The Democratic Party’s millstone: “Identitarianism”
Trump won the 2024 election because the Democratic Party had long lost its connection with, and support from, “regular people”: working-class and middle-class people.
As Batya Ungar-Sargon has described cogently [1], the United States has become divided into classes along lines that are largely economic but also associated with cultural and educational factors.
The Democratic Party now functions as elitist, condescendingly virtue-signaling as being on the side of every minority, no matter how small or esoteric. The party now represents political correctness in the extreme, often described as “wokeness”, though James Carville and others prefer “identitarianism”, since “woke” in its original meaning was not pejorative, to the contrary, it was a favorable term indicating an “awakening” in the black community.
Maureen Dowd, in “Democrats and the case of mistaken identity politics” [2] spells out in detail the misguided preoccupation with racial identities of the leftish “Democratic” elite, while it fails to recognize the importance of economic and cultural factors.
This change of identity and consequent demise of the Democratic Party has its roots in decades past. Political correctness was first noted in the 1980s [3], and I observed its impact in academe, for instance because of the scandalous Mandelstamm affair [4].
I joined the then-newly founded National Association of Scholars (NAS) [5], whose aim is to preserve (or bring back) Intellectual integrity in higher education. During the 1990s, I edited 15 issues of Virginia Scholar [6], the newsletter of the Virginia chapter of NAS.
The 2024 election led me to look back at some of those newsletters, and it was more than somewhat depressing to note that more than 25 years ago, so much of what is wrong culturally nowadays was already then so evident; for instance, note in the Virginia Scholar of March 1998 [7] the reviews of four books by Neil Postman that describe what had gone wrong culturally; and note the despair expressed about the hegemony of political correctness in academe in my pastiche of Allen Ginsburg's poem, “Howl”.
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[1] Speak truth to power and be ignored, not heard, suppressed;
https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/speak-truth-to-power-and-be-ignored
Bad News: How woke media is undermining democracy
https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/bad-news-how-woke-media-is-undermining
[2] “Democrats and the Case of Mistaken Identity Politics” https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/09/opinion/democrats-identity-politics.html
[3] Dinesh D'Souza, Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus, Free Press, 1991
[4] Henry H. Bauer, “The trivialization of sexual harassment: Lessons from the Mandelstamm Case”, Academic Questions, 5 (#2, Spring 1992) 55-66; follow-up letters from Abigail L. Rosenthal and Laura Bianchi, and response, in Academic Questions, 5 (#4, Fall 1992) 5-6; Abigail L. Rosenthal, “More on Mandelstamm” 6 (#2, Spring 1993) 9; Barry R. Gross, “In defense of a friend”, p. 6;
“Affirmative Action at Virginia Tech: The tail that wagged the dog”,
Academic Questions, 6 (#1, Winter 1992-93) 72-84
[5] nas.org