Some of Those That Spin Losses Are the Same That Pushed Wokeness

To be fair to Jentleson, there is some truth to what he’s saying: too many progressive interest groups have had the unfortunate tendency to use this kind of — for lack of a better word — “woke” language and political framing, and it’s something that Democrats clearly picked up on as a way to try to signal to and keep on side left-leaning voters.

But it’s hard to take seriously that the party is “dominated” by these groups or that they were the main driving force here, when the party establishment at the height of Democrats’ Trump-era progressivism constantly ignored or even waged war against them, and news outlets reported on how little influence they had on the party. In 2018, for instance, officials proudly ignored such groups’ pleas to use budget negotiations as leverage to force a vote on Dreamers, and through the Trump years, the party establishment regularly and successfully protected conservative incumbents against challengers backed by progressive activists.

“At the height of its influence, the Tea Party had the GOP in a vise-grip. But liberal activists have a long way to go to match that sway over Democrats,” went the lede in Politico that year. “There has been no evidence of a national, ideologically motivated rebellion among Democratic primary voters, interest groups or donors,” a pair of commentators noted in the New York Times.

No, to find the real driving force of this shift, you have to look at the party’s efforts to stop Bernie Sanders. Both of Sanders’s presidential campaigns gave a real scare to the party establishment, and they did so by doing the exact thing that members of that establishment are now calling for: they put bread-and-butter issues front and center, focused on appealing to the working class, and played down divisive ways of talking about identity. In fact, Sanders explicitly told the Democrats again and again that this is what they should do.

In return, Sanders and his movement were engulfed in a forever-flowing avalanche of scurrilous attacks from the party establishment, allied media outlets, and liberal commentators that they were too white and male, too culturally conservative and fixated on economic issues, and, as a result, were out of step with both Democratic voters. Often, the argument devolved into not-so-subtle hints, even outright accusations, that they were dangerously bigoted, if not in league with the far right.

It is hard to overstate how rampant, dishonest, and often ridiculous this smear campaign was. Sanders’s movement was perennially (and wrongly) derided as a bunch of “Bernie Bros,” meaning a collection of young, often white, and usually angry and misogynistic men who it was dangerous to appeal to. (Now, of course, this same crowd laments the Democrats’ loss of young men and ponders how to win them back.)

When leftists disputed this smear, that was held up as further proof of rampant sexism among Sanders’s supporters. Pro-Democratic voices eagerly took up Trump’s invented label of “alt-Left,” claiming that this movement shared the worldview of the global far right, was making “common cause” with it in a “deeply xenophobic axis” targeting immigrants, and that its “disgust with ‘identity politics’” had “created a kinship” with the alt-right — meaning, with white supremacists.

When Sanders said in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss that Democrats needed to move beyond “identity politics” and that it was not enough to pitch a candidate’s diversity to voters — a view that is now, apparently, uncontroversial within the party’s power brokers — a host of pro-Democratic pundits pounced on him. It was just the first of countless similar, tiresome controversies and race-and-gender-based attacks ginned up against him as he prepared to run again.

A sampling:

• Now–Westchester County district attorney Mimi Rocah telling MSNBC that “as a woman, probably considered a somewhat moderate Democrat, I — Bernie Sanders makes my skin crawl . . . I can’t even identify for you what exactly it is, but I see him as sort of a not pro-woman candidate.”
• An anonymous Clinton aide complaining as Sanders geared up for a second run: “He hasn’t adapted the messaging to the post-loss world that we live in. Democratic socialism is more popular than ever, but the broader message around institutional racism, he’s still in this ‘identity politics doesn’t matter’ . . . saying things that don’t resonate with a lot of people who don’t share his privilege as a cis white man in politics.”
• A chorus of voices suggesting his being white and a man made him a poor candidate or that he should even step aside, not just from Democratic TV personalities, but from Barack Obama, who complained about old white men “not getting out of the way” and said the world would be better if it was run by women.
• “At the end of the day, he is still an old white man, so there are lots of other things that he wants to talk about besides those parts of his identity,” one Democratic strategist said about Sanders’s unwillingness to talk about his “biography,” namely that of a working-class Jew whose family was killed in the Holocaust.
• When Sanders said that candidates shouldn’t be judged based on their skin color, gender, age, or sexual orientation, one Clinton 2016 alum and current Democratic strategist replied that, “If Bernie is going to start this contest telling us he’s at a disadvantage as a white man it is going to be a LONG year,” while the Center for American Progress’s Neera Tanden complained that, “At a time where folks feel under attack because of who they are, saying race or gender or sexual orientation or identity doesn’t matter is not off, it’s simply wrong.”
• An MSNBC pundit and former Clinton staffer wrongly claiming Sanders “did not mention race or gender until twenty-three minutes into” his campaign kick-off speech, then doubling down when corrected.
• That same pundit encouraging a misinformation-fueled pile-on on Sanders in 2019 for giving a rebuttal to Trump’s State of the Union speech after the official Democratic one by Stacey Abrams: “Sanders’s Democratic critics are accusing him of trying to upstage a black woman, part of what they say is a long-running blind spot on issues of race and gender,” Vox explained at the time.
• The similar Democratic pile-on over Sanders touting the endorsement of hugely popular podcaster Joe Rogan, fueled by establishment liberal outlets and by Joe Biden’s campaign, which tweeted: “Transgender equality is the civil rights issue of our time. There is no room for compromise when it comes to basic human rights.” (Harris’s failure to appear on the show this election is now widely considered a mistake.)
• MSNBC’s Jason Johnson, a frequent attack dog against Sanders, charging that Sanders was supported by “racist liberal whites,” that “he cares nothing for intersectionality,” and calling the women of color who held top roles in his campaign “people from the island of misfit Black girls.”

