Identity politics indeed cost Kamala Harris the election — Trump's supremacist kind

Rather than marking the end of identity politics, as the pundits proclaim, the 2024 election reflected the triumphal victory of the original version.

No, Kamala Harris did not lose because of her supposed embrace of “identity politics.” Just the reverse is true: Donald Trump won because of his very real embrace of identity politics. White identity politics.

It’s one of the more popular lines of self-flagellation Democratic Party critics and strategists have taken in the wake of the disastrous 2024 election: Harris and her “identity politics” caused many voters, including minorities, to look elsewhere. But as Tressie McMillan Cottom already observed, Harris in fact tended to deemphasize the racial aspects of her historic candidacy and worked hard to win over Republican voters—to little avail:

Notably, there are numerous obituaries for “identity politics” that argue that Harris’s decision to de-emphasize her race and gender in her campaign means that diversity is dead as an overt political strategy. But what if she should have leaned into identity more, risking the white identity voter but telling us a clear story about why electing her would speak about our audacious potential?

We cannot know for sure. We do know that she declined to write the narrative of her historic firsts throughout her campaign, while Trump wrote the second volume of his story of which identities should matter most. Harris’s campaign positioned race and gender not as strengths to be reclaimed but flaws to be subsumed. If you have to hide the light of your race and gender behind the metaphorical bushes to come vaguely close to being the first Black female president, then identity still matters very much indeed.

… It is racist to believe that racial identity is an affliction that only weak-willed or weak-minded minorities suffer. When we limit identity politics to minorities, we insist that in politics only nonwhite people have racial identities (and to a lesser extent, that only women have gendered identities). If you accept that everyone has a racial identity — which is very hard to refute — then every political individual engages in identity politics.

White voters are also identity voters. In fact, they are the most important of all identity-driven voters. It was their votes that Harris had to court.

Nonetheless, the New York Times proclaimed that the results were about how “Identity Politics Loses Its Grip on the Country”—erasing Trump’s obvious and pronounced white identity politics.

The foundation of Trump’s entire campaign against Harris was racial identity politics. This was abundantly clear at the Republican National Convention, as the Washington Post reported at the time. He kicked it all off shortly after she had secured the Democratic nomination by falsely claiming that she switched back and forth between her Indian and Black heritages for her identity:

Throughout the campaign, Trump’s MAGA cohort kept doubling down on white identity politics. A book disgorged by the Claremont Institute built the narrative that white people are the main victims of racial discrimination now:

Carl’s book centers on the claim that “anti-white racism is the most predominant and politically powerful form of racism in America today.” What mainstream scholars of race call “white privilege” is, in his view, a series of “informal evanescent cultural legacies.” By contrast, anti-white discrimination “is increasingly legal and formal.”

This discrimination is, for Carl, primarily the product of a pernicious ideology popular among elites (nonwhite and white alike). “Anti-white racism is the all-but-official ideology of our ruling regime,” he writes — and they have acted in such a way as to ensure that whites are increasingly shunted to the bottom of America’s social hierarchy.

Carl’s arguments for this view resemble a funhouse mirror version of American racial history: roughly the same series of events, but with the roles of victim and perpetrator reversed.

Those ideas will reverberate throughout the coming Trump administration, particularly among the coterie of close advisers he has already assembled: Elon Musk, Stephen Miller, Tom Homan, Tulsi Gabbard, and the rest of his chaos-ensuring clown car.

None of this is new for Donald Trump. He embraced white identity politics early in his 2015-16 campaign, a clear warning “that white consciousness can be a potent force in mass political behavior, and could foreshadow a rising white identity politics in the Age of Trump.” Since then, we’ve witnessed how white identity politics has become the core animating feature of Republican politics, and how that is borne out at the ballot box.

Throughout the past campaign and indeed the preceding four years, we’ve been inundated with claims that Critical Race Theory and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion measures constitute “reverse racism.” And thanks to the right-wing media ecosystem, they’ve taken hold.

Over at the Heritage Foundation—home of Trump’s Project 2025 team—they’ve been fulminating that DEI sessions are racially divisive. Meanwhile, Trump’s minions (including Musk) repeatedly described Harris as a “DEI hire.”

