This morning, as I turned to the editorial page of the Houston Chronicle, I was greeted by a screed written by Jonah Goldberg claiming that the racists fueling Donald Trump’s campaign for the White House are just falling into the trap of “identity politics” set by the liberals.
But let’s talk about liberals and the perceived “identity politics” for a minute.
As late as the 1960 Presidential election, Republicans enjoyed significant black support — certainly not anywhere close to a majority, but nothing like the single-digit numbers of support they get today. What happened? In 1964, Barry Goldwater declared that segregation was a states’ rights issue, and in elections to follow, Republicans doubled down on this strategy. Republicans’ support among black voters evaporated almost overnight as Republicans effectively declared that they were not interested in getting their support.
In the early 2000s, George W. Bush and other Republicans made a concerted effort to court Hispanic voters, and while the near-majority of Hispanic votes that Bush allegedly got in the 2004 election is probably not true, it’s also true that Republicans once got a much larger portion of the Hispanic vote than Donald Trump will in November. Republicans’ decision to tack to the right on immigration policy — couched in blatantly anti-Hispanic terms — is no doubt a driving factor in their loss of Hispanic support.
The numbers on LGBTQ Americans are a bit more difficult to pin down, but if LGBTQ Americans joined the Democratic Party, it certainly wasn’t because the Democrats were all that progressive on LGBTQ issues until recent years. They were more progressive than Republicans, but that wasn’t saying much; Bill Clinton still signed the Defense of Marriage Act into law, after all, and President Obama did not openly support marriage equality until 2012. But the driving force behind LGBTQ Americans joining the Democratic Party was largely that Republicans made clear that they did not want them to be part of their party. In fact, a better argument would be that LGBTQ Americans and their allies becoming a significant voting bloc within the Democratic Party moved the party to the left on LGBTQ issues, and not the reverse.
And again, the numbers are difficult to pin down, but Muslim Americans were a swing voting group until after 9/11, when bigotry against Muslims became a feature of Republican rhetoric. Jewish voters (and other non-Christians) were turned off by Republicans’ lack of commitment to religious pluralism.
If you’re noticing a pattern here, virtually every group that votes Democratic because of Republicans’ perceived “identity politics” wound up there BECAUSE Republicans drove them into the Democratic Party — and certainly not because Democrats promised them anything. If anything, the causal relationship runs the other direction: those groups becoming significant parts of the Democratic coalition forced Democratic leaders to pay attention to them.
But the driving force behind this is, and has always been, the Republican Party, which has been (since the Goldwater campaign) a party of exclusion, a party that seeks only the votes of white Christians. So complaining about Democratic “identity politics” is little more than projection, and more to the point, complaints about the Trump campaign are really just complaints that Trump has removed the veil concealing Republicans’ white (Christian) identity politics.
