The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his blog:

With Beto O’Rourke apparently about to enter the Presidential race, it’s a good time to consider how he did so well in that 2018 Senate election. Patrick Ruffini of Echelon Insights recently published some detailed data on Twitter which I think are quite interesting.

The main takeaways are below. I was particularly struck by the findings on persuasion vs. turnout. The key to O’Rourke’s excellent performance was apparently persuading folks to vote for him, rather than simply getting more Democrats out to vote.

✅ Turnout leaned slightly right of ‘16.

✅ Backbone of Dem ‘18 voter surges: Whites in metros and young voters.

✅ Stronger Latino turnout than in CA or FL

✅ Dem gains entirely persuasion- (not turnout-) based

Let’s have a hearty ‘Amen” for Ian Millhiser’s post, “Democrats don’t need any more presidential candidates. They need senators: Let us all take a moment to praise Sherrod Brown” at ThinkProgress. In one graph, Millhiser writes, “Other Democrats, such as Texas’ Beto O’Rourke or Colorado’s John Hickenlooper, would do well to follow Brown’s example and run for Senate and not the presidency.” Brown’s presidential candidacy would have almost certainly given the Republicans another Senate seat. Hickenlooper and O’Rourke didn’t take Millhiser’s advice, and may have booted two possible pick-ups for Dems. Millhiser continues, “If Democrats win the presidency, but lose the Senate in 2020, Republican partisans like Mitch McConnell, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh are likely to sabotage the next president’s entire term — and then force that president to run for reelection with no accomplishments whatsoever.” Really, after Biden enters the race, the spectrum of Democratic beliefs will be well-represented by a host of solid candidates.

But among those Democrats who are running for president , Ronald Brownstein sees a problem developing among announced candidates: “The sprawling Democratic field is already so large, and so diverse in race and gender, that strategists are expecting tough competition in the early stages for almost every group of voters imaginable. But there’s one potential exception to that pattern: older voters. Even in a rapidly diversifying party, it’s virtually certain that most Democratic primary voters next year will be older than 45. Yet most of the top-tier candidates look best suited to compete for younger voters, an imbalance that grew more lopsided with the announcement from O’Rourke, who connected powerfully with youthful audiences during his narrow loss in last fall’s Senate race in Texas…And for all of the candidates already jostling in the race, relatively few alternatives might be able to compete with Biden for middle-aged, middle-of-the-road voters, particularly in the middle of the country…This potential mismatch between the pools of voters and candidates looms so large because, even amid all of the party’s other demographic changes, older voters constitute a surprisingly large share of the Democratic primary electorate. Fully 60 percent of primary voters in 2016 were 45 or older, according to an analysis of all 27 exit polls that year conducted by the CNN polling director, Jennifer Agiesta. And while the Democratic primary electorate is growing more racially diverse, about two-thirds of those relatively older primary voters were white.”

In his post, “There Aren’t Many True Independents, and They Aren’t Into Politics” at New York Magazine’s Intelligencer, Ed Kilgore notes, “The most interesting thing about the small tribe of true indies is that they are significantly less politically engaged than independent leaners, who are in turn less engaged than out-and-out partisans. Only about a third of true indies report having voted in the 2018 midterms. It’s likely many of them aren’t turned off by partisan extremism and longing for centrist savior, but rather turned off by politics generally. This means they are difficult to persuade and even harder to mobilize.” Also, “In truth, much of what you read about independents reflects the dynamics of partisan leaners canceling each other out. So that big, potentially irresistible force poised between the two parties is mostly a figment of the imagination.”

