If what follows seems like it took place quite a long time ago, that’s because I’m about to describe a style of politics that has already passed.

Remember when we were supposed to celebrate the first black president, even though he disappointed the hopes of every progressive who campaigned for him? Remember when supporters of Bernie Sanders were relentlessly tarred as sexist (and racist, somehow) for opposing Hillary Clinton?

This style of politics continued to define liberalism during the Donald Trump administration. While women lost abortion rights and right-wing men gained power, liberals cheered the spectacle of prominent liberal men — mostly in media and cultural institutions — losing their jobs for sexual harassment. Land acknowledgments became prevalent in corporate and academic settings, even as the construction of pipelines on indigenous lands continued apace. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder by the police, many were disappointed by how little changed for poor and working-class black Americans: the most tangible outcome of the widespread street protests of 2020 was that corporate America put more black people on its boards.

This was neoliberal identity politics, an elite discourse that centered identities as a way of undermining a robust, effective class politics. Of course, race, gender, and sexuality matter and are salient political concepts in the fight for human freedom. But elites used neoliberal identity politics to undermine broad human solidarities, divide the Left, and advance policies that benefited only the 1 percent. Because bigotry is still a real problem, many good progressives would fall for it every time.

For a variety of reasons, this style of politics has run its course. Even with a Democratic presidential candidate of many history-making identities, Democrats and the media now seem to realize that such firsts aren’t enough to win elections. The New York Times noted recently that Kamala Harris doesn’t talk much about her own black and Indian identities. Liberals are just as excited about Kamala Harris’s white male running mate, Tim Walz, who made school lunch free in Minnesota and has said, “One person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.”

Bernie Sanders’s materialist politics — though hardly the radical economic redistribution he advocated — seems to be in vogue now. Most of the national political discourse under President Joe Biden has been about the economy and to what extent his policies were good for middle- and working-class Americans. Union organizing and strikes have been more prevalent and visible than in past years. United Auto Workers leader Shawn Fain has emerged as a standard-bearer for working-class politics, leading the Big Three autoworkers through a successful strike and calling for a general strike in 2028. We have socialists in elected office all over the country and activists pushing for bread-and-butter demands.

Even the prim, hectoring moralism of neoliberal identity politics — the accusatory glee of the callout, the focus on catching bad men, the uptight energy of political correctness — is largely gone. The good vibes of the Harris-Walz campaign and its supporters reflect a less preachy approach to identity politics, with ironic memes about coconuts and lucrative fundraising Zoom calls from White Dudes for Harris.

That’s not to say that vibes aren’t being used to mask or distract from a potential neoliberal agenda. It’s painful to watch Harris move away from her past support for Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, some of the social democratic ideas that made her appealing in the first place. That’s bad policy and bad politics, but it’s not identitarian.

And just because identity politics is more or less dead or dying in its neoliberal form doesn’t mean that it’s gone. Before it dies out entirely, Republicans and centrist Democrats are getting all they can out of it, painting Zionist Jews as an oppressed minority in order to discredit and demonize the opponents of Israel’s war on the Palestinians. Over the past year, congressional Republicans have investigated universities for permitting pro-Palestinian protests. Some centrists and liberals jumped on that bandwagon, using the language and punitive prosecutorial mode that campus left identitarians had pioneered, equating speech they did not like with violence and harm and getting the perpetrators fired and expelled, in the hopes of ultimately quelling the speech itself.

When Tim Walz was chosen as Harris’s running mate over Josh Shapiro — likely because Walz is far more likable, and because Shapiro’s comments about both protesters and Palestinians (whom he’d once described as “too battle-minded to be able to establish a peaceful homeland”) would have been divisive — some prominent Democrats insisted antisemitism was to blame. CNN commentator Van Jones, who owes his career — from Maoist activist to Bay Area nonprofiteer to failed Obama administration appointee to centrist TV bimbo — to the era of neoliberal identity politics, lamented that some supporters of Palestine are “anti-Jewish bigots,” musing that Harris’s choice to bypass Shapiro called for a conversation about “how much of what just happened is caving in to some of these darker parts in the party.” Jones was joined in this by prominent voices on the Right, like Newsweek opinion editor Batya Ungar-Sargon, who said that Shapiro was blocked by the “antisemitic left.”

These charges against Harris were contemptible and baseless, just as most of the charges against campus protesters have been. Never mind that Shapiro’s loudest opponents will remain devastated to their dying day that Bernie Sanders, a Jewish son of Holocaust survivors, did not become president. More salient, the presidential candidate who made the decision has a Jewish husband. Modeled as it is on left identity politics, perhaps this toxic line of discourse will die out as the Left (and even the center left) continues to find more unifying language. The genocide in Gaza itself may later be seen as one of the factors leading to the demise of the identitarian style. It has been grotesque in the extreme, and perhaps ultimately discrediting, to see so many apologists of mass murder attempt to seize moral high ground with the language of microaggression.

In fact, as the Right railed against the supposed injury suffered by Jews through Harris’s VP choice, even the most prominent neoliberals seemed bemused. When right-wing commentator Erick Erickson tweeted, “No Jews allowed at the top of the Democratic Party,” Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, who is Jewish, responded, “News to me.”

All of this brings us to a giant caveat: identity politics is alive and well on the Right, and in a particularly deranged and ugly form. In a vulgar and racist reference to Harris’s long-ago relationship with a former San Francisco mayor, one conservative meme claimed, “The ONLY African American DNA we found in Harris was from Willie Brown!” More significant, Trump is theatrically failing to pronounce Kamala Harris’s name properly, even misspelling it “Kamabla.” He has been making fun of her biracial background and asking, “When did she become black?” White supremacists are obsessed with hatred over J. D. Vance’s Indian American wife and biracial children, with another meme (horrifically) comparing the children of the Republican VP candidate to feces. Nick Fuentes, a leader in the white supremacist movement, registered his disappointment with Trump’s VP pick in strident terms. “Who is this guy, really?” he demanded. “Do we really expect that the guy who has an Indian wife and named their kid Vivek is going to support white identity?” It’s all a reminder that the oldest form of identity politics is racism — and that’s not going away anytime soon.

The neoliberal identitarian style of politics could make a comeback, of course, especially if a Harris administration grows tired of triangulating between the left wing of the party and her big Silicon Valley donors, or between the antiwar movement and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. If Democrats once again reach a point where they fail to deliver material gains to working people but can only mobilize against the fascism of the Right, they may fall back on the professional-class baubles of denunciation and girlboss-hood once more.

But for now, this discourse has receded. The Left moving on from the culture war while the Right remains mired in it would only be good news for our political prospects.