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By Jamelle Bouie
Opinion Columnist
Much as it was after the 2016 presidential election, the conventional wisdom in the wake of the 2024 presidential election has been that identity politics is a dead end for the political left. And inasmuch as “identity politics” means the cynical appeal to narrow group interests, then this wisdom is well taken — although one might also observe that narrow appeals to group interest helped Donald Trump win a second term to the White House.
But if held too tightly, justified disdain for particularism — for rejecting the appeal to general interest so that one can cut the electorate into thin slices — can be counterproductive. “Policies and rhetoric framed in the interests of the working class as a whole are crucial,” Michael McCarthy, an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, writes in Hammer and Hope magazine. “But organizers have always known that in order to build a movement, you need to address specific yet important concerns that affect only some parts of your coalition while also speaking to the issues shared by everyone you want to draw into your base.”
