Identity Politics Blows Up in the Democrats' Face

When you think that everyone who isn't a white man is bound to vote for you no matter how badly you treat them, you might lose some elections.

Some years ago, a university that I once attended decided to promote new orchestral music by premiering three original compositions at three successive year’s end concerts. (The main items on the programs were works by Mahler, Mozart, Orf, and Verdi). Whoever was in charge of the music program seems to have held left-wing political views, since he or she decided that the contests to determine which work should be played would be open exclusively to “female-identifying black, indigenous, or people of color.”

All of this was justified with the usual platitudes about opening up classical music to people who used to be excluded. But while it’s one thing to revive the works of composers like Florence Price (a half-black woman who wrote for orchestra in the 1930 and ‘40s, and who didn’t get nearly as much attention at the time as her talents merited), anyone could see that what this forward-thinking university was actually doing, here in the present, was excluding about 90 percent of the composers who might want to enter its contest – including half of all “people of color,” and a majority of women.

And this wasn’t just a one-off thing, with the race-based contest being one category out of several which people could choose to enter. There were three composition contests, three years in a row, and all three of them were only open to the ten percent or so of the population that managed to check the right pair of oppression boxes.

What does this have to do with electoral politics? Is it just a matter of leftists pulling leftist shenanigans in a subculture that’s left-leaning to begin with? Not quite, since even though most swing voters don’t care about classical music, some of them do.

Perhaps you remember how, when MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred stepped onto a baseball field to present the Atlanta Braves with their trophy for winning the 2021 World Series, he got loudly booed by thousands of Braves’ fans? The reason was that, earlier that year, Manfred had moved the All-Star Game from Atlanta to Denver to punish Georgia’s legislature for a set of minor reforms to the state’s voting laws.

The fact that one political party (and only one) regularly intimidates elected officials with collective punishments like this isn’t lost on the people who have to live with the consequences. And while most swing voters may not care much about major league baseball, some of them do.

The plain fact of the matter is that the progressive left’s habit of politicizing everything, dividing people up into victimhood groups, and then making policy based on the (imagined) interests of whoever sits at the intersection of the most victimhood groups, is very unpopular.

Which is one of the reasons why Donald Trump ended up not only winning the popular vote, but improving over his past vote shares with almost every demographic group that pollsters keep track of. For instance, Trump won 50 percent of the vote of people earning less than $100,000 per year (next to 46 percent for Harris), 65 percent of combat veterans, 21 percent of black men (compared to just 14 percent in 2016), and 55 percent (!) of Hispanic men. He also got a majority of Hispanic voters in Texas, proving that the Democratic dream of Texas turning blue because of immigration is dead. Of course liberals will continue to blame their losses on white supremacy – they always do – but when your opponent is winning more than a third of the non-white vote and making his biggest gains in Hispanic and Native American counties, the time for delusions is clearly over.

Today’s Democratic party is one of those cases where the fish quite literally rotted from the head down. We all remember how, back in 2020, Joe Biden announced well ahead of time that, in the interest of “diversity and inclusion” (yes, the Orwellianism really is that bad) he was limiting his VP selection to black women. As a result of this, he had to pick Kamala Harris – by all accounts one of his worst primary opponents when it came to actually campaigning, but the only one who fit the race and sex criteria. And then, after getting sworn in as president, Biden announced that when he got his first (and only) Supreme Court vacancy, he would once again only consider black women.

While I don’t know enough about Ketanji Brown Jackson’s jurisprudence to comment on her competence vis a vis her liberal colleagues, Vice-President Harris is a different story. Harris failed miserably at the one job she was actual given as vice president – that is, border security – and then she went on to spend the 2024 campaign hiding from the press, talking in word salads when she didn’t just treat her audiences like small children, and finally looking like a deer in the headlights the moment a reporter asked her a question as basic as what she would do differently to improve on Biden’s record if she won the White House in her own right. To make a long story short, America’s top DEI hire turned out to be America’s top DEI failure.

The sad thing (at least if you’re a liberal) is that Biden had to pass over a lot of more competent people in order to pick Harris. If he had been a little less greedy and had been content to choose a VP who checked just one diversity box, then he could have ended up with a competent politician like Amy Klobuchar or Corey Booker, people who have actually won competitive elections at some time in their lives.

Yet Booker, the black senator and former Newark mayor, was at a big disadvantage during the Summer of Floyd – you see, as mayor he had increased the number of police in his city (which immediately saw a drop in the crime rate). Granted, this wasn’t because he was a right-winger – it was actually part of a compromise that also made it easier for ex-cons to get hired in a variety of municipal jobs, the idea being that these people were less likely to re-offend if it was easy for them to make a living honestly and hard for them to do so by thievery. What was common sense back then was poison during the year of “All Cops Are Bastards” – but in the long run, it was the Democrats’ pro-crime jurisprudence that hurt them the most. After all, most black people are law-abiding citizens who have more to lose than whites when crime is tolerated in their neighborhoods, and these days, more and more of them are waking up to the fact that the hardcore left has nothing to offer them but permanent victimhood status.

(Perhaps you recall how, a few days after the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in June of 2023, the liberal law professor Laurence Tribe gushingly tweeted about how “Justice Jackson’s dissents will someday be the law?” Just imagine the thought process going on inside the head of somebody for whom an optimistic future is one where, decades down the line, blacks continue to do worse than whites in school and need government help to get jobs they aren’t qualified for. What a useless ally for black people who actually want to improve their lives!)

The situation with Hispanics is hardly any better for the Democrats. These people are even more likely than blacks to realize that it’s themselves and their families – not wealthy liberal DEI theorists – who bear the brunt of soft-on-crime policies. The situation is, of course, worst near the border, where not only migrant caravans but also the drug trade and the sex slave trade flow unimpeded, and where in some counties the situation is so bad that (as I’ve written about before) it’s the cartels, and not the sheriffs or federal law enforcement, that are the de facto government to whom people must pay deference if they want to keep their lives and property.

And of course the final result of all this liberal prattle about how “no human is illegal” was, among other things, that Donald Trump won all eight of the heavily Hispanic Rio Grande border counties.

And so, whether you’re a black American living in the inner city who’s had your house or your car broken into one too many times, and who knows that “defund the police” is easiest to say when one is living in a gated community – or whether you’re a Hispanic living in a border county who is tired of the local crime boss moving a thousand or so illegal aliens through your hometown each month and acting like he’s a medieval baron and you’re his peasants – or whether you’re just a young black or Asian man who wants to write for the symphony, only to find out that your school’s orchestra is too “inclusive” to play your works – if you are any of these people, then you are going to realize, sooner or later, that for all its imagined “diversity,” Kamala Harris’ America just doesn’t have a place for you.

But now, thanks to enough of these people waking up to the reality of identity politics, there isn’t going to be a “Kamala Harris’ America.” And for that, the Democrats have no one to blame but themselves.

This article was originally written for the American Thinker.