like, “As hard as we work, and as virtuous as we are, it gets harder to make ends meet, while government is generous to people who are less deserving.” This resonates with popular-culture depictions (dominating a more problematic reality) suggesting that the lives of minority group members have been steadily improving.

Many liberals wonder how White voters without college degrees could vote two-to-one for a party whose policies are inimical to their wellbeing. And how white evangelicals could vote four-to-one for a candidate whose every behavior was the opposite of what Jesus taught.

They didn’t vote their faith. They voted their identity.

Their hatred for “government” is not based on Republican small-government philosophy, but on the felt certainty that government doesn’t deserve our money and allegiance because it doesn’t respect us and take care of us—a more liberal attitude. Some portion of the bitterness is, indeed, about race. But its potency comes from lived conditions.

Those conditions were the focus of Donald Trump’s and Bernie Sanders’ campaigns, while Hillary Clinton’s campaign lacked focus. With Sanders’ departure, Trump became their personal messenger.

Exit polls reported that 25 percent of Trump voters believed that he is unfit to be president. Filmmaker and Michigan native Michael Moore explained this seeming contradiction when he predicted Trump’s victory:  “He is the human Molotov cocktail that they’ve been waiting for, the human hand grenade that they can legally throw into the system that stole their lives from them.” Trump’s “fitness” didn’t matter.

Advancing the “arc of the moral universe” that Martin Luther King spoke of must always include supporting the struggles of oppressed people. But we are most successful at that when we show, through word and deed, how those struggles are inseparably linked to the wellbeing of us all.

King’s movement was successful because he appealed not only to African Americans’ particularistic concerns, but to the truth that we, as Americans, are better than Jim Crow. He came to understand that the struggle for justice ultimately turned on class, and he died as a leader in a labor dispute.

By abandoning working people over the last 35 years, the Democratic Party lost its ability to mobilize citizens based on class grievances. So mobilization around identity grievances became the best, though inadequate, alternative. That’s the subject of the next column in this series.