There was that John Stewart interview with Sarah Smarsh. That was a pain to watch, but the gist was that "we didn't pander to the American rural working class identity".
I felt weird about this framing of working class, which seems to mean the low-brow identity. "Oh sorry there, we were mistaken in thinking that NPR is par to Fox News". And now, what exactly Democrats? Are you going to cater to anti-intellectuals to get votes? You know like fascists do? So they will try to take a page out of Trump's book, but they are doomed because they can't do it as well as fascists do. There is a chasm between that (whatever is called...) NPR discourse and the pre-industrial dogmas and prejudice. That's why everybody says that even logical arguments do not work the same way with them, as we have seen time and again. They just were never modern, if you get my meaning.
I also read these politico articles. They go into many areas, but I want to focus on the identity thing, since this is the second hint in my feed about it. On the one hand they say "you know what, how we missed that, rural bigots are also an identity", on the other hand they say "we might have focused too much on identity". So which one it is m'fers?
The idea that the working class rural America is a forgotten identity is really weird to me. I was apalled by the fact (cited in one of the two articles) Harris refers to all the different sets of oppressed people as "the groups". The "groups" are consequential because simply they are not the dominant group. All this is gaslighting because the Democrats now say, yes the cisgender straight Caucasian uneducated transphobic male is also an identity, and we should cater to him too. Which is too similar to MRA incel shit to take seriously.
Then, I don't even see black, brown, woman, trans, gay, intersex, as identities, rather than inherent features of people. The meanings they have are due to societal groupings alone. And you bet they have been political in the past and they are as hell political now. Anti-identitarian leftists, leftists who split "identity" from "class consciousness" by default seem weird to me in that effect, because for example slavery was a mode of exploitative production, ownership and enslavement of women was integral in pre-industrial economic systems. This "laborist" sterilization of the working class definition reduces a snapshot of British 19th century capitalism to the canon of analysis for every historical period and every type of social stratification? How do you even approach other type of societies entirely, like tribal societies? Like marxist anthropologists tried to and ended up with all kinds of upgrades to marxist theory, but some people do not want to hear about it because of purity.
This leads to paradox, when on one hand you say "wage labor is like modern slavery" but then you ditch all analyses that explore the long aftermath of actual slavery in society, or the deep roots that oppresion of women has in society including labor relations. As if the fact that modern American society has nerfed the feminist, civil rights, and gay liberation movements by providing an inclusivity capitalist narrative, is itself the true essence and historical origin of these groups historical movements and demands. Some go as far as rejecting the concept of human rights on supposedly marxist and/or antiimperialist premises.
This way you just erase decades of movements, activist, and scholarship, because race and gender has been branded to you as a neoliberal smokescreen, but I can't take serious an analysis like that.
To get back to the original topic, Democrats are doomed if they want to start catering to the low-brow rural population. Especially coining this demographic as yet another identity is preposterous and ridiculous. This is rock bottom for representative democracy of the late stage "politician marketing" flavor. And from a strategic perspective, the fascists have long beaten them to catering to this demographic, and such obvious, after the fact, flattery will only worsen the results, even if they decide to be machiavelian about it.
So much for the Democrats, RIP, start organizing at the local level, and don't forget that working class means strictly you are exploited for surplus value, and you can't understand this without intersectionality. Rather than "identity politics", race and gender are historical components of worker exploitation, and sticking to a naive definition of the working class does little more than undoing the collective history of these movements.
Last but not least, it seems that blaming a specific identity is trending, and that would be trans people. We get several Democrat lawmakers speaking out the same ignorant shit as conservative conspiracy nutjobs. I won't go in depth here, but this is just scapegoating. Not to mention, all those who complain about identity politics they either think trans acceptance is "too much", or upon inquiry they also oppose gay marriage and are just centrist bigots. This new wave of Democrat anti-trans scapegoating only helps normalize Republican misinformation and bring it to the mainstream.
The two lines of news show that Democrats want to cater to the the straight white man and throw other groups under the bus, because this is just political marketing. They need the people to get the votes and serve their own fucking lobbies. Have no doubt about it. If they lose elections over Black Lives Matter and trans rights, they will move the goal posts more and more to the right, until they are indistinguishable from fascists. I was not with the camp against Harris vote on the election, but gauging Democrats behavior after their loss, I eventually think that people were right to shit on them, even at the cost of a fascist dictatorship in the US.