Turns out, “Most Americans have confidence in special counsel Robert Mueller and congressional Democrats, as both investigate aspects of President Trump and his administration, according to a new Hill-HarrisX poll,” Matthew Sheffield reports at The Hill. “The survey, released Monday, found that 19 percent of registered voters trust Mueller the most, followed by 10 percent who chose Democrats. Twenty eight percent of respondents said they trust the special counsel and Democratic lawmakers equally…Fifty-seven percent said they trusted Mueller and Democrats, while 43 percent said they didn’t trust either of them. That figure is in line with the 45 percent of registered voters who approved of Trump’s job performance in a recent Hill-HarrisX poll…Older respondents were least likely to have faith in the congressional and special counsel inquiries. A 52 percent majority of voters between the ages of 50 and 64 said they trusted neither Mueller nor congressional Democrats, as did 47 percent of voters who were 65 and older.Thirty-nine percent of respondents between the ages of 35 and 49 said they did not trust Mueller or congressional Democrats to investigate Trump. Voters between the ages of 18 and 34 had even more confidence in the two investigations, with 34 percent saying they did not trust them.”

At The Atlantic, Adam Serwer’s “White Nationalism’s Deep American Roots” probes the ‘literary’ foundations and influence of white supremacy, anti-semitism and eugenics, supported by Presidents Harding and Coolidge and reaching expression in the Immigration Act of 1924. Among Serwer’s insights: “It was america that taught us a nation should not open its doors equally to all nations,” Adolf Hitler told The New York Times…Elsewhere he admiringly noted that the U.S. “simply excludes the immigration of certain races. In these respects America already pays obeisance, at least in tentative first steps, to the characteristic völkisch conception of the state.”…What the Nazis “found exciting about the American model didn’t involve just eugenics,” observes James Q. Whitman, a professor at Yale Law School and the author of Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (2017). “It also involved the systematic degradation of Jim Crow, of American deprivation of basic rights of citizenship like voting.” Nazi lawyers carefully studied how the United States, despite its pretense of equal citizenship, had effectively denied that status to those who were not white…They examined cases that drew, as Thind’s had, arbitrary but hard lines around who could be considered “white.” Serwer goes on to explain that modern-day proponents of “nativism,” including Trump advisors, built on these foundations to influence Trumpism. Serwer adds, “to recognize the homegrown historical antecedents of today’s rhetoric is to call attention to certain disturbing assumptions that have come to define the current immigration debate in America—in particular, that intrinsic human worth is rooted in national origin, and that a certain ethnic group has a legitimate claim to permanent political hegemony in the United States.”

Jim Kessler and Ryan Zamarripa argue at The Daily Beast that “Democrats Need to Understand That This Election Will Be Won—or Lost—in Places Like Lordstown, Ohio: Democratic candidates are mostly from blue bubbles, and so is their base. But unless they talk to people in struggling cities and small towns, they will lose.” The authors note that “while Democrats, activists, and progressive intellectuals have railed against the evils of wealth concentration and income inequality, they have paid scant attention to a more pernicious, salient, and politically roiling problem: the concentration of opportunity in America…Consider Queens County and Trumbull County (where Lordstown is located). Between 2005 and 2015, Queens added 7,577 new businesses and gained 78,756 new jobs. Over those same 10 years, Trumbull County lost 592 businesses and shed 11,704 jobs. To put that into perspective, one-seventh of the businesses and jobs in this one Ohio county disappeared. As Queens rocketed forward, the economy in Trumbull resembled a depression…The vast differences between the very wealthy and the rest of us are an everyday reminder in the urban cores of the Blue Bubble. But in the rest of the country, it’s kitchen-table concerns like jobs, wages, and basic benefits that are more tangible and urgent…That is why Democrats need to make opportunity their uniting cause. They need to focus on economic issues that vast swaths of the country can relate to. Spreading the opportunity to earn a good life to more people and places would unite the disparate factions of the party.”

At The Optimistic Leftist, Ruy Teixeira argues “Underrating Trump could also lead Democrats to make bad decisions about the map. It would be easy for Democratic politicians to look at Trump’s low approval numbers, the growing number of Asian American and Latino voters, and conclude that they should de-emphasize the Midwest (or take the region for granted) and run hard in long-term targets such as Georgia, Arizona and Texas so they can run up the electoral college score…Democrats shouldn’t do that. They should try to play on a broad map that includes Midwestern swing states as well as suburban, diversifying America. It’s smart for Democrats to try to get Republicans to spend money and effort on Georgia and Arizona, but Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin are still arguably the lowest hanging fruit and the best route to 270 electoral votes.”

