Bill Mahar on Friday

[Sympthsical]

40. We compartmentalized ourselves, which is a problem

As I watched his commentary on this, I kept thinking, "It works, because conservatives generally have a unified identity that can be appealed to." Guns or religion or immigration or just hating whatever it is the Left is doing this week. It's fairly simple and straightforward. Conservatives I know who aren't say, particularly religious or gun owners, overlook it, because they're on board with the basic foundational things of conservatism. And a lot of the time, conservative just means, "Not what the Left is doing."

Which, hey, we have people in our own party who spend all day hating on whatever the Left is doing. So, what to do about that.

The Democratic Party, for good or ill (I tend to think ill), has wholly embraced identity politics over time. It's all about who we are instead of what we think, and we have become more granularly compartmentalized over time. Our ideology diced all of us up, and our politicians now have to somehow cater to everything, everywhere, all at once. I'm not just a Democratic voter. I'm a gay, white, suburban male worried about climate change, the electric grid, economic and social justice, student loans, the cost of health care, and housing costs. (using myself as an example so as to not call anyone out).

Now check all those boxes, or I'm coming for you, you homophobic, racist, rural, climate denier who probably burns coal! Hold on. Let me get my twitter so I can let everyone who isn't me have it.

Before anyone thinks this is an endorsement of, "The Party Before All," or a denunciation of "purity politics" - it's not. (Purity tends to be used as a dismissal of just about any issue. If they never matter because there's always an election coming, how do they matter at all?) I think that thinking has 1). Wrecked us at the polls almost my entire life absent a once in a generation politician in President Obama, and 2). Been used as an excuse to allow our own politicians to do as little as possible with as little accountability as possible, thus leading to a cycle of apathy and disenchantment. Look at New York state and that climate initiative that failed under a Democratic supermajority.

But how many times do you see any issue at all, and the answer or rationale of the person's opinion is, "As a Democrat" or "As a liberal." It's not too often. It's always, "As a gay man. As a woman. As a minority. As a victim of . . ."

The identity is more important than the idea. And the idea can't be criticized, because then it's met with a dishonest invocation of the identity. "If you don't like this idea, it's because you're racist." Ok, but what if I'm not racist? What if it's just a really bad idea?

But the ship has sailed, because we operate within an ideology that ordains that ideas and identities are the same things.

So our politicians don't have much unifying to appeal to. There's no lowest common denominators. There are plenty of low ones, but there aren't many common ones. Our politicians have to check too many boxes.

I don't see this getting any better. This, "It's all about me and what I am," strain of politics is getting worse over time. Millennials and Zoomers absolutely embrace this identity stuff to a more radical degree. And I can say that as a Millennial. Most of my peers don't identify as liberal or Democrat. They will sometimes identify as progressive, and when doing so usually they're discussing policy concers outside of identity. Climate change. Economic justice. Corporate control. Otherwise, it's all about their identity.

But as long as we're separating ourselves and chopping ourselves up into smaller and smaller identity squares, we make it impossible to have a unified party in the way Republicans do. Yes, the Big Tent is a good thing, but if it's a tent full of cubicles where people are solely worried about what's going on in their corner and no one else, it's not going to be a functional tent.

There's going to have to be a point where we get over ourselves a bit.