The dangerous game of identity politics

We had such an occasion last month. On April 21, professor Cornel West GS ’80 and the Center for African American Studies invited Donna Brazile, the interim head of the Democratic National Committee, for a discussion on the impact of politics on race relations. Brazile was warm and charming throughout the conversation, but in assessing the recent resurgence of American conservatism, she revealed some unfortunate truths about the mindset of her own party’s leadership.

“This is the same group of people,” she said of the Republicans and tea partyers who flocked to the polls in 2010, “who opposed the New Deal, opposed the Great Society, opposed the changes in the ’70s. They are back in full force with corporate backing, and if you don’t watch it, they’ll take us backwards. And as I said back in 2008, I am not going to the back of the bus. I am going to fight them every step of the way.”

That’s right, Princeton. According to the head of the Democratic Party, we’re not at a crossroads between social democracy and limited government. No, our choice is between Democrats and segregationists.

This kind of shallow rhetorical appeal to racial anxieties is ugliness, pure and simple. Still, in the interest of granting her the benefit of the doubt, I gave Brazile a chance to take back the statement during a question-and-answer session, asking her if she and her party were playing the dangerous game of identity politics in employing such charged language.

To her credit, Brazile was not willing to go so far as to call the tea party movement as a whole racist, explaining, “I don’t know what’s in their hearts.” But aside from this brief disclaimer, she seemed content to double down on her nasty comparison of fiscal conservatism to Jim Crow. In response to my asking whether racial rhetoric such as hers did more harm than good, she answered, “Oh, absolutely not. I am speaking personally as a woman of the segregated South who had to live under those segregated circumstances ... So I know exactly who I am and what I speak about when I say I’m not going to the back of the bus. Because I’ve been there, and I’m not going back. That is a statement.”

Indeed, it is quite a statement. Brazile’s argument is that because Republicans’ proposed cuts to the federal budget “are going to hurt poor people, a disproportionate number of young people and people of color,” it’s perfectly reasonable to compare their proposals to segregated busing. In other words, conservatives may not actually be racists, but if they’re successful at implementing their agenda, they’ll essentially be undoing the progress of the Civil Rights Movement. This scurrilous charge does a disservice to the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks and all those who fought against segregation. As a society, it is true that we cannot afford to ignore the structural inequality that is the legacy of slavery and its aftermath, but there is simply no comparison between laws regulating which race can drink at which water fountain and reforms of Medicare, Medicaid and other government programs that have become impossible to maintain. The fiscal status quo has become unsustainable, and unless we are willing to kill job creation by squeezing every penny of each year’s shortfalls out of the top earners, we will be forced to make cuts that hurt disadvantaged populations. To suggest that serious attempts at fiscal responsibility — even when controversial — amount to a racial injustice that is akin to segregation, is demagoguery.

President Obama tried a similar tone last October, telling a Latino radio station, “If Latinos sit out the election instead of saying, ‘We’re gonna punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us,’ if they don’t see that kind of upsurge in voting in this election, then I think it’s gonna be harder.” To Obama, Republicans aren’t just wrong; they are “enemies” to Latinos. What a stark contrast to the Obama who told us in 2004 that “there is not a liberal America and a conservative America — there is the United States of America. There is not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America — there’s the United States of America.”

The words of today’s Democratic leaders suggest a more cynical vision. Their rhetoric paints a picture of an America that is an amalgamation of races and classes, all with differing interests, pitted against each other in zero-sum conflict. On this understanding of American politics, it’s not enough for Democratic leaders to argue to the downtrodden and the disadvantaged that they should not support Republicans; Democrats feel the need to make Republicans feared and reviled. I suppose that if this is how one sees America, then even the most brutal rhetoric can seem justified.

This is not how a party newly ascendant after a midterm bump in the road is supposed to look and talk. We bear witness instead to the sad sight of a party fraying at the seams and unable to maintain electoral victories without the worst kind of pandering.

This ain’t the way the game should be played, and it’s not the way the age of Obama was supposed to look. In a year and a half, we will have an opportunity to prove that we are more serious than this. I hope we do.

Jacob Reses is a sophomore from Linwood, N.J. He can be reached at jreses@princeton.edu.