“Trump loses if working people learn how he has betrayed them…To elevate this may be next to impossible…House committees will detail Trump’s perverse budget, which slashes funding for the EPA and food stamps, and renews the attack on health care, cutting everything from Medicare to Obamacare. But all this is too often swamped by the media fixation on Trump and his scandals…Democrats would have to exercise unimaginable discipline—ignoring Trump’s provocations, and the media’s fixations—to focus attention on the true betrayals…No matter how difficult it is, House Democrats have to put real energy in this mission.”  — From “Democrats Must Expose Trump’s Betrayal of Working People: Forget the scandals and the tweets. What really matters is the looting” by Robert L. Borosage at The Nation.

In “Court-Packing Is Not a Threat to American Democracy. It’s Constitutional. Congress is allowed to change the size of the Supreme Court, and it has done so seven times. The country survived just fine” by Tim Burns in The New Republic, he writes: “Courts can, and have at times, stagnated our government’s ability to respond to critical political and economic issues of the day. That is exactly what is happening today. A Supreme Court majority, sharing a constitutional vision that harkens back to the days when political power was enjoyed by only a landed, male, white aristocracy, is preventing our democratic processes from solving problems that go to the very heart of our democracy. The court’s conservatives stand in the way of our efforts to keep dark money out of politics, to prevent the suppression of the voting rights of people of color, and to solve the polarization that has come with political gerrymandering…it’s no accident that the Constitution grants Congress the right to make the Supreme Court as large or small as it likes. Having the ability to change the composition of the Court in this way ensures that Congress has the power to prevent stagnant visions of our law from threatening the growth of our democracy.”

You had to be of a certain age to remember Birch Bayh when he died this week at 91. As it happens, he sponsored the first piece of congressional legislation I was ever involved in. But his bigger accomplishments were near-legendary, as I wrote about at New York.

If you voted between the ages of 18 and 21 or benefited in any way from the Title IX program banning gender discrimination in higher education, Birch Bayh had an impact on your life. And he played an indirect role in the breakthrough in reproductive rights represented by the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision.

Bayh was elected to the U.S. Senate at the age of 34, after serving as the youngest-ever Speaker of the Indiana House. His first high-profile national moment came in 1964, when he pulled his colleague Ted Kennedy to safety from a plane crash that killed the pilot and a Kennedy staffer.

He soon became a power on the Judiciary Committee and chairman of its Constitution Subcommittee. In that role he became one of the last great advocates for constitutional amendments, co-authoring the 25th amendment providing for appointment of a vice president upon a vacancy in that position, and the 26th amendment lowering the voting age to 18 in federal and state elections. Bayh was also the chief Senate sponsor of the Equal Rights Amendment, which cleared Congress in 1972 only to succumb to a powerful backlash closely associated with the rising conservative movement when the drive to ratify it stalled (there’s still an effort underwayto complete ratification of the ERA, though some argue the deadline for state approval is long past).

But Bayh considered Title IX, best known for its impact on opportunities for women in college athletics, his most important legacy, as NBC News observed:

“The law’s passage came at a time when women earned fewer than 10 percent of all medical and law degrees and fewer than 300,000 high school girls — one in 27 — played sports….

“Now, women make up more than half of those receiving bachelor’s and graduate degrees, and more than 3 million high school girls — one in two — play sports….

“Bayh said the law was aimed at giving women a better shot at higher-paying jobs. He continued speaking in support of Title IX’s enforcement for years after leaving Congress.”

