The ultimate identity politics

This kind of thing (gift link) drives me nuts in this the Year of Our Lord 2024:

One reason Kamala Harris is on the Democratic ticket is because of her identity. One reason Josh Shapiro isn’t on the ticket is because of his.

In March 2020, then-presidential candidate Joe Biden declared that he would choose a woman as his running mate. The following month, after Mr. Biden became the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee, multiple news outlets started reporting on the “pressure” influential Democrats were applying to ensure that the woman he chose would be Black.

Ms. Harris’s race and gender were not the only reasons Mr. Biden chose her. She served as attorney general of the country’s most populous state and had been a senator for four years.

But it’s disingenuous to argue that race and gender played no role in her advancement.

The matter of identity arose again in this year’s Democratic veep stakes, but in a subtler, more insidious way. In this case, the candidate in question doesn’t possess an identity trait preferred by the left, but one the left increasingly views with suspicion.

James Kirchick goes on to make an argument that I do think is worth considering: that Josh Shapiro’s views on the Israel/Palestine conflict are practically indistinguishable from those of people like Tim Walz, Andy Beshear, and Mark Kelly, and that the fundamental reason those views were considered so unacceptable by certain people on the left was because Shapiro is Jewish.

You’re free to talk about that aspect of the column, as the current liminal status of Jews as both “white” and “minority” within Democratic and liberal-left politics is an interesting and potentially problematic issue, given the fact that Jared Kushner’s Middle East peace plan has not been 100% effective so far.

But what I want to focus on here is Kirchick’s lede, which highlights the role of what people like him think of as “identity politics.” What he thinks is that Kamala Harris got chosen as Joe Biden’s vice president, in part, because of her race and gender, which is of course absolutely true. The implicit basis of this kind of argument however, is that Joe Biden didn’t get chosen for his three elective offices — U.S. senator, vice president, and president — because of his race and gender, which is just utter nonsense, made possible by the fact that somehow whiteness and maleness remain to a significant extent unmarked categories in the American cultural consciousness.

Let’s review the facts here. When Biden was elected to the Senate in 1972, he was one of 96 white male senators who in that club — and “club” here is barely a metaphor — at the time. Indeed at that time there had been only three women elected to the Senate in the body’s entire history (a handful of widows of senators who died during their terms had been appointed to finish their husbands’ term), and exactly two black men, one of whom was elected during Reconstruction. Hawai’i’s two Asian-American senators were the only other non-whites in the Senate.

It’s barely an exaggeration to say that the dual identity of white and male was at that time, and for quite a bit longer afterwards, almost a requirement to even be considered for an office like United States senator. I just looked it up, and Kamala Harris was the seventh black person elected to the Senate in the entire 227-year history of the institution, when she took office in 2017! Prior to the 1990s, a total of six women had been elected to the Senate in the institution’s entire history, three of them in the 1970s and 1980s. Six.

But that kind of identity politics was considered completely normal and unproblematic and indeed so much so that it was for all practical purposes invisible. Being a white male wasn’t being anything in this context, except a normal person, with an essentially invisible racial and gender identity.

And of course when being white and male started to become a marked category, with the advent of such horrors as “political correctness,” and “wokeness” and “DEI,” whiteness and maleness then became and are today consciously critical attributes, that some candidates are practically required to have to play the role they are playing in the political system. Such as, to pick an example at random, Joe Biden, who was chosen to be Barack Obama’s vice president because he was white and male, every bit as much as Kamala Harris was chosen to be vice president because she was black and female.

Beyond this, Joe Biden won the 2020 Democratic nomination, and then the presidency, in no small part because he is white and male. The whole pitch for Biden was we needed to return to “normal” after the craziness of the Trump years, and what do you think “normal” looks like in this context?

What I’m saying here should be as obvious and uncontroversial as the fact that the west coast of the US is bounded by the Pacific Ocean, but something like Kirchick’s lede illustrates the extent to which it remains, absurdly, a kind of radical thought. And that fact itself goes a long way towards explaining how Donald Trump got elected president in the first place, and why he might be elected again.