Kirsten Gillibrand isn’t going to win the Democratic nomination in 2020. And she probably won’t even win a single delegate. Even former staffers are calling her campaign ‘obnoxious and performative’ and asking her to quit the race. As a result, my own guidelines might suggest I shouldn’t write a post about her campaign. But I’m going to write about it anyway. I’m going to do it because I think she’s centering her campaign on an idea no one else has ever taken up for a major national campaign. That idea is gender-identitarianism.
Quite a few people seem surprised by Joe Biden’s lead in the polls. Some of this is because their friend circles aren’t representative of the Democratic Party electorate. But some of it’s deeper than that. Democrats say in generic polls that they’d prefer women to men, non-white candidates to white candidates, and younger candidates to older candidates. Given the fact that Democrats are more or less evenly divided between moderates and liberals, we could form some hypotheses about who ought to be leading right now.
The best hypothesis would be Kamala Harris. She’s a black women who’s probably neither too liberal nor too moderate for the Democratic electorate. She’s youngish and serves in a political office that’s a common launching pad for presidential campaigns. And we’d expect candidates like Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Amy Klobuchar to be doing OK. We might even think candidates like Julián Castro could take off.
To put it lightly, that’s not what we’re seeing. The two leading candidates, as of May 2019, are Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. Two white guys older than any president-elect in the history of the US. Biden is arguably too conservative for the Democratic electorate, and Sanders is well to the left of the electorate. Even moving beyond Biden and Sanders, we have Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren as four of the top five. Warren isn’t as far left as Sanders, but she’s still well to the left of most Democrats. And Buttigieg is a white guy.
Lots of people now think about class in terms of identity. But this is a peculiarly modern idea. We find it in terms like ‘Nascar Dads’. And we find it in weird, quasi-ideological attachments to Carhartt products. We might call the politics of class-as-identity ‘class-identitarianism.’ It’s an ugly term, but let’s not shy away from ugly. At least not yet.
I’m working on answering two questions in this post. First, is class an identity? And, if it is, does class-identitarianism offer an explanatory framework that helps us make sense of the world and/or formulate a better political path?
W. E. B. Du Bois wrote an article on women’s suffrage in The Crisis in 1914. I’m assuming all of you know who Du Bois was. But if any of you don’t, click the link in the previous sentence. The Crisis is a magazine Du Bois founded and edited for the NAACP.
Du Bois was no stranger to the issue of women’s suffrage, which was a hot political topic in his day. In this particular article, he focused on the relationship between suffrage and race. Especially whether black people should advocate for women’s suffrage even if the vote is extended to only white women.
Du Bois argued they should.
It’s more than 100 years old, and suffrage isn’t exactly a hot topic now. But it’s worth noting that voter suppression and felon disenfranchisement certainly are. Consequently, I think we can learn from his argument and apply it to contemporary issues.
Let’s start here: It’s hard to write a book about your own failure. And that was Hillary Clinton’s task in What Happened. Silicon Valley and the business press are full of schlock extolling the virtues of failure, but that’s shit people write after they’ve succeeded. They look back at how they learned from failure. Lessons from the road, and other nonsense.
That’s not the kind of failure Hillary Clinton is writing about in What Happened. What Happened is like writing a book about that time you hit a home run in Game 7 of the World Series, but you got thrown out because you inexplicably forgot to touch first base on the way in. Then your team lost. And then you retired.
Al Gore made a movie after he lost the presidency, and he forged ahead with a new career in stopping climate change. I don’t see a tomorrow for Hillary Clinton’s political career, even on the scale of Al Gore. It’s all the day after November 8. The presidency was supposed to be it for her: the defining moment of the career of the first woman president.
So that’s the kind of failure she’s writing about in her book. I’m not a fan of Hillary Clinton’s politics. I didn’t caucus for her in the primaries or vote for her in the general election. And I’m not interested in revisiting that debate. I’ve said what I have to say on those issues.
But I do think it took some chutzpah for her to write about the election, especially so soon after it. What Happened is supposed to be the story of how that event…well, happened.
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