From his position on the Judiciary Committee, Bayh had a definite if more subtle affect on the shape of constitutional law via the composition of the U.S. Supreme Court. He led the successful opposition to two Nixon SCOTUS nominees, Clement Haynesworth and Harrold Carswell, who were widely perceived as payoffs to southern reactionaries who had stood by Nixon in 1968. Nixon ultimately substituted Warren Burger and Harry Blackmun for the rejected pair; Blackman soon authored Roe v. Wade, with Burger concurring.

Bayh’s final years in national politics were deeply disappointing given the high esteem he had gained from liberals in particular and from political observers generally. After a flirtation with a 1972 presidential run cut short by his wife’s cancer diagnosis, Bayh ran for real in 1976, but was soon eclipsed as the liberal champion in the field by Mo Udall. It’s also clear his Hoosier-style persona and campaign methods didn’t travel well, as Adam Clymer notes:

“The Bayh campaign never caught on. It was troubled by poor fund-raising and a style described by Charles Mohr of The New York Times as ‘juvenile, corny.’ His campaign theme song, to the tune of ‘dHey, Look Me Over,’ began: ‘Hey, look him over, he’s your kind of guy./His first name is Birch and his last name is Bayh.’ He dropped out of the race in March.”

No wonder.

Bayh lost his Senate seat in 1980, suffering the ignominy of a defeat at the hands of a then-obscure young conservative named Dan Quayle. It was a bad year for Democrats generally: late in the campaign year Bayh had to take time to head up an inquiry into the so-called “Billygate” scandal, involving President Carter’s brother Billy, who had acted as an unregistered lobbyist for Libya’s Muammar Ghaddafi.

After leaving Congress, Bayh stayed out of electoral politics (other than supporting his son Evan’s career), but was still visible in defending Title IX and advocating the abolition of the Electoral College. The one public shadow on his long and dignified retirement came in 2016, when the champion of equal rights for women was accused of sexual assault (as Clymer notes):

“He…become the subject of a sexual-assault accusation in 2016 by a technology journalist, Xeni Jardin, who said in a series of tweets that he had groped her in the 1990s in the back seat of a car in the presence of unidentified male colleagues of hers. News websites, including Vox, reported the allegation at the time, but Mr. Bayh did not respond publicly.”

That Bayh did not reply is not surprising, given his advanced age at the time. 88-year-olds rarely do. Here is tennis legend Billie Jean King’s statementupon hearing of Bayh’s death:

“Sen. Birch Bayh was one of the most important Americans of the 20th century and you simply cannot look at the evolution of equality in our nation without acknowledging the contributions and the commitment Sen. Bayh made to securing equal rights and opportunities for every American….

“Birch Bayh was a man of integrity, a leader with unquestionable character and an American treasure.”

God only knows how ultimately to judge Birch Bayh, but for all the nostalgia about the passing of deal-cutting back-slapping senators, he was a lawmaker of principle who got things done.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his blog:

I usually mock the idea of a contested political convention in this day and age. But 2020 could be different for Democrats, as I explained at New York:

At this early point of the 2020 cycle, it’s natural to hear those old siren songs from a more interesting past when conventions actually decided something instead of serving as a four-day party infomercial as tightly scripted as any other TV drama. The fact that the last-multi-ballot convention occurred in 1952 (when Democrats nominated Adlai Stevenson on the third ballot), and the last seriously contested nomination in 1976 (when Gerald Ford survived a close challenge from Ronald Reagan on the first ballot), is often forgotten. And yes, it’s fun to engage in reveries over the “smoke-filled rooms” that picked Warren Harding out of nowhere in 1920, the 103 ballots Democrats needed to find their doomed nominee (John W. Davis) in 1924, or the stampeding of Republican delegates by galleries chanting “We Want Willkie!” in 1940.

But aside from the question of who, exactly, would “broker” a “brokered convention” these days, fantasies of any sort of contested nomination at a convention run up against a fundamental change in the process that made primaries and caucuses ubiquitous and delegate selection less arbitrary and “bossed,” as I noted a few years back:

“The main reason for this shift away from deliberative–or if you wish, ‘brokered’–conventions was the rise of a primary system that all but eliminated undecided delegates and favorite-son or stalking-horse candidacies. So it requires really, really special circumstances even to get within shouting distance of a convention where someone hasn’t locked up the nomination long before the balloons are inflated.”

