Woke-up call: the election was a rejection of the Democratic Left’s divisive identity politics
Even with the relief and elation among Democrats that Joe Biden will now, almost certainly, become the next President of the United States, there is cause for liberal humility. Certainly, Biden’s achievement, should he finally triumph over Donald Trump later today, cannot be underestimated – he would be the first challenger to unseat an incumbent president since Bill Clinton in 1992, and the first to do so with a majority of the popular vote since Ronald Reagan in 1980.
And yet, despite the Republicans fielding an unpopular and controversial candidate, and against the backdrop of a pandemic that has claimed the lives of some 234,000 Americans, the result was still uncomfortably close. The anticipation of a crushing landslide quickly dissipated throughout the uneasy hours of Wednesday morning as it became clear that the Republicans will now retain control of the Senate while the Democrats have suffered losses in the House.
Amid what now looks likely to be a close win for the Democratic presidential candidate, the progressive wing of the party had a torrid time. There was a cautionary note in this contest, revealed through what the exit polls and results told us about the concerns of many American voters on election night. They painted a picture not – as is fashionable to declare – only of a political landscape divided, but also of a society increasingly sceptical about radical progressivism.
The results among ethnic minority voters were particularly striking. The ultra-liberal New York Times – not a famous bastion of Trumpism – revealed in its exit poll that Trump had lost ground among white men from 2016. Instead, he had modestly, if significantly, increased his vote share among Black (12%), Hispanic (32%) and Asian (31%) Americans. When all the votes are counted, he is set to win more votes among non-white Americans than any Republican presidential candidate since Richard Nixon in 1960.
This is the writing on the wall for a Democratic Party moving leftwards on identity and culture. These inroads among minorities will be Donald Trump’s legacy to his Republican successor, whomever it may be. As my colleague, Mutaz Ahmed, reported after the election results on Wednesday morning, “Donald Trump, of all people, has begun the slow process of winning the ideological battle in the communities that will define America’s future. His base today is much darker, and speaks more languages, than four years ago.”
It shatters a myth – that Trump and Trumpism are a passing spasm against the triumph of liberalism, a creed of angry white men who will soon die and leave the world to a new, progressive generation. It also undermines the political strategy that many prominent Democrats appear to be banking on for their future success.
Far from galvanising more ethnic minority voters around the Democrats in 2020, their association with progressive causes célèbres appears to have had the opposite effect. It has caused more and more Latino and black Americans to conclude that their political instincts are more closely aligned with the Republican Party. After four years in which even mainstream Democrats have moved ever further down the path of a new identity politics, the dramatic consequences of this ideological journey were seen on Tuesday night as Latino voters smashed hubristic hopes of a “Blue Wave” landslide in Florida and gave Donald Trump a lifeline to an electoral college upset.
It could so easily have been worse for the party. In 2024, the Democrats will need to have a strategy to appeal to concerns among those ethnic minority Americans they have lost to the Republicans in key states.
This extraordinary election has revealed that anxieties about the consequences of identity politics cut far deeper – and across a wider cross-section of society – than many on the liberal-left would like to acknowledge. It turns out that significant numbers of Latino and black American voters, many of them practising Christians, cannot be taken for granted or condescendingly treated as ballot fodder for progressive causes.
It is not only in swing states that the more unbridled wings of progressivism turn off American voters either. At the same time as this cliff-hanger election was beginning to unfold, another upset was taking place in the Democrat stronghold of California. While the state reliably voted for Biden on the presidential ballot, Californians also went to the polls to vote in a referendum to resoundingly uphold – by 56% to 44% – the State’s ban on Affirmative Action programmes.
California, of course, is the most ethnically diverse state in the entire country, according to the UN’s World Population Review. This result will no doubt be broken down and analysed in the coming days – but it is extraordinary that liberal California has chosen to remain alongside states as different as Texas, Florida, and New Hampshire in rejecting racially-based positive discrimination.
Even in the safe congressional districts of New York and Minnesota, progressive Democrats have taken a significant hit to their vote in this year’s House elections. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the rising star of the Democrats’ Progressive Congressional Caucus, and Ilhan Omar, the group’s whip in the House, have both seen their district vote take a dive of about 9% and 13.5% respectively.
Despite the sensational headlines created by waves of protests that have engulfed the United States since the spring, American society at large remains broadly conservative. There is little appetite for the sociological activism of self-satisfied intellectuals or for the violent chaos unleashed by the left-wing radicals who faithfully echo their divisive, metaphysical language of “intersectionality”. These are the culture war rallying cries of a college-educated class weaned on post-modern dogmas, whose values are detached from the lives of the very people they claim to champion.
Instead, in America as much as in Europe, there appears to be widespread, instinctive suspicion of progressives and the alternative, utopian societies that they promise to create. Most voters do not relish the divisive methods that they employ – from toppling statues without discussion or process to cancelling university lecturers whose opinions fall foul of progressive orthodoxy. Their utopias carry a distinct whiff of dystopia.
Biden, of course, knows this and it is the reason why he has probably clawed back enough of the centre ground to squeeze into the White House (a significant accomplishment in a system that favours the Republican candidate). Throughout his career, he has exhibited strikingly conservative instincts, especially on crime and social security. When he first joined the Senate in 1973, he proudly told the Delaware Morning News that he identified as “really moderate to liberal and a social conservative”. He has spent his political life acting as a counterbalance to what he calls “knee-jerk liberals” in his own party – with his final coup being his acquisition of the Democratic nomination against a host of other candidates offering more radical platforms.
Against this backdrop, the apology Biden offered for his past in January 2019 and his insistence in March 2020 that he has a “progressive” record, look like more of a convenient deathbed repentance, or pragmatic positioning, than any Damascene conversion. Hate as much as hope can be indicative of political persuasion – and the radical left despises him with an intense hatred that it reserves only for the moderate centre-left. Biden is no raging Jacobin and neither are those who have voted for him.
In the long run, the election shows that Democrats will be in trouble if they cannot create a new pitch and offer a path to progress that unites rather than divides people. Like liberals everywhere, they must learn – or re-learn – how to speak to people’s values and hopes for a harmonious society as well as a fairer economy and personal freedom. If they retreat further into the aporia of identity politics, they could find themselves being vanquished by a credible Republican candidate who can articulate a positive vision of an America where middle class and working people of all races can have a share in common national values.
Who knows, that candidate might even be able to speak to Latino voters in their native Spanish as well as in a shared language of patriotism and aspiration.