All of these “reverse racism” claims have a certain familiar ring to anyone who has studied the American extremist right for any length of time, because we became accustomed to hearing identical claims from the likes of David Duke and his neo-Nazi cohorts in the 1980s and ‘90s.

Indeed, what we call white identity politics now has gone by another name for most of its existence in American politics: white supremacism. Every aspect fundamentally originates in the racist worldview that ruled the U.S. for much of its early history. But it has largely been erased from history education.

A brief history of white supremacy

White supremacy is rooted in a set of theories known as scientific racism, which date back to the 17^th century, but which took full flower in the late 19^th century, especially in the United States. It posited, as a kind of natural phenomenon, a hierarchy with the white race in the superior position.

The central concept described race as a biological phenomenon with uniform characteristics. A set of scientific theories inspired by Darwin called “cultural evolutionism” claimed that the racial hierarchy was a product of genetic superiority. Much of this was based on spurious data about skull size and other factors. Black people were depicted as an evolutionary “bridge” between white men and chimpanzees. White societies were de facto regarded as the final superior flowering of evolution.

Similarly, even races that today are considered obviously white, such as the Irish and Italians, were deemed lesser subspecies in many of these taxonomies. A pseudo-science called “eugenics” developed that advocated strict racial barriers as a kind of “hygiene.”

This was when the world’s population first became “scientifically” divided into races, with ramifications that quickly spread into the arenas of medicine, politics, public policy, and culture. It particularly became inflamed in the United States in the context of the Civil War.

Early scientific racists like Samuel George Morton and Samuel Cartwright were profoundly influential in the slaveholding societies of the South, and their pseudo-scientific theories (including the idea of blackness as a curable disease) were used to defend slavery.

How deeply these beliefs were adopted in Confederate society is reflected in the various declarations of secession by Southern states in 1861, which offered a variety of pretexts but all agreed on one thing: This was first and foremost about defending white supremacy and slavery.

Texas:

We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.

That in this free government *all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights* [emphasis in the original]; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations; while the destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities upon both and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding states.

Alabama:

Upon the principles then announced by Mr. Lincoln and his leading friends, we are bound to expect his administration to be conducted. Hence it is, that in high places, among the Republi­can party, the election of Mr. Lincoln is hailed, not simply as it change of Administration, but as the inauguration of new princi­ples, and a new theory of Government, and even as the downfall of slavery. Therefore it is that the election of Mr. Lincoln cannot be regarded otherwise than a solemn declaration, on the part of a great majority of the Northern people, of hostility to the South, her property and her institutions—nothing less than an open declaration of war—for the triumph of this new theory of Government destroys the property of the South, lays waste her fields, and inaugurates all the horrors of a San Domingo servile insurrection, consigning her citizens to assassinations, and her wives and daughters to pollution and violation, to gratify the lust of half-civilized Africans.

Mississippi:

Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin. ....

... It has nullified the Fugitive Slave Law in almost every free State in the Union, and has utterly broken the compact which our fathers pledged their faith to maintain.

It advocates negro equality, socially and politically, and promotes insurrection and incendiarism in our midst. ...

Alexander Stephens, a Georgian who eventually became vice president of the Confederacy, made this explicit in his “Cornerstone Speech” in Savannah in 1861. 7/24

The great truth, I repeat, upon which our system rests, is the inferiority of the African. The enemies of our institutions ignore this truth. They set out with the assumption that the races are equal; that the negro is equal to the white man. If their premises were correct, their conclusions would be legitimate. But their premises being false, their conclusions are false also. Most of that fanatical spirit at the North on this subject, which in its zeal without knowledge, would upturn our society and lay waste our fair country, springs from this false reasoning. Hence so much misapplied sympathy for fancied wrongs and sufferings. These wrongs and sufferings exist only in their heated imaginations. There can be no wrong where there is no violation of nature’s laws. We have heard much of the higher law. I believe myself in the higher law. We stand upon that higher law. I would defend and support no constitution that is against the higher law. I mean by that the law of nature and of God. Human con­stitutions and human laws that are made against the law of nature or of God, ought to be overturned; and if Seward was right the Constitution which he was sworn to support, and is now requiring others to swear to support, ought to have been overthrown long ago. It ought never to have been made. But in point of fact it is he and his associates in this crusade against us, who are warring against the higher law—we stand upon the laws of the Creator, upon the highest of all laws. It is the fanatics of the North, who are warring against the decrees of God Almighty, in their attempts to make things equal which he made unequal. My assurance of ultimate success in this controversy is strong from the conviction, that we stand upon the right.