The big shift was in 1972, when virtually all states moved to primaries or voter-driven caucuses. (That’s also the same year that Democratic nominee George McGovern gave his acceptance speech at about 3:00 AM Eastern Time, which led both parties to move quickly to squelch virtually all spontaneity at later conventions, wherever possible).

But there is a basic problem in assuming that the Republican delegate selection process in 2016 tells you anything about the Democratic process in 2020. Once he got rolling in 2016, Trump benefitted enormously from winner-take-all (usually by congressional district) delegate award rules. Democrats insist on strictly proportional delegate awards, which makes it much easier for candidates with limited but consistent support to hang around and hang around until late in the primary season hoping to catch fire (or to benefit from a front-runner’s calamities). That’s particularly true if they have a reliable source of money and/or an ideologically motivated national support base (like Bernie Sanders). So those who scoff at the possibility of a contested convention need to factor in several things: the size and strength of the field, the absence of a big-time front-runner, the likely split of delegates and a relatively front-loaded primary calendar that could make survivors of the early events quite durable.

It’s important to note that proportionality of delegate awards has its limits. There is a 15 percent minimum threshold for winning delegates at all, and in many congressional districts awarding delegates there really aren’t that many at stake to spread them around in strict proportion to the popular vote. But there are some counter-pressures that might encourage “losing” candidates to hold out, as well. As Nate Cohn notes, Democrats have “killed” superdelegates’ independence on first ballots. But if there are subsequent ballots, these ex officio delegates will spring back to life:

“In 2020, Democrats have sought to tamp down the superdelegate hysteria by barring these leaders and officials — currently 765 of them — from casting votes on the initial ballot at the convention. But here’s the ultimate irony: They can still cast votes on successive ballots, so they could be more influential than ever if the Democratic primary devolves into a floor fight.”

So sure, maybe history will hold true and only two candidates emerge from the earliest contests and one croaks the other by April. But for the first time in a long while a contested convention is an actual if still remote possibility. That in turn could influence candidate strategies in ways that are hard to anticipate. Despite its reputation for mild summer weather, it could get hot in Milwaukee in July of 2020.

Perry Bacon, Jr. offers a typology of various kinds of Democrats in his FiveThirtyEight post, “The Six Wings Of The Democratic Party.” Bacon writes that “The goal is to better reflect the disagreements playing out among party elites in the real world, which aren’t well captured by “liberal vs. moderate” or other broad terms like that.”  The six categories include: The Super Progressives; The Very Progressives; The Progressive New Guard; The Progressive Old Guard; The Moderates; and Conservative Democrats. Bacon notes that “The two most liberal groups have a ton of new policy ideas and energy, and they are determined to push the party left. But the Democrats have a majority in the House in part because of moderate Democrats winning in closely contested districts, and the party probably needs more moderate, and even some conservative, Democrats to gain ground in gubernatorial and Senate seats. Trapped in the middle are the party’s congressional leaders and most of its presidential contenders, facing pressure from the party’s left and the right.”

