The Twilight of Identity Politics
23rd May 2022
During the 2016 Democratic primary Hillary Clinton began to enthusiastically deploy identitarian arguments against Bernie Sanders. Her media surrogates derided his supporters as straight white “brocialists”. Bernie Bros were guilty of “mansplaining” anti-capitalism to the nation’s minorities and aspiring young girlbosses. “If we broke up the big banks tomorrow, would that end racism?”, Clinton asked on the stump.
In turn, Bernie supporters came to regard identity politics as a tool wielded by Democratic elites to deflect from their critiques of American capitalism and empire. One often heard variations of the joke that what the DNC really wanted was Cruise missiles painted with rainbow flags. Years later, that joke was made grimly literal in the viral “woke CIA” ad, in which an agency analyst announced “I am a woman of colour, I am a mom, I am a cisgender millennial who has been diagnosed with generalised anxiety disorder”. By that point, the only people around to laugh at it were conservatives and various marginal Twitter anons.