When Hating Isn’t Enough

The 2024 election tested the limits of identity politics. Not because Kamala Harris was running as a half-black, half-Indian and full-time accent swapper, code switching her way through a multicultural landscape, only to take a beating from a national multicultural electorate.

Call it identity politics, the rainbow coalition or the minority majority, Democrats had tethered their future to defining oppressed groups and organizing them against an equally artificial majority who were given the choice of standing with the oppressed or preserving their privilege.

This construct had so thoroughly defined three generations of Democrat politics with only some very local exceptions that few national politicians know how to run on anything else except organizing racial and ethnic minorities, LGBTQAIZ+ people, refugees, drag queens, terrorists, abortionists and illegal aliens into a clumsy alliance to oppose the white cisheteropatriarchy.

Democrat politics had become campus politics. They gave the party such a death grip on major cities and suburban bedroom communities that a Republican big city mayor is a vanishing breed, but they also wiped out the party’s appeal in rural and working class areas.

The underlying assumption of the identity politics electoral strategy was that an alliance between black voters and white liberals could be endlessly replicated by adding new minority groups united by a mutual grievance against the white and male oppressor class. But each addition was also a subtraction, adding new minorities also added new oppressors.

Feminism turned all men into the oppressors while the transgender movement turned women from the oppressed to the oppressors. Asians, Latinos, black men, gay men and Jews have all been denounced as former members of the oppressed who have become the oppressors.

Every time the identity politics coalition expanded it also contracted by creating new enemies.

Identity politics was negative from the very beginning. Its solidarity was just bigotry, its aspirations were grievances and its narratives were conspiracy theories. The only thing keeping its alliances together was the hatred of a common enemy. Not pride, joy or love, but hate.

Hating white people. Hating men. Endlessly harping on their crimes. Devising new terms to demonize those who didn’t base their identities around their sexual fetishes. Contending that America was a hateful place that was always one election away from turning into Nazi Germany.

Hate didn’t just become the center of Democrat politics, but the culture that it controlled.

Academia churned out conspiracy theories ranging from the global to the local. Its new mission became to convince the students passing through its doors that all of life could be distilled to a grand struggle between the white male straight oppressors (and their allies) and everyone else. Popular culture did its best to popularize and universalize these toxic ideas on a national scale.

Hate is hollow. It offers the dubious satisfactions of fear, rage and victimhood. Some are content to live on these dark feasts while pretending that their ugly emotions are morally superior.

The Democrat investment in identity politics however sapped their ability to provide a positive agenda. The traditional socialist standards of the party had to be filtered through equity. Rural white men, who had been a party mainstay, left first, followed by white women and then Latino men. The emergence of new identities alienated existing members of the rainbow coalition.

Class warfare had taken a backseat to every form of identity politics warfare. And despite the intersectional paradigm, the rainbow coalition struggled to keep everyone on the plantation.

What were the Democrats to do when Asians were being assaulted by black criminals? Why should minorities have to pay slavery reparations? Should women’s sports be destroyed by transgender men? Should the party side with Jews or Muslims after Oct 7? Hindus or Muslims over Kashmir and Bangladesh? Should it offend Latinos by insisting on Latinx?

The intersectionality hierarchy told the Democrats to prioritize the most oppressed. So they pretended that Asians were being assaulted by white men. Told women and girls to shut up about men taking away their trophies and bathrooms. Sided with Muslims over Jews and Hindus. Used Latinx as much as they could. And in the process alienated everyone.

Identity politics had been built on a common hatred of a majority, but as the country became multicultural, the resentments and demands became too dynamic to manage. It was impossible to please everyone, like feminists, transgenders and Latinos, at the same time. Intersectionality conveyed to every minority group exactly how much it was or wasn’t valued.

The tighter the hierarchy of victimhood grew, the more discontent it produced.

But the biggest problem with identity politics by far was that it had nothing to offer to non-bigots. Anyone who wasn’t convinced that America had been rigged by some systemic ‘ism’ to personally oppress them was left cold by a movement based around that conspiracy theory.

The Democrats could have built a ‘positive’ movement based on socialism and then added a dose of ‘negative’ class warfare, instead they built a mostly ‘negative’ movement based on hating the right people and knowing your place in a confusingly tangled pronoun hierarchy.

The 2024 election served as the movement’s most urgent warning that it isn’t working anymore.

Growing numbers of the Democrat base demonstrated that they cared more about economic growth than hating white people, hating men or hating any construct of the oppressive ‘majority’. The idea that there is a powerful white man everyone must fight against that is so central to identity politics has slipped its grip on most of the varied groups in the Democrat base.

Hating isn’t enough anymore. But without hatred is there even a party anymore?

Some leftists had been calling on the party to drop its central focus on identity politics and pivot to traditional socialism, but the Democrats are too in thrall to identity politics to escape its pull.

In the seventies, class resentments seemed weaker than the tribal resentments emerging out of the wreckage of the civil rights movement being nourished by racial nationalists in ghettos and on college campuses by the Ford Foundation. Urban areas had begun their slow transformation into third world countries. Dividing up America seemed like the best strategy for the future.

Until it wasn’t anymore.

An entire activist class nurtured on identity politics now makes up the backbone of the Left. Democrat elites are the products of not only DEI training, but DEI morals, their sense of outrage is inflexibility tethered to bigoted conspiracy theories, and there may be no way back.

A movement that lives by hate is now dying of its own poison.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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