The Problem with Bill Maher: Identity Politics as Low-Hanging Fruit
The Democrats should move on from identity politics. It’s not working. They are hemorrhaging the very voters they think they’re pandering to.
Bill Maher
It is somewhat customary now for liberals to criticize other liberals for being overly infatuated with identity politics. Bill Maher is typical of this sort of lecturing, recently opining, “the more you obsess over identity, the more you ignore the bread and butter issues that win and lose elections.”
But it’s never really clear exactly what people like Maher expect Democrats and liberals to pivot to. The usual suspects are, at this point, platitudes: “kitchen-table concerns,” “checkbook politics,” support for the “working class,” or the “middle class,” maybe a recommitment to the unions that were left behind since the triangulation of the Clinton-era. In this 2024 election cycle, the “bread and butter issues” would be things like inflation, immigration, family stability, the decline of rural communities, etc. Maher recently threw in another permutation: “The real issue is class, not race. And the real gap is the diploma divide. And the real future of the party and maybe democracy depends on the Democrats figuring that out.”
The background assumption here is that politics has become too extreme on both ends of the spectrum. The Right has gone off the deep end with Trump, and the Left is fanatically bewitched by wokeism, gender, and other identity issues. As Maher puts it, “the battle for America isn’t right or left, it’s normal vs. crazy.” For Maher, this is a looming catastrophe, a clanging cymbal that libs are out of touch with their preoccupations with identity. “Far-left liberals are living in an old paradigm. Americans don’t fit into neat little boxes any more.”
For some liberals, this in-house lecturing is a way to stay on the moral high-ground by appearing to be objective. The thinking here is that you can’t constantly castigate Conservatives for not reigning in Trump unless you are practicing what you preach, doing your part to squelch the loonies on the Left. And there is certainly ample evidence that many non-white voters, the traditional bastion of Democrats, are inherently more conservative in their beliefs, especially around issues of abortion, religion, sexuality, size of government, and recent immigration.
But there are some major problems with this whole discussion. As I have mentioned in earlier posts, the metaphor of a unidirectional political spectrum, with erroneous extremes at the ends and a practical creamy middle of moderation and common sense, is bogus on its face. This is a fetishization of American folk wisdom that doesn’t actually exist in reality, and has very little to do with how real people form their identities, maintain their communities, and live their day-to-day lives. The Right-Left model takes an artificial political template and forces it onto society as a whole, and the bad fit is evident in how little impact it has had on reducing overall cultural polarization. After all, people have been calling for common sense, middle of the road leadership for decades, but somehow it never materializes.
Maher exemplifies the difficulty in applying the extreme spectrum critique. He recently observed that “the far end on both left and right have gotten way too much attention.” And yet, he is one of the people giving it that attention, as he harps on the most extreme manifestations of behavior and speech in virtually every episode of his show. And in a nation of 330 million people, you’re always going to be able to find plenty of examples of anything, especially political and social stupidity. In that sense, Maher is utilizing the same tactic as the Conservative media: scour the media landscape for whackadoddle outliers, and portray those as perfect indicators of how depraved and degraded your opponents are.
One reason for this continuing dualistic approach to politics comes from the medium itself: entertainment. After all, Maher is a comedian, and his counterparts in the conservative media are also entertainers. They all need ears and eyeballs to stay in business, and conflict sells. Crazy examples of political behavior and speech are also good for ratings, as they are inherently more interesting than the alternative: talking about boring committee meetings, details of federal regulatory statutes, or long-term trends in economics. In the hyper-saturated media landscape, outrage talks and the commonplace walks.
But there is something deeper too. In general, there is no dearth of explanations for our multitudinous quandaries. Despite the many currents of denialism, I think that most people sense in their bones that we are cosmically screwed. And there are mountains of evidence telling us how and why. The problem is not one of diagnosis, but of prescription. And this brings up a question for Maher and his ilk: “What should the Democrats and liberals actually do?”