Some salient comments from New York Magazine’s Intelligencer chat on “Should Democrats Impeach President Trump?,” featuring Jonathan Chait, Benjamin Hart, Margaret Hartmann, and Ed Kilgore: Ben:..At Crooked Media, Brian Beutler opined that there’s little evidence impeachment would be damaging to Democrats, and that opposition to it is short-sighted. He writes that “Democratic leaders have all but doomed themselves to the worst-possible approach: One in which they unearth damning evidence and then make the conscious decision not to act on it; one in which they tacitly bless all of Trump’s wrongdoing and pray both that voters do all the hard work for them, and that nothing tragic happens as a consequence of their inaction.” His take on the political dynamic is that it would not deepen divisions any further…Ed: “I think the odds of Republicans flipping on Trump in numbers sufficient to make impeachment (a) feasible, or (b) perceivable as anything other than partisanship by Republicans are roughly zero for obstruction of justice, and maybe 10 percent for evidence of actual collusion…Just look at what happened to Republicans in 1998. Have we forgotten they managed to blow a midterm — an almost completely unprecedented event for the “out” party — because of their determination to impeach Clinton?”…Margaret: Yeah, I don’t even know if removing him from office would be beneficial at this point. I think a good chunk of the country would freak out and feel that he was unfairly ousted, even if they got a few GOP senators onboard…I agree with Pelosi that it’s just going to divide the country further…Jon: That’s a whole other can of worms, but I don’t think there are going to be 67 votes to remove for any reason.”

At The Atlantic, Edward-Isaac Dovere spotlights “The Myth of Joe Biden’s Working-Class Support,” and observes, “People always talk about Joe Biden’s special connection to the white working class, those vaunted lost voters throughout the industrial Midwest whom Democrats are desperate to get back if they want the White House again.” However, Dovere writes, “No one has any proof that this connection gets anyone to vote for Biden, or vote at all…The idea that he can win white working-class votes is part of every calculation about Biden’s likely 2020 run, in public and among his inner circle. It has become automatic filler in conversations and news stories about how he’d measure up against the rest of the Democratic field and how he might perform against Donald Trump, or which states he’d put in play.” But Dovere also notes that “John Anzalone, a pollster who has been advising Biden on a 2020 run, pointed to a Harvard-Harris poll from last month that showed that three-quarters of people who said they’d support Biden don’t have a college education, and that he’s winning 42 percent of non-college-educated voters—as opposed to the closest runner-up, Bernie Sanders, who had 22 percent. Likewise, Anzalone noted that Biden was leading among non-college-educated voters with 30 percent in a Monmouth University poll that came out earlier in the week.” Yet, Biden might do better to emphasize his proven political gift, a talent for projecting authentic compassion and warmly connecting with people on a human level. As Fire Fighter’s union president Harold Schaitberger observed, “His voice is more than connecting with the neighborhoods,” he said. “He really connects with the individuals.”

When Beto O’Rourke was quoted in Vanity Fair as saying “I’m just born to do this” and it was widely reported, I imagined milllions of Americans thinking “Oh great, another rich guy who thinks he’s entitled to rule.” But having just watched his roll-out in a Keokuk coffee shop, I don’t think the perception of elitism is going to be much of a problem for him. Like Biden, he has a natural ability to connect with people on a human level, plus he conveys tremendous energy and passion. He has staked out a vaguely-stated center left agenda, which may be just the thing at this stage of the campaign. But some extremely shrewd and tough politicians will be coming after him, including competitors Harris, Biden, Klobuchar, Sanders and Warren. He may not do so well against them in debates, but he will make up for it on the trail, long though it is. Campaign 2020 just got a lot more engaging.

The AFL-CIO just weighed in on the Green New Deal, and their response will not gladden the hearts of GND advocates: “We welcome the call for labor rights and dialogue with labor, but the Green New Deal resolution is far too short on specific solutions that speak to the jobs of our members and the critical sections of our economy,”  the AFL-CIO Energy Committee told the congresswoman and the senator in a letter dated March 8…We will not accept proposals that could cause immediate harm to millions of our members and their families. We will not stand by and allow threats to our members’ jobs and their families’ standard of living go unanswered,” they wrote. “We are ready to discuss these issues in a responsible way, for we all recognize that doing nothing is not an option.” It seems a little harsh of a critique for an overall vision resolution. But one of the lessons here for GND proponents is to solicit the input of major stakeholders before publicizing it. The wise course for GND supporters is to graciously accept criticism and tweak it, based on the merits of each critique.

