We've Been Blaming "Wokeness" For Six Decades
Some context for this conversation, and a vision for how polling can be part of the solution going forward.
First things first: I don’t intend to publish this frequently! My goal is to share 1-2 pieces per month, but since I started this Substack right before the holidays, I’m condensing December/January into a short span. This timing also means I’m late to the post-November 5th conversation about “identity politics” and “wokeness” costing Democrats the election, and the need to focus on the economy and eschew social progressivism. On the other hand, this is an evergreen argument that we’ve been having in one form or another for decades, so I don’t think the moment to weigh in has actually passed.
I wrote this (long) piece to offer my perspective on this debate, as informed by my research and experience. This is not a “what really mattered to voters” rebuttal. All year, my research has shown that a great many voters believe Democrats care about certain groups and issues at the expense of caring about people like them. This piece is a reflection on why voters feel that way, our legacy of blaming identity politics for our electoral misfortunes, and how we chart a better way forward.
We Have Been Having This Conversation For Six Decades
A quick historical level-set. Until the 1960s, the two political parties were virtually indistinguishable on matters of race. That changed mid-decade when the Democratic Johnson Administration passed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in 1964 and 1965, respectively. Suddenly, voters could distinguish the two parties’ stances on racism and segregation, and this set off a racial realignment of the party coalitions. White segregationists in the South began to migrate away from the Democratic Party, while Black Americans and racially liberal white voters migrated toward it.
Post-Civil Rights era, the two parties found themselves embroiled in what scholars call the “electoral temptation of race.” In order to win national elections, each needed need to appeal to uncommitted white voters — the ones who were not racial liberals but were not segregationists, either — without incurring political costs. For Republicans, the challenge was to court these voters with messages that subtly appealed to their racial biases without being so overtly racist as to violate new social norms about equality. For Democrats, the challenge was to balance a core component of their new voting base—Black voters—against the need for a broader coalition that included white voters who would be alienated by outright racial liberalism. Their mandate was to do just enough for Black voters to keep them in the coalition, but not enough to threaten the white voters needed to amass a majority.
The argument that Democrats should lean away from social issues and concentrate on economics dates to this same moment in time. In their book The Real Majority, published in 1970, Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg argued that most voters are economically liberal and socially conservative, and consequently, that the Democratic Party has an advantage on economic issues, the Republican Party on social issues. They suggested that elections would generally be won by whichever party played to its strengths and exploited the opposition’s weakness, which meant that Republicans would try to win votes on the basis of “the Social Issue” by branding Democrats as excessively liberal (including but not limited to matters of race) and therefore out of touch with voters. This tactic has been a feature of the Republican playbook ever since.
Why Is Identity Politics Unpopular?
Political parties are made up of groups, many (I’d argue most) of which are identity-based. Evangelical Christians, farmers, gun owners, union workers; these are all examples of identity-based coalitions that inspire specific outreach strategies from campaigns and exert considerable influence in our politics but against whom the accusation of identity politics is not leveraged. The groups that practice identity politics and are criticized for it tend to be minority groups and/or historically marginalized demographic groups (mostly Black people, but also women, LGBTQ+ people, etc). Why this double standard? Three theories.
The first has to do with the American mythology around equal opportunity. The idea that a trait one is born with could have any deterministic power over their advancement in America is antithetical to our national sense of self. It violates the belief that we live in an equal-opportunity meritocracy that rewards people exclusively based on talent and effort, not on connections, wealth, status, or power, benefits that historically have a great deal to do with things like gender and race. Scholars have explored how beliefs in meritocracy and colorblindness motivate resistance to movements perceived to prioritize race or other demographic traits (e.g. Bonilla-Silva’s Racism Without Racists). Under this framework, the chosen identities that we gravitate towards and build our lives around (e.g. religious groups, work-based groups, parenthood) are legitimate reasons to form political coalitions and make demands on the group’s behalf. Demographic traits are not, because they violate the normative belief that these things shouldn’t matter in America.
The second is that many voters perceive these political coalitions are competing for zero-sum resources, and therefore, that the advancement of one demographic group comes at the expense of others. Importantly, those resources can be tangible (housing, government aid) but they can also be symbolic (cultural dominance, membership to the majority). People who bemoan the use of “happy holidays” often view the expression as a “war on Christmas.” People who are bothered by feminism tend to view it as hostility towards men, not advocacy for women’s equality with men. A 2011 paper by Norton and Sommers showed that on average, white Americans believe that as discrimination against Black people has declined, discrimination against white Americans has correspondingly increased and, in fact, exceeds the average amount of discrimination Black people face. In other words, “Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing.” Through this lens, if identity politics is a tool for the in-group’s advancement, then for members of the corresponding out-group, identity politics is a threat.
Critics of identity politics often invoke this zero-sum framework. They will argue that antiracism means creating a permission structure to discriminate against white people, that saying “Black Lives Matter” implies white lives don’t, that advocacy for certain groups is tantamount to giving them special rights that other groups don’t get, all of which violates our unifying belief in equal rights for all groups. I’d argue that’s a mischaracterization of identity politics at best, and a deliberate distortion at worst.