Many liberals, especially younger ones, focus on identity issues because universities and social media are some of the only spaces left where regular people feel like they have some agency. In many ways, it is the counterpart to the Conservative retreat to the safe spaces of Breitbart, Fox News, and right-wing social media (where Conservatives get almost all their “news”). These largely artificial places are refuges from the overarching economic and political systems, which are almost completely controlled by huge corporations and their water-carriers. The plutocrats have a total stranglehold on the infrastructure of our society, and the Polarization Industrial Complex is deployed to keep regular people fighting with each other while the whole system slides slowly into collapse.
Unsurprisingly, the Dems are currently losing popular support. In that critique, Maher is right. But they’re losing support simply because they happen to be at the helm as industrial consumer civilization continues its implosion of unsustainability. If the Republicans happen to win this year, they will also bear the brunt of continued collapse, and Trump’s promised campaign of revenge and retribution will only placate people for so long. The people will eventually turn on him too, as symbolic victories don’t pay the bills and buy the groceries.
This is the pendulum of polarization, where the main parties actually prefer that power swing back and forth, ideally with mixed authority between the President and Congress. This provides a built-in excuse for why things continue to suck for regular people. “It’s their fault! Those evil bastards on the other side are to blame!”
Leaving that aside for the moment, let’s go back to Maher’s pleading that Dems return to issues of class, education, and other real bread-and-butter concerns that supposedly win elections. What exactly does that look like? Free money for college? Dems continually float that. Free money for child care? Dems push that too. Union rejuvenation? Check. The Democrats are constantly pushing for practical stuff, but it just doesn’t get any traction or much attention. And more broadly, the liberal vision of the future is just not convincing, a Lake Wobegon world where we can all be above average. But that vision is no less convincing than the Conservative desire for a dictator-led fusion of the Andy Griffith Show and The Handmaid’s Tale. Certainly, Trump coming to power again would likely be disastrous, but what will the plutocrats actually allow the Democrats to build as a plausible positive alternative for the future?
As mentioned last time, Trump has the advantage of not needing to build anything positive. He just rails against the liberal Enemy, and people flock to that approach because out-group hostility is an ancient and effective way to build identity and group cohesion. In that landscape, how would Dems focusing on class, education, and other kitchen-table issues actually sway those voters, people who increasingly hate them and view them as traitors?
Finally, the biggest hurdle to the Democrats pivoting to a more common sense approach to things is that all such proposals are pre-screened by the plutocracy, to make sure they don’t threaten the economic and political status quo. This is a heavy blanket of propaganda that suffocates any sense that there might be something fundamentally wrong with the system itself. The effect here is that anything that might radically change something fundamental in the system is portrayed as a dysfunctional threat.
In other words, Maher assumes the the kookiness he sees on both ends of the political spectrum is what is creating the chaos that we all see all around us, the “world-gone-crazy” sense that is now swirling around everywhere. But in reality, this polycrisis is actually the entire edifice of our way of life crumbling, because it is fundamentally unsustainable. The polarization battleground is really just a a parochial turf war on the deck of the Titanic.
The bubble of polarization keeps us focused on the extremism of the Other, but the answer is not some anodyne appeal to common sense moderation. Even when couched in seemingly practical issues like class, education, and other “real-life” concerns, the plutocracy will not allow these things to substantially impact existing arrangements, whether the proposals come from the right or the left. Instead, what is needed is a wholesale overhaul of our way of life, a completely new social model.
As covered in the last post, the fact that Conservatives are faring pretty well is an indication that they are ahead of the game in sensing the impending collapse of our whole system. They are just focused on the wrong reasons for it, and, of course, their solutions have no basis in reality. They have thus hit a dead end, flailing around in a horrifying quicksand of fascism, white supremacy, and theocracy.
Liberals need to leapfrog Conservatives by embracing an appropriate sense of doom at the ongoing disintegration of our industrial consumer civilization. But then they need to pivot to a totally different approach to the future, instead of putting their hopes in a creamy-middle, common sense fantasy land.
(Other posts on this blog describe what that approach to the future should be: Bigger Home Bases, Universal Basic Income, and Modern Money Theory.)
Originally published at http://entropolitanblog.com on May 5, 2024.