Matthew Miles Goodrich, NY State Director of the Sunrise Movement, shares quite a different  perspective on the GND at Dissent: “Defining the Green New Deal is one challenge, but making it the law of the land is another. To do this the climate movement, and indeed the left in general, must fully shed its electoral agnosticism. The earliest any of the Green New Deal’s policies could make it into law is 2021. In that time, Democrats must retain their majority in the House, take control of the Senate, and win the presidency. The disproportionate power that rural states hold in Senate and presidential races means that the traditionally urban left must make in-roads fast in less populated states. Here, the Green New Deal, with its emphasis on agriculture reform and renewable electrification, will be an asset. Ending the minority party’s de facto veto power in the Senate filibuster will also be necessary. So will statehood for D.C. and Puerto Rico. The primaries over the next two years provide the climate movement with a window to push agenda-setting candidates to race each other to develop a plan to actualize the Green New Deal’s full scope. Sitting on the sidelines again would be nihilism…Though still far from our goal, the chasm between necessity and reality no longer seems so insurmountable. The Green New Deal has set a course for the country to combat climate change at scale. The journey will require more protest, more power, and especially more politics.”

In “Americans’ Support for Immigration Is at a Record High. There’s No Need to Appease Fascists,” Noah Lanard writes at Mother Jones: “Last year, only 24 percent of Americans supported cutting legal immigration, down from 40 percent in 2006, according to data provided to Mother Jones by the Pew Research Center. Among Republicans without a college degree, the heart of Trump’s base, 59 percent say legal immigration should be increased or kept at the present level. That makes them slightly more supportive of legal immigration than the average Democrat was 12 years ago. Since Frum praised Alien Nation, the share of Americans who say immigrants are a burden on the country has dropped from 63 percent to 28 percent.” Lanard presents some excellent hover-charts to illustrate the data.

It had to happen. The Wall St. Journal takes The Bogeyman for another preaching-to-the-choir stroll  in “Socialism? Yes, Be Afraid: The next Democratic president will come from a zombie army of anti-capitalists” by their go-to lefty-basher Daniel Henninger. Measure the ruling class fear of the rising acceptability of socialist ideas in the title against the nervous ridicule in the subtitle, and you have a preview of conservative attacks against progressive Democratic candidates in the months ahead.

In more wingnut paranoia news, Gabby Del Valle reports that “A Yelp-style app for conservatives wants to protect right-wingers from “socialist goon squads” at vox.com. “As its name suggests, 63red Safe isn’t just about finding Trump supporter-friendly establishments — its founder appears to be worried about threats to conservatives’ physical well-being. “I’m trying to position it as an everyday ‘where can I go eat safely,’” the app’s founder, Scott Wallace, told the Daily Beast.” As Bette Midler said back in August, “Now Trump’s saying Democrats are going to be “violent” if they win big in November? What are we going to do? Throw our PBS tote bags at them?”

Foreign Affairs online is hosting a forum, “E Pluribus Unum? The Fight Over Identity Politics” in the March/April issue featuring contributions by Stacey Y. Abrams; John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck; Jennifer A. Richeson; and Francis Fukuyama. In her essay, “Abrams takes the opportunity to explain how “Identity Politics Strengthens Democracy,” and shares her critique of Fukuyama’s insights on the topic from one of his articles from the September/October issue:

Fukuyama’s criticism relies on a number of misjudgments. First, Fukuyama complains that “again and again, groups have come to believe that their identities—whether national, religious, ethnic, sexual, gender, or otherwise—are not receiving adequate recognition.” In the United States, marginalized groups have indeed come to believe this—because it is true. Fukuyama also warns that Americans are fragmenting “into segments based on ever-narrower identities, threatening the possibility of deliberation and collective action by society as a whole.” But what Fukuyama laments as “fracturing” is in reality the result of marginalized groups finally overcoming centuries-long efforts to erase them from the American polity—activism that will strengthen democratic rule, not threaten it.

