Failure of Identity Liberalism

Columbia prof Mark Lilla writes in the NY Times:

It is a truism that America has become a more diverse country. It is also a beautiful thing to watch.

Especially beautiful if you hate white ppl.

Hillary Clinton ... tended on the campaign trail to ... slip into the rhetoric of diversity, calling out explicitly to African-American, Latino, L.G.B.T. and women voters at every stop. This was a strategic mistake. If you are going to mention groups in America, you had better mention all of them. If you don’t, those left out will notice and feel excluded. Which, as the data show, was exactly what happened with the white working class and those with strong religious convictions. Fully two-thirds of white voters without college degrees voted for Donald Trump, as did over 80 percent of white evangelicals.

Mentioning them all no longer works for the Democrats. She loses votes by saying "All lives matter." To get the votes of those who hate whites and Christians, she has to signal that she will appoint ppl who hate them also.

But it is at the level of electoral politics that identity liberalism has failed most spectacularly, as we have just seen. National politics in healthy periods is not about “difference,” it is about commonality. And it will be dominated by whoever best captures Americans’ imaginations about our shared destiny. Ronald Reagan did that very skillfully, whatever one may think of his vision. So did Bill Clinton, who took a page from Reagan’s playbook. He seized the Democratic Party away from its identity-conscious wing, concentrated his energies on domestic programs that would benefit everyone (like national health insurance) and defined America’s role in the post-1989 world. By remaining in office for two terms, he was then able to accomplish much for different groups in the Democratic coalition. Identity politics, by contrast, is largely expressive, not persuasive. Which is why it never wins elections — but can lose them.

But the Democrats have nothing going for them, except hating whites and Christians.

Advertising Age reports:

… It seemed like every ad that Clinton and her allies released in the ensuing months was simply a variation on the theme that Donald Trump is a big jerk. In fact, as recently as Sunday, Clinton’s campaign released a video titled “10 minutes of Donald Trump demeaning, objectifying, and insulting women.”

Whereas Trump’s campaign released dead-simple, exceedingly traditional ads related to Big Issues. In Trump’s first TV commercial of the general election, a narrator declared that “In Hillary Clinton’s America, the system stays rigged against Americans. Syrian refugees flood in. Illegal immigrants convicted of committing crimes get to stay, collecting Social Security benefits, skipping the line….”

On foreign policy, the Democrats and NeverTrumpers have become the warmongers:

Of all the people in the world, it is nationalists who are now the least inclined to support devastating world wars. It is globalists who want to intervene in Syria, establish no-fly zones, put troops on Russia’s border, encircle China with military bases, and overthrow governments in the name of “democracy.”

That is why President Trump will be much more liked and respected overseas than Barack Obama, or than Hillary Clinton would have been.