Friday, March 29, 2019

Identity Politics

The Democrats and Identity Politics in 2020
Excerpt: Over at Slate, Christina Cauterucci writes a column with the headline, “Is Pete Buttigieg Just Another White Male Candidate, or Does His Gayness Count as Diversity? ... But if you embrace identity politics, you can draw a quick conclusion about a candidate just by looking at him or learning the name of his spouse. You can dismiss him as “a run-of-the-mill white-male candidate,” or you can be cheered by his status as a gay man, even if you lament Buttigieg’s “assimilationist perspective” and that he’s “less exciting as the supposed gay trailblazer some on the left desperately want him to be,” as the Slate piece does. Who cares about what Buttigeig actually thinks about policy — like his belief that Mike Bloomberg’s large-soda-ban “came from this pragmatist, business-oriented mayor who was following the facts and realized there is a pretty high social cost to obesity” — when you can instantly declare he’s either a trailblazer or “not enough of a trailblazer”?

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