Or the polarization engendered by nationalist conflicts. Perfectly reasonable to suppose that though both sides are not equally bad, you're not going to get rid of the worse side before the less bad side reforms. That was absolutely certainly the case in the UK in the 1980s.
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Of course, you can argue that's no the situation here, that there is a road to victory for the Dems even if identity politics continues to rule the roost, but that's an empirical judgment (about which honest interlocutors might come to a different conclusion).
Pragmatism doesn't just mean supporting less extreme tendencies, though it might. It sometimes requires going after your own fringe (as it did in the 1980s with the Labour Party).
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In the US, it is the left fringe that goes after the Democratic Party and tips close elections to Republicans. That’s the only way Republicans won any presidential election since 1988.
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Okay, I should leave this... but you think this point supports your position!? You don't think it means you have to sort out your left fringe? (And all politics is not identity politics. You don't know the terrain. Hegemonic project vs. identity politics, for example).
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I’m not as ignorant as you may think. But I don’t think the Marxist framework of class vs. nation generalizes properly as class vs. everything else, which is what those who denounce “identity politics” from the left seem to assume. 1/
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Rather, in practical politics, class is just an example of identity, and politics always works through people grouping around identities. What changes, though, is the relative salience of such identities. 2/
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Well, I'm not inclined to think of it in terms of class. But there's a difference between a politics that seeks to break down distinctions between identity groups, emphasizing what binds people together, rather than what separates them... 1/
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and perhaps uniting behind particular universal policy commitments - e.g., eradication of poverty, drive for equality, increased educational access - and a politics that seeks to preserve disparate identities, and valorizes those in political, moral & epistemic terms, making 2/
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them the organizing principle of any political engagement. The first can aim towards hegemony in the Gramscian sense (i.e., it seeks to build a single unified movement that dominates the ideological terrain). The second will inevitably flounder precisely in the relations...
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of inclusion and exclusion it fosters. The second is characteristic of identity politics. Hegemonic interventions don't have to be class aligned. For example, the sociologist Stuart Hall conceptualised Thatcherism as a hegemonic project (authoritarian populism).
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