You could fill a Bible-sized book with examples like these. These kinds of cynical, “woke” attacks on Sanders from his corporate opposition were often paired with similarly cynical dismissals of substantive criticisms of his rivals, as when Tanden implied that progressive scrutiny of Cory Booker and Harris’s records was motivated by racism.

This kind of discourse was everywhere — on cable news channels, on social media, in virtually every political news outlet — for years. It wasn’t invented out of whole cloth by Democratic power brokers; key parts of the progressive movement in and around college campuses and some grassroots organizing outfits have pushed this politics during the multidecade period of the Left’s decline. But the adoption of such rhetoric by party elites effectively sent a message, absorbed over time by voters, that the Democratic Party had a bizarre disdain for white men, that the noneconomic issues the Democrats now blame for their failure had to be central to politicians’ rhetoric and agendas, and that anyone who failed to toe this line would suffer a torrent of attacks, including accusations of being in league with white supremacists.

What resulted was an incentive structure for Democratic politicians to incorporate what’s now derided as alienating “identity politics” into their rhetoric and policies — and crucially, it came directly from the party’s centrist establishment and those loyal to it.

Everything Comes Back to the 2016 Primary

What’s doubly ironic is that the progressive stance on issues like immigration that Democrats are now hurriedly backtracking on partly came out of this same phenomenon.

The attacks on Sanders’s record on immigration and gun control came out of the 2016 Clinton campaign, as the former secretary of state looked for ways to present herself as more progressive than the independent senator eating her lunch with key segments of Democratic voters. Taking advantage of a type of liberal political discourse that had developed in the preceding years, one that tended to be used by the better-educated segment of the Democratic base, she chose the cultural route.

Clinton’s campaign was awash in the exact kind of overly academic “identity politics” Democrats are now blaming the Left for. This was the notoriously “intersectional” campaign that leaned heavily on the history-making nature of Clinton’s gender and objected that breaking up big banks, as Sanders called for, wouldn’t end racism or sexism. Even Matthew Yglesias has said that Clinton’s run “unleashed the Great Awokening.”

Her attacks on Sanders over these issues were in turn amplified by the media and liberal commentators, and helped ensure more liberal stances on these matters became a litmus test for Democratic politicians going forward — especially as Sanders geared up for a more formidable second run. It was Democratic strategist and Clinton 2016 rapid response director Zac Petkanas who, in February 2019, brought up Sanders’s more centrist gun control and immigration record as vulnerabilities his rivals would exploit once the 2020 race started, which they did, including the centrist, billionaire-backed Biden campaign. These attacks were, again, fueled and amplified by establishment news outlets.

Pod Save America’s Jon Favreau, a former Barack Obama speechwriter, endorsed Jentleson’s op-ed. Yet eight years ago, he called Sanders’s message “unrealistic,” because “a campaign which is largely about Main St vs. Wall St economics is too narrow and divisive for the story we need to tell right now.” Better was Clinton’s “more inclusive story” that focused on immigrant families facing deportation and black victims of gun violence, he said, a story of a country that “turn[ed] away from our darkest impulses,” “embrace[d] our growing diversity as a strength,” and ended the ceilings to opportunity.

Jentleson himself is an odd voice to make the case that centrism on immigration is the only way forward in the first place, since his main claim to fame was working for Harry Reid, whose career was rescued by taking a risk, defying pollsters and centrist conventional wisdom, and championing the DREAM Act, despite a blizzard of right-wing attacks about immigration and warnings he would lose white voters. Jentleson’s longtime boss, in other words, saved himself by doing the opposite of what Jentleson is now advising.

He’s also an odd voice given the personal opinions he’s voiced in the interim. Not long ago, Jentleson shared the ACLU’s instructions for how to respond to ICE agents at the door, advocated nuking the filibuster to pass immigration reform, and expressed horror at a video of Border Patrol snatching an undocumented mother off the street while walking with her kids (“Stop destroying families to try and restore a white America,” he wrote). He insisted on “the centrality of racism to Trump’s appeal” while dismissing any economic explanation and used language like “our democracy has tilted to minority rule by white conservatives who are imposing their will on the diverse majority.”

Learning All the Wrong Lessons

It’s great that liberal pundits and Democrats have come around to what Sanders and his supporters have been saying for years. But they carried the turn to identity politics and “woke” rhetoric, while others on the Left insisted on a different approach. And they’re now overcorrecting their past mistakes in a dangerous and foolish way: by choosing to simply throw vulnerable groups like trans people and undocumented immigrants under the bus wholesale.

The key to Sanders’s political success, which began in a far more socially and politically conservative era, wasn’t that he parroted the Right’s positions on social issues and people’s basic rights. It’s that he made his populist economic messaging the center of his political identity even as he steadfastly defended basic liberal values, explaining that right-wing attacks on the vulnerable were a ploy to divide people and distract them from the real culprits, the economic elite — earning him the support of both liberal activists and working-class voters across the political spectrum. If Democrats’ takeaway now is that they must vilify trans people and immigrants while abandoning a positive counternarrative, it won’t just be a moral disgrace — it will also flatten the nuances of what voters actually believe about these issues.

Maybe we should have Jentleson himself have the last word. As he put it in the wake of Democrats’ underwhelming 2020 performance: “It’s becoming increasingly clear that the attempt to throw activists under the bus is a panicky attempt to cover for inexplicable, systemic failures by Democratic leaders and campaign committees.”