Don't blame trans people for Dems' loss

 

Dr. William Barber is one of the premier prophetic voices in America today
(Source: breachrepairers.org)

Having said my peace on this year's elections, I was anticipating a return to issues affecting our local communities. But a disturbing trend has emerged in the frustrated post-election expressions by Democrats and their liberal allies that I think needs addressing.

To start with, the 2024 election results were, despite all the weirdness of the campaign, rather "normal," in the sense that a typical electoral response to stressful times is to vote the other party in. It happened after World War II in a number of countries including the United States and Britain, and happened again this year after worldwide struggles with the coronavirus pandemic and the attendant economic dislocation. As in 1945-46, Britain and the United States changed legislative majorities, with the British going from right to left, and the Americans going from left to right. Go figure.

That said, many on the left criticize the Biden administration and the Harris campaign for ignoring the economic concerns of working people. There's a lot to be said for that argument, given that the decades-long trend towards greater concentration of wealth continues to gallop along. On the other hand, Biden proved adept as a crisis manager, and his deficiencies certainly don't explain why the answer was to turn the government over to a self-absorbed chaos agent with an actual policy record that promotes that greater concentration of wealth. Again, go figure. Maybe the explanations tentatively offered in my last post can help explain that.

Two commentators I greatly respect, Nicholas Kristof and Fareed Zakaria, take that critique farther to argue that Democrats in the Biden years lost working class support because they prioritized other issues. Kristof, who has written movingly of the struggles of his small Oregon town, has trouble explaining what could have been done to reverse its condition:

I think Democrats have far better policies for working class Americans than Republicans do. It was Democrats who backed labor unions, who raised minimum wages, and who under President Biden crafted a strategy to create manufacturing jobs and slash child poverty. Trump talks a good game about manufacturing, bui... Biden so far has seen an increase of 700,000 manufacturing jobs. (Kristof 2024)

So what's the problem? "Democrats increasingly are the party of university-educated elites, and they have an unfortunate knack for coming across as remote and patronizing scolds" (Ibid). What?!? This barely qualifies as analysis. (I scolded.)

Zakaria goes farther to blame the administration's failures on immigration, and a penchant for identity politics. This too is unsatisfying. Immigration is hard, and Trump was different less on outcomes than on the retributive excess of his approach. Zakaria's examples of identity politics are use of the term "Latinx"--by the administration? I'm not remember that)--and support for the transgendered. "One of Trump's most effective ads," he notes, "on trans issues, ended with the tagline: Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you" (Zakaria 2024). Aside from the fact that the ad itself is a flagrant example of identity politics, Zakaria is suggesting that transgendered people, like Mexican immigrants, are too unsympathetic to merit attention from a campaign that wants to win an election. (And has Zakaria forgotten that Biden lost a bipartisan immigration bill in Congress this year when Trump told Republicans to nix it?)

Look, I know plenty of people who agree with me on issues, but are so insufferable about their politics that I almost wish they didn't. And I find quarrels over terminology to be baffling and distracting. But that's no reason to treat anyone as less than fully human. We can't let everyone in the country who wants to come, and we can't give everyone everything they want, but we can treat everyone with human dignity. Kristof dings liberals for disdaining religion, but fundamental to the major religions of the Western world is the idea that we are all children of God. I'm not seeing that in the Trump immigration-mass expulsion policy.

Thankfully, we have with us one of the most passionate and cogent advocates of common life, the Rev. William Barber, who among many other things is co-director of the Poor People's Campaign. Barber too argues that Democrats in the administration and presidential campaign failed to address fundamental injustices in the American economy, and attributes the election loss precisely to that (cf. Goodman 2024). Yet he also sees a unity across issues, as he told a class he teaches at Yale University:

When people sit down across the lines that have tended to divide us – race, geography, sexuality – and then take an honest look at the politics of extremism,” he says, “they figure out that the same people who are voting against people because they are gay are also blocking living wages. ("Meet the Religious Leaders" 2024)

He concludes:

What are the major tenets of religion as it relates to the public square?” he asks. His answer is a litany his repeats often: “Love, truth, justice, mercy, grace, the least of these, the poor, the sick, the imprisoned. Look at this piece of legislation. How are these policies affecting people? How is it affecting their living and their dying? (Ibid.)

We don't have to dump the imprisoned in order to help the sick. Common life is not easily arranged, and Democrats have a diverse and fractious coalition, whose members compete for scarce resources and issue space. But as we push forward, or in the direction we hope is forward, we should remember the quotation attributed to Benjamin Franklin: "We must hang together, or assuredly we will hang separately."