David Brooks’ arrestingly headlined New York Times column — "Voters to Elites: Do You See Me Now?" — contains a sentence that stopped me cold, possibly for a reason that both Brooks and I had forgotten. He warns that “There will be some on the left who will say Donald Trump won because of the inherent racism, sexism, and authoritarianism of the American people. Apparently, those people love losing and want to do it again and again and again."
I said precisely that to Brooks and others in a small audience at Washington’s Politics & Prose bookstore on Sept. 9, 1997, during a talk on my book "Liberal Racism: How Fixating on Race Subverts the American Dream." I insisted then that if liberals keep fixating on racism and ethno-racial identity politics, “we’ll keep on losing and losing and losing.”
Brooks and I had a drink after my Politics & Prose talk. For all of our differences, which are deep and long-lasting, he agreed with my argument in the first chapter of my book, "Life After Diversity," that diversity can’t be preached or programmed in bureaucratic, cookie-cutter protocols to benefit “people of color.” It's basically the same argument I made three years ago in "Scrapping the Color Code," in Commonweal.
Real diversity should be a consequence of premises and practices that aren’t “of color” at all. Institutions must take account of race, for sure, but without valorizing it to an extent that ends up compounding racist stereotyping itself. Liberal institutional diversity, I argued in my book, had become politically and morally self-defeating. Brooks agreed with me about that much, even though he was writing for the neoconservative Weekly Standard magazine and I for the democratic-socialist magazine Dissent. We understood that conservative racism often hides behind pious professions of color-blindness and pretensions that the only "color" that should matter is dollar green.
But we also understood that conservative hypocrisies don’t excuse all neoliberal anti-racist ones. Too many liberals often glorify racial and other culturally fashionable identities for breaking corporate glass ceilings (with “the first” Black or Latino or gay or female CEO) even as the same corporate liberals repeal, in conjunction with Republicans, broadscale economic protections for the larger community., The New Deal-era Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, repealed in 1999 under President Bill Clinton, had stopped banks and other corporate entities from speculating in the types of financing schemes that in 2008 wrecked the material security of millions of Americans, disproportionately people of color. Broken glass ceilings can't excuse a broken Glass-Steagall.
By indicting corporate and finance capitalism, I went further than Brooks, an entertaining celebrant of corporate consumer marketing and a scourge of neoliberals who make great shows of rectifying turbo capitalism's brutalities with “glass ceiling” gestures. But conservatives, in reaction, spent so much of the 1990s and early 2000s dining out on their exposes of liberal hypocrisies and political correctness run amok that they forgot how to cook anything better for themselves or the rest of us. Preoccupied with owning the libs, they abandoned their kitchen to Donald Trump.
They also abandoned millions of clueless Americans who’d been condescended to and lied to by pre-Trump Republicans like George W. Bush, as much as by liberal glass-ceiling breakers at PBS, NPR, The New York Times and Ivy League universities. A few years after my drink with Brooks — and after the dubious ascent of Bush to the White House in 2000, and the Iraq War had caught and carried Brooks hook, line and sinker in his New York Times columns — I lacerated him in my own columns, perhaps especially this one.
But neither did I charm neoliberal Democrats since the summer of 2016, when, even while warning about Trump’s triumphal but proto-fascist rampage through the Republican primaries, I denounced Hillary Clinton’s clinging to the turbo-capitalism of moguls and managers of finance.
Both major political parties had betrayed us — Democrats by pushing aside Bernie Sanders’ critique of neoliberalism, and, now, neoliberals in the Democratic Party and the high-end press by learning nothing from ejecting Joe Biden, who understands viscerally what Glass-Steagall represented and who has proved quite capable and effective as a substantively progressive decision maker, despite his bad calls in the Middle East.
Misogyny figured significantly in Hillary Clinton’s and Kamala Harris’ defeats, and racism figured in Harris’, but they weren't the only reasons they lost. A politics that trades incessantly on disdaining “white male” this and that and on hyping “toxic masculinity” is as self-defeating as a purportedly “anti-racist” politics that end up hyping racial identity itself.
Harris, to her immense credit, avoided such a politics, rejecting “the same old playbook,” as she put it. It’s hardly her fault that that wasn’t enough. But it is her fault, and the fault of most liberal Democrats, that they'll do anything but really challenge economic, material injustices. Trump has been adept at displacing blame for those injustices onto immigrants and Democrats (calling them “the enemy within”), thereby diverting millions of Americans’ inchoate disgust from a regime that's transforming deliberating citizens into impulse-buying, indebted, heavily monitored, digitally pick-pocketed consumers. Under Trump, the surveillance state will get into the act even more intimately than it is now.
After Clinton’s loss to Trump in 2016, I told the editor of a prominent policy journal that his and her Clintonite regime is “illegitimate and unsustainable.” No less than Trump, who certainly is a scapegoater, centrist and conservative Democratic celebrants of ethno-racial identity politics bear some responsibility for this disaster because they'll do almost anything but challenge the economic riptides and plutocratic stratagems that are driving it.