White supremacy’s forces lost the war, but remained irrevocably woven into the American fabric. In the first decades afterward, the same bigotry was used by the Ku Klux Klan and the Red Shirts to justify their murderous terror in the Reconstruction era; preventing “negro rule” of whites was their raison d’être.

As Southerners constructed a regime of Jim Crow laws to maintain control of the black population, they often relied on tropes devised under scientific racism to justify their means. In particular, they claimed blacks were more prone to rape as justification for lynchings. Jim Crow was the official enshrinement of white supremacy in the body of American law, though it is worth remembering that it was primarily enforced by the extralegal violence common to the lynching era, in which victims were selected mainly because they were threats to the system.

White supremacy became law in many other ways, including planning and zoning laws, housing ordinances, and two-tiered education systems. Interracial marriages, following the dictates of eugenicists, were broadly forbidden as “miscegenation.”

Eugenicists devised maps showing where the world’s various races resided. By the early 20^th century, white supremacists became increasingly focused on immigration as a source of the “dilution” of the white majority and as a threat to white supremacy. Two national bestsellers by noted eugenicists Lothrop Stoddard and Madison Grant—The Rising Ride of Color Against World White Supremacy (1920) and The Passing of the Great Race (1916)—played major roles in spreading the bogus claim that brown people threatened to overwhelm the white population.

According to Stoddard and Grant, the most dire threat came in the form of Asian immigration; both foresaw a future invasion of the Pacific Coast by Japanese or Chinese armies, and warned against the “pollution” of the population by immigrant farmers.

These books were not just widely read but their theses became conventional wisdom, eventually adopted as the basis of government policy. The Immigration Act of 1924—which forbade any further Asian immigration, and encoded the concept of “illegal aliens” into law—was largely inspired by the ensuing discourse.

At about the same, Germans recovering from World War I were inspired by white supremacists on a course of “national recovery” that then led inevitably to World War II and the nightmare of the Holocaust. That horror, combined with the experience of going to war with a nation that loudly embraced white supremacy that had in many ways first taken root in the USA, struck a seemingly lethal blow to the idea of white supremacy in global society, including here.

The shift in public sentiment began to turn as early as the 1950s, when the Civil Rights movement first emerged as a national force. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 reversed much of the damage of the 1924 law by ending racial quotas and broadening the demographic mix.

The 1965 Voting Rights Act largely ended Jim Crow. In 1967, anti-miscegenation laws were overturned by the Supreme Court. Public attitudes shifted: segregation and white racial superiority, became minority views among whites by the mid-1970s, and declined into the 1990s.

Explicitly white supremacist groups had been long banished to the fringes of society by then, but the strands woven into American culture and law remained. By the 1980s, leaders of the fringe groups, determined to return to mainstream power, began building on those strands.

They first manifested in public as “Patriot” militia groups, who despite their obvious violent extremism—including the Oklahoma City bombing—were nonetheless often given a media treatment that minimized their radical beliefs and normalized them. These groups exploded in numbers when America elected its first black president, reaching a crescendo late in his first term when there were about 1,300 such groups. Their ideology, built on white-identity bones, was popularized and mainstreamed through the Tea Party. 22/24

Out of that milieu emerged Donald Trump, who claimed leadership of the Tea Party early on, and gradually shaped that into a presidential candidacy that captured the devotion of the nation’s authoritarian personalities—especially its white supremacists.

White identity politics now

White supremacy, as we can see throughout this history, is more than just a matter of tribal identification or pseudo-science based on an arbitrary racial hierarchy. It is above all else an authoritarian system of social control—and that is ultimately its appeal. That’s what people want. All kinds of people. Nonwhite people included.

The most remarkable aspect of Trump’s 2024 success, in fact, was the inroads he made among Latino and Black (especially male) voters. It was the highest share of that segment of voters for the GOP candidate in decades.

A lot of these voters gave rationales that tended toward their preference for male leadership, and tended to ignore or dismiss the tribal-affiliation aspects of Trump’s white-identity politics. They liked its masculine authoritarianism. The racism was just a diversion by his opponents.

