We All Live In Berkeley Now

It feels pretty good to write an “I-told-you-so” piece on what the Democrats got wrong. If you’re not directly on the Democratic Party’s payroll, you probably feel vindicated in whatever critique you’ve been making for the last year. I’ve seen a lot of valid criticisms in articles like these in the last two weeks. The party completely failed to offer a positive vision for America, instead opting for bizarre microtargeted messages to their chosen identity groups and scolding for everyone else. Where Bill Clinton cleverly triangulated on major issues to capture moderates, Harris’s team seemed eager to deliberately neutralize their advantage on every issue. Starting out with the hope of distinction from Biden and frantically trotting out the Cheneys in the last weeks; criticizing corporate price-gouging, then elevating Uber’s Tony West to a senior advisor; eschewing I’m-With-Her identity politics in favor of camo hats, only to barrage non-white male voters in the last weeks of the campaign with cajoling and pre-emptive scolding in equal parts. Weed and crypto, anyone?

The highly paid consultant class and the Republican party are essentially united in their explanation of what went wrong. They clearly want what’s best for the party, so we should listen. To hear it from them, the key failure of the Democratic Party was actually their over-reliance on identity politics, wokeness and words like ’latinx’. Of course, none of the people saying this have ideas for what to replace this with. People have been quick to point out that the Harris campaign wasn’t actually all that identitarian, which is true. However, it’s possible that the Democratic Party’s brand was just too associated with identity politics this cycle. In many ways, I think this election absorbed a lot of the pent-up dissatisfaction with the weird Trump-2016-era cultural shift toward online histrionics; the 2020 election now seems like a product of COVID, and the anti-wokeness of the last four years a holdover or overdue reaction to the overweening internet race war of 2020.

Either way, people are crowing that this election represents the end of identity politics. I think that couldn’t be further from the truth. What I’ve seen over the last four years is the rise of identity politics on the right. To me, Trump’s win this cycle is a demonstration of the power identity politics still has in the American mind. The groups whose identities were folded into the Trump id-pol coalition are different. JD Vance is the exemplar of right identity politics; he’s a token redneck that made it through the elite institutions, talks like one of us (elites), and carries a dual message: society has immiserated his identity group (white Appalachians), and although he overcame it, his mission is to right that wrong for the rest of them. He’