The third is what’s called The Availability Heuristic, which refers to our tendency to overestimate the frequency of a phenomenon based on how easily examples come to mind. Because vivid/memorable events are easier for our minds to access, we tend to overestimate how frequently they happen. This is what leads people to overestimate rates of violent crime (high media coverage makes these events easy to recall, even if they’re rare) or the likelihood of shark attacks (thank you, Jaws). If identity politics bothers you, as a voter, you’re perhaps likelier to recall examples of it, leading to an overestimation of how much parties and candidates are focusing on it. After the election, researchers conducted a study and found that voters across the political spectrum correctly identified that inflation/the economy was among Republican’s top three priorities but they widely misperceived Democrats’ prioritization of “LGBT/transgender policy”:
“Although this was not a major priority for Democratic voters in reality—it ranked 14th—our survey respondents listed it as Democrats’ second-highest priority. This effect was especially dramatic among Republicans—56 percent listed the issue among Democrats’ top three priorities, compared with just 8 percent who listed inflation—but nearly every major demographic group made a version of the same mistake.”
I suspect this cognitive bias may help fuel the perception that Democrats focus disproportionately on social issues affecting marginalized groups at the expense of issues like the economy and costs. The Trump campaign certainly worked hard to reinforce that perception. Per a PBS report, between October 7th and October 20th, Trump’s campaign and Trump-aligned groups spent an estimated $95 million on ads. More than 41% of those ads were anti-trans.
Hearing Out The Critics
In order to operate in good faith, I also want to give critics of identity politics—the ones from “inside the house,” so to speak, not the ones who would like to see Democrats lose — a fair treatment and do my best to take their perspective.
They (rightly) note that at the end of the day, we all must subscribe to some superordinate identity that binds us together over and above what makes us different from one another if we want to win elections as a party and unite as a country. This is true, and how best to articulate that shared identity is an ongoing challenge. Critics also worry that identity politics leads to infighting and division, rather than coalition-building and compromise. If we are all chiefly concerned with our own subgroup’s advancement and not committed to some broader, mutually beneficial outcome for the greater group, we’ll fracture into sectarianism instead of coming together. This is a fair concern to have about any big tent party that makes room for diversity and heterogeneity.
But I’d argue these critics tend to over-index on fears that identity politics threaten or fracture the collective and disregard all the movements/laws/legal precedents that identity politics has won for us by reinforcing the collective. Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Obergefell v. Hodges decision; these are all victories that we owe to identity politics and that brought us closer to living our fundamental values as Americans. Do any of these hard-won civil rights protections undermine the civil rights of white people, able-bodied people, or straight people? Or do they inspire us to feel pride and attachment to our superordinate identity as Americans for making profound social progress?
To that, critics might say: victories secured through identity politics had their time and place in the past. Those social movements were justified and palatable, whereas today’s social movements are fringe and alienating. The truth is, identity politics as practiced by minority groups is usually unpopular in its own time. During the height of the Civil Rights movement, a 1966 Gallup survey found that just 33% of white respondents viewed Martin Luther King Jr. favorably. A Harris poll from the same year found that 50% of white respondents believed King was "hurting the Negro cause of civil rights" and only 36% felt he was helping. In 1968, the American National Election Survey asked, "Some people say that the Negroes who are trying to integrate schools, restaurants, and other public places are moving too fast; others say they are not moving fast enough. How about you: do you think Negroes are moving too fast, not fast enough, or about the right speed?" 60% of white voters answered, “too fast.” (Today, decades after he was assassinated, 94% of white Americans have a favorable view of King.)
None of this means that everything Democrats or progressives do and say is right. We will make tactical errors. We shouldn’t be in the business of deliberately alienating people. And we aren’t. That’s the opposition’s framing, and that’s a perception rooted in zero-sum thinking. Recognizing that is an important step in figuring out how we regroup and go forward without sacrificing people or values along the way.
So, What?
Many folks will still argue that we should focus on what’s popular and discard the rest. That the purpose of polls is to inform campaigns about what voters like so that leaders can champion those policies, make voters happy, and win more elections. They’ll argue that because various aspects of “identity politics/wokeness” are unpopular, that we should de-emphasize social issues like trans rights and focus on what voters “actually” care about, like the economy, to regain political relevance. It’s an age-old argument.
I don’t disagree that a healthy democracy requires leaders to respond to the public’s demands and preferences, and that determining what’s popular so that leaders can respond to it is a core purpose of polling. But we also have an imperative to champion smart, pro-social policies, and if the public doesn’t embrace them, pollsters can be enlisted to help shift voters’ minds. Republicans will keep branding us as excessively liberal on social issues regardless of how we actually conduct ourselves. That means candidates have to own what they stand for and not live in fear of how the opposition will portray it. This is not an argument to double down on every language choice, message, or policy out of defiance or activist pressure. I’m arguing for thoughtful decision-making about what Democrats stand for, what we won’t concede out of fear, what we will compromise on in order to make progress, and how best to communicate that message to voters in a way that makes them feel included and inspired.