Jeremy Stangroom

If identity politics delivers Trump thousands of voters (enough to tip the balance in key states), and if the judgment is that the only road forward is electoral, then you have to go after identity politics. It's not a distraction. It's not absolutely essential.

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).

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.

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).

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/

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/

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/