With the close of the 2016 election — what John Oliver called “Oh, I Get It: We All Died, and This Is Hell, and Satan Has Cursed Us to Live Out This Nightmare for All Eternity 2016” — the obsession with the GOP’s identity crisis faded, and observers turned their intellectual energy to dissecting the Democratic Party’s failure.

Some attribute Hillary Clinton’s surprise loss to the breakdown of the party’s strategy, built on marrying neoliberal economics with the politics of social inclusion. Bernie Sanders has loudly reaffirmed his commitment to making class politics the Democrats’ defining feature in hopes of turning Trump voters attracted to a message of economic populism, as well as the many more Americans who did not vote at all, into a new political movement. In response, Sanders has had to contend with accusations that he’s endorsing Trump’s white nationalism and that his criticism of certain forms of identity politics amounts to white supremacy.

This, of course, isn’t the first time Sanders has faced this controversy. During the primaries, Hillary Clinton rhetorically asked, “If we broke up the big banks tomorrow, would that end racism? Would that end sexism?” And in the October 2015 debate, when Sanders proclaimed that “we should look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway and learn from what they have accomplished for their working people,” she reminded Americans that “we are not Denmark.” Implicit in her comment was the long-standing myth that the Nordic states can provide such a robust welfare state only because of their racial and ethnic homogeneity.