Opinion by: Krystal Ball
We’ve been reporting on election 2019 this week and I didn’t want you to miss out a genuinely historic result which occurred in Kentucky. For the first time in state history, Kentucky elected an African American to the post of attorney general. Daniel Cameron, a former Mitch McConnell aide, became the first African American elected in their own right to actually any statewide office in the Bluegrass State, a state which by the way is overwhelmingly conservative and 87% white.
I’m sure you were well aware of Cameron’s trailblazing election though given the overwhelming celebration of his achievement by civil rights leaders, Democratic politicians, elite media, and all of the folks who typically celebrate such identity-based achievements, right? The white women who were horrified when AOC endorsed white man Bernie Sanders, the pundits who told me you have to be sexist not to support a woman, and those who support Kamala because of her identity as a black woman; they must have been elated by Daniel Cameron’s victory, right? After all, if you can’t see it, you can’t be it. So, if the thing that matters is identity politics, surely Cameron’s victory would be widely celebrated. Wait…what’s that you say? Virtually no Democratic politician said a damn thing? Hmm. Weird.
Perhaps that’s because identity politics is a thin gruel to be offered by the Democratic party establishment, corporatists, and media elites in lieu of actually delivering anything of consequence. The lack of even one mention of Daniel Cameron’s election shows you that they are well aware just how shallow it really is.
Now look, I don’t want to pretend that race and gender glass ceiling-breaking is meaningless. It’s not. I loved that the first president my kids knew was a black man. It does make a difference to see people of color and women in leadership roles. But if those people pursue the same racist, classist, elitist, crappy policies of their white brothers and sisters, well, it’s not really change we can believe in, is it? If you’re an immigrant getting deported, does it matter to you that the “deporter in chief” is the first African American president? If you’re in jail for marijuana possession or because your kids were truant at school, does it make a difference that it’s Kamala Harris who gleefully prosecuted you? Aren’t you delighted that Kellyanne Conway was the first woman to run a successful presidential campaign?
The truth is so obvious that it’s embarrassing to state it. What you do, the policies you advocate for, and the people you help matters. It matters a lot more than having equal diverse representation in the advocacy and implementation of racist, anti-working-class policies. It was Democrats who put in place the racist 100-to-1 crack sentencing disparity. Thanks Joe Biden! Democrats who proudly destroyed welfare as we know it. Democrats who let the banksters off the hook so they could pillage African American and Hispanic communities with their subprime mortgages of mass destruction.
I could spend the next ten hours in a filibuster of woke Democratic hypocrisy on this issue. Tulsi Gabbard is a woman of color running for president. Why does she get no love from the left? It’s because she doesn’t step in line for the heterodox pro-war policies that have hijacked the party. if you’re a millennial drowning in student debt, do you care that president platitude Pete the millennial is the one who lets you keep drowning in your student debt? If you are one of the parents of the 70,000 people per year that die of an overdose, do you care about the race, gender, or sexual orientation of the political coward who continues our racist and inhumane war on drugs? Woke people need to wake up. If the Democratic party wants to win and wants to be about something, then do something for the multi-racial working class instead of just changing the race of the so-called leader that runs palliative care for the working people in the giant hospice that both rural and urban America have become. And by the way, if you don’t believe the suffering of the white working class is just as real as that of the black and brown working class because they have “privilege,” people who have watched their jobs shipped overseas and their towns flooded with drugs and their young people sent off to die in war all by a bipartisan consensus, then you are just as heartless as those who would put precious immigrant babies in detention centers.
This isn’t a suffering Olympics where we get to stand in judgment of who is most oppressed. If Democrats want to be the party of working people then they can’t pick and choose which people. And if they want to continue being the party of the professional managerial class, throwing a bone of identity politics to the black and brown working class to keep them in the tent because at least we’re not out and out racists like the other team, well, that’s a party I want no part of.
I was listening yesterday to Bernie Sanders interview with Mehdi Hasan on his podcast deconstructed. Mehdi asked Sanders if he would commit to a vice president who wasn’t another white guy.
“My vice-presidential candidate will be a strong progressive.” It actually takes courage to say that — to say that the ideology matters first and foremost, and if it’s a woman or a person of color so much the better. So, Democrats, you have a choice. Celebrate Daniel Cameron. Celebrate it when he prosecutes women for trying to get an abortion, celebrate roll-backs of worker protections and more mass incarceration, because at least he’s the right color. Or, get off this idea that identity politics are the only thing that matters because by the complete silence on Cameron’s election you have shown, that obviously it’s not. Leave your identity politics at the door and start evaluating people by the content of their character and their record and not by some BS woke signaling that no one believes anymore, including, I might add, the demographic groups you are pandering to. Otherwise, prepare for another 4 years of this…
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