Fukuyama claims that the Democratic Party “has a major choice to make.” The party, he writes, can continue “doubling down on the mobilization of the identity groups that today supply its most fervent activists: African Americans, Hispanics, professional women, the LGBT community, and so on.” Or it can take Fukuyama’s preferred tack, focusing more on economic issues in an attempt to “win back some of the white working-class voters . . . who have defected to the Republican Party in recent elections.”

Fukuyama and other critics of identity politics contend that broad categories such as economic class contain multitudes and that all attention should focus on wide constructs rather than the substrates of inequality. But such arguments fail to acknowledge that some members of any particular economic class have advantages not enjoyed by others in their cohort. U.S. history abounds with examples of members of dominant groups abandoning class solidarity after concluding that opportunity is a zero-sum game. The oppressed have often aimed their impotent rage at those too low on the social scale to even attempt rebellion. This is particularly true in the catchall category known as “the working class.” Conflict between black and white laborers stretches back to the earliest eras in U.S. history, which witnessed tensions between African slaves and European indentured servants. Racism and sexism have long tarnished the heroic story of the U.S. labor movement—defects that contributed to the rise of a segregated middle class and to persistent pay disparities between men and women, disparities exacerbated by racial differences. Indeed, the American working class has consistently relied on people of color and women to push for improved status for workers but has been slow to include them in the movement’s victories.

The facile advice to focus solely on class ignores these complex links among American notions of race, gender, and economics. As Fukuyama himself notes, it has been difficult “to create broad coalitions to fight for redistribution,” since “members of the working class who also belong to higher-status identity groups (such as whites in the United States) tend to resist making common cause with those below them, and vice versa.” Fukuyama’s preferred strategy is also called into question by the success that the Democratic Party enjoyed in 2018 by engaging in what he derides as identity politics.

Abrams goes on to share her experience running for Governor of Georgia, and notes further that,

My campaign built an unprecedented coalition of people of color, rural whites, suburban dwellers, and young people in the Deep South by articulating an understanding of each group’s unique concerns instead of trying to create a false image of universality. As a result, in a midterm contest with a record-high turnout of nearly four million voters, I received more votes than any Democrat in Georgia’s history, falling a scant 54,000 votes shy of victory in a contest riddled with voting irregularities that benefited my opponent.

She concludes that rather than dodging identity politics, “Instead, Americans must thoughtfully pursue an expanded, identity-conscious politics. New, vibrant, noisy voices represent the strongest tool to manage the growing pains of multicultural coexistence. By embracing identity and its prickly, uncomfortable contours, Americans will become more likely to grow as one.”

Fukuyama responds to the three essays that critique his take on identity politics, and has this to say about Abrams’s contribution:

Stacey Abrams criticizes my desire to return to class as the defining target of progressive politics, since class and race overlap strongly in the United States. But it is absurd to see white Americans as a uniformly privileged category, as she seems to do. A significant part of the white working class has followed the black working class into underclass status. Communities facing deindustrialization and job loss have experienced increases in crime, family breakdown, and drug use; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated that 72,000 Americans died in 2017 of drug overdoses related to the opioid epidemic. So although part of the populist vote both in the United States and in Europe is driven by racism and xenophobia, part of it is driven by legitimate complaints that elites—the mainstream political parties, the media, cultural institutions, and major corporations—have failed to recognize these voters’ plight and have stood by as this decline has occurred…In practical terms, overcoming polarization means devising a posture that will win back at least part of the white working-class vote that has shifted from the left to the right. Peeling away populist voters not driven by simple racism means taking seriously some of their concerns over cultural change and national identity. I agree that the burden is on Republican politicians to stop defending Trump, but they will do so only when they realize that their own voters are turning against him.

Fukuyama concludes by saying Trump practices “identity politics on steroids” and “unless the United States counters this trend domestically, it will continue to set a bad example for the rest of the world.” The other contributions to the forum are well worth reading, especially for Democrats seeking clarity on the benefits and pitfalls of ‘identity politics.’