We now live in the age of identity politics, with political outcomes more influenced than ever by considerations of ethnicity, gender and race. We are also more polarized along such lines than in the past, with each of our two major parties possessing more clearly defined ethnic/racial bases.
What Arthur Schlesinger warned of-the “Balkanization of American politics”-has come to pass.
The Democratic Party is largely now the party of blacks, Hispanics, single women, public employees and young voters. Taken together, that gives it a powerful built-in electoral advantage, because the first four of those five groups are getting bigger as a percentage of the electorate over time, and roughly 40 percent of the fifth group (young voters) are black, Hispanic or Asian as well.
The Republicans have become, by default, the party of “the rest,” essentially the dwindling white majority. The Republican base is whiter, more married and older. It is also more religious in a land where organized religion, after long resisting a trend visible in other First World countries, has begun to decline.
The triumph of identity politics and the coalescing of the two major parties along such lines was the great lesson of Barack Obama’s election in 2008. Within this context, his re-election last year affirmed a new Democratic electoral base in much the same fashion as Franklin Roosevelt’s re-election in 1936 cemented the “New Deal” coalition that dominated American politics well into the 1970s.
Obama’s base isn’t as overwhelming as FDR’s was, and the Republicans are not nearly as weak today as they were in the 1930s, but it is also important to note that Democrats now have an advantage that FDR’s coalition didn’t, which is a much greater degree of cultural dominance by virtue of the left’s “long march through the institutions” that commenced in the 1960s.
The left controls the popular culture because it has virtually unchallenged supremacy within the mass media, Hollywood, the publishing industry and academe. To the extent such institutions serve as primary mechanisms of political socialization, the content of that socialization is now thoroughly left/liberal. As such, it is quite possible for a young man or women these days to grow up reading popular fiction, watching the most popular television shows and movies and news programs and to then to graduate from a respectable college without having ever come into contact with serious conservative ideas.
The Democratic Party’s control of the mainstream media has special electoral significance because it is the media that decisively sets the narrative within campaigns and elections. For the media, the overarching theme of 2008 was that it was time for us to elect a black president, and there just happened to be a certain junior senator from Illinois, practically cut from central casting, “articulate and bright and clean” (in Joe Biden’s words), to be “the one.”
Those who see race as the key factor in reactions to Obama have it right, but in the wrong sense-the more important part isn’t that some people oppose him because he is black, but that so many more people have given him unqualified, almost cult-like support for that same reason. The undeniable truth is that if Obama had been white, we would have never heard of him.
Obama’s election demonstrated the power of the new Democratic “minority-majority” base, but his race and persona also galvanized it and kept it in place for his re-election four years later. Far from a liability in an irredeemably racist land, Obama’s race both propelled him into the White House and continues to this day to insulate him from the kind of media scrutiny that other presidents were routinely subjected to.
But precisely because the logic of identity politics rests upon victimization and resulting grievance, any political coalition built on such a basis requires a distribution of spoils to each group in turn, suggesting that, if 2008 was about electing the first black president, 2016 will be about electing the first woman president. Having been there and done that with Obama, gender is likely to trump race next time around.
Just as Americans were (falsely) encouraged by the media narrative to believe that they could acquire forgiveness for their nation’s racist past by supporting Obama, they will now be urged to prove they can overcome their entrenched sexist tendencies by voting for Hillary Clinton.
There is, of course, ultimately something sad and even medieval about our descent into such ways of thinking, in which pigmentation, gender and tribalism of various sorts, what social scientists call “ascription,” determine outcomes in life. And about the implicit assumption, flowing from the left’s cultural dominance, that American history consists of little more than a disgraceful Howard Zinn version of racism, sexism and intolerance that must be expiated in the present by a series of token electoral gestures on behalf of the putative victims.
But it still useful to note that coalitions built around grievance and identity politics are difficult to maintain. It is also a political game that anyone can, at least in theory, play.
So how threatening for the new Democratic coalition and the supporting media narrative would it be to see a GOP ticket in 2016 consisting of Condoleezza Rice and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio?
-
———◊-
———
Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial, Pages 13 on 10/21/2013