They wanted a strongman, an Alexander who solves the Gordian knot with a single blow. Democracy was too spineless for them, too dithering, too corrupt, too ineffective to run a society properly. Trump is the guy who can fix all that, in their worldview.

This was something I explored on the sidelines of the numerous Proud Boys/Oath Keepers/”Patriot” rallies I covered between 2017 and 2020, where I inevitably encountered a number of nonwhite and LGBTQ participants—not many, but noticeable in the context of the sea of white-identity politics.

Sometimes they even assumed leadership positions. The founder and chief organizer of the Proud Boys-affiliated group Patriot Prayer, Joey Gibson, is a dark-skinned Japanese-American man; his right-hand man and chief enforcer, Tusitala “Tiny” Toese, is a large Samoan.

The minority bloc on the right was statistically tiny, but noticeable for its presence, particularly at rallies where white nationalists would scream racial slurs and announce their desire to inflict violence on immigrants and other minority targets.

I often tried to make a point of talking to these participants to understand their motivations, querying them on what drew them to groups like the Proud Boys and whether they were disturbed by the group’s often naked bigotry.

Their answers varied widely, but there was a theme running through them. Like their white cohorts, they were first attracted to the Proud Boys because of the opportunity for violence directed against the leftists they despised. But most of all, wanted to impose a right-wing model of governance on everyone else.

They were all deeply skeptical of the principles of equality and democracy, and considered efforts to repair the long-term damage of white supremacy simply self-interested poseurism. Reporting on the bigoted and violent beliefs and behavior of their fellow right-wingers was dismissed as simply an easy leftist smear with no basis in reality.

They were all prone to conspiracism and could parrot misinformation straight from the social media where they consumed it. Their beliefs were a jumbled mass of contradictions dependent on compartmentalized thinking, and were prone to projection. They were highly self-righteous and aggressive, both rhetorically and physically. And they especially loved the camaraderie of the far-right street rallies because they offered a sense of community and belonging.

All of these traits, as it happens, are consistent with the psychological model for authoritarian personalities.

German political philosopher Theodor Adorno argued that the appeal of seemingly implausible populists and demagogues like Trump (or Hitler) was more a product of their personal psychological traits than their political self-interest. “Since it would be impossible for fascism to win the masses through rational arguments,” Adorno wrote, “its propaganda must necessarily be deflected from discursive thinking; it must be oriented psychologically, and has to mobilize irrational, unconscious, regressive processes.”

As Ruth Ben-Ghiat explains, Trump “has accomplished a kind of mass conditioning to see democracy as failing and see strongmen rule as something that emotionally, socially, can offer people what democracy could not.”

This is why Latino and Black voters may be attracted to Trump’s white identitarianism: they inevitably see themselves as exempt from the oppression endemic to such rule. They often see themselves occupying a known upper rung in its racial hierarchy, if not the top one.

A 2016 study by Matthew MacWilliams found that on average, Black Americans actually score higher in texts for right-wing authoritarianism than whites. This is particularly true of African Americans who attend church on a regular basis. Similarly, research dating back to the 1950s has shown that Mexican-Americans also have a powerful authoritarian streak, also related to their churchgoing behavior.

Minorities with authoritarian personalities uniformly dismiss concerns they themselves might be victimized by the authoritarian leaders they support. A man I met in Los Cabos last spring told me he thought Trump’s vow to deport Mexicans was just a way to rile up liberals. He liked how Trump “tells the truth.”

After Trump increased his share of Black and Latino votes in 2020, Yasheng Huang observed that these voters all shared authoritarian personalities, “a more primordial disposition than ethnic tribalism, religious affiliation, and sexual identity.”

The secret to authoritarianism is that it transcends whatever racial, ethnic, or national boundaries it may predicate its core appeal around. It appears in multiple cultures amid varying circumstances, but its promise of simple effectiveness is its real draw.

But that promise is illusory. Inevitably, authoritarians create dysfunctional societies by damaging if not destroying intergroup relations. It foments in-group aggression against targeted out-groups, and renders whole blocs of society nonfunctioning pariahs.

Authoritarians also inevitably create failed states because they are incapable of responding adequately to facts on the ground as situations change. They try to make society conform to their preferred narratives rather than assessing facts pragmatically. Think of Trump and COVID-19.

This is why the pandemic killed a million people. As Umberto Eco observed: “Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.”

Trump’s minority voters clearly responded to his white-identitarian appeals: his smears about Kamala Harris’s racial identity, his fearmongering about immigrants eating dogs and cats in Ohio, a rally comedian labeling Puerto Rico a “floating mountain of garbage,” and most of all his vows of mass deportation. They believed he just didn’t mean them—rather, they believed he would only target criminal immigrants.

Latino voters in particular were angered by the treatment given to asylum seekers in recent years, believing it was preferential and left them behind. One Latino woman interviewed by ProPublica was typical of this. Trump was going after criminals, not people like her: “They know who has been behaving well and who hasn’t been,” she said.

A Republican strategist had bad news for her, saying “it’s wishful thinking to believe Trump will give any special treatment to undocumented immigrants who have been living and working in the U.S. for a long time. ‘They’re allowing themselves to believe that for no good reason.’ ”

This is why limp responses to white identity politics fail: They permit their authoritarian narrative to prevail rather than confronting and discrediting them. They also convince all kinds of authoritarian personalities that liberals are too spineless to effectively defend anyone.

White identity always has claimed that criticism of its oppressive politics, its violent behavior, and its bigoted hatemongering is just “racism in reverse” against white people. This goes back to at least the Civil War period and its aftermath. This syndrome is recognizable today as an observed trait of abusers, called DARVO: Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender.

It’s able to do this because our modern mass media have rendered white identity politics invisible, despite its being the original identity politics. This why the New York Times can declare identity politics dead when in fact they rage throughout MAGA world.

Yet all of what is broadly characterized as “identity politics” is simply the efforts by the nonwhite groups targeted by white supremacy to counter its oppressive division of society into racial and patriarchal hierarchies: the Civil Rights movement, immigrant rights, LGBTQ rights.

The Trump campaign is riding on a wave of fear over the coming demographic change, roughly twenty years hence, when whites will cease to comprise less than 50% of the population. Its fearmongering over immigrants and “leftists” is intended to invoke an authoritarian response.

Democrats cannot abandon “identity politics” because this change is reality, not a “great replacement” conspiracy, and the white identitarian attempt to prevent it is the game that has been thrust upon us by Republicans. As long as Democrats seek to be the party that defends equality of opportunity, rights, and protection under the law, it must battle attacks on those rights by white identity politics.

Indeed, their problem may have been not that they were guided by such politics, but that they were so meek and spineless in playing them. As the post-election reporting by ProPublica suggests, Latinos in particular are frustrated by Democratic failures on immigration.

For decades now, Democrats have supported comprehensive immigration reform that would have repaired problems for immigrants already—but they have placed them so far on the back-burner that now they have earned the blame for them.

When discussing immigration issues, Kamala Harris rarely mentioned “comprehensive immigration reform,” or bothered explaining in plain language how they planned to tackle these problems. It’s a subject rich with possibilities for refuting MAGA smears. 37/39

The same is true with other forms of identity politics. Rather than minimize Trump’s attacks on transgender people by characterizing it as about a tiny and irrelevant minority, Harris easily could have turned it into a defense of equality under the law and common decency.

Even when it came to her own identity, Harris backed away from taking an explicit stand. It may have been a matter of self-restraint, but it furthered the stereotype of her as a mealy-mouthed and ultimately spineless defender of the causes she ostensibly espoused.

If the lesson Democrats draw from 2024 is that pro-democratic identity politics are toxic because they’re difficult to explain, and thereby abandon the field to white identity politics and rule by supremacists, then it’s not clear what reason the party even has to exist.

As McMillan Cottom put it:

Obama’s coalition feels like an aberration and it is time for us to accept that American politics is identity politics. It is a battle for the identities that will be named and shamed, while others are granted anonymity and power. Playing to the silent white identitarian does not guarantee victory if you aren’t a white identity candidate. If we learn anything from Harris’s loss, it should be that we must stop sacrificing the power of other identities — their values, their hopes, their security — for a chance that will not pan out.

[Note: a version of this post appears as a multi-part thread on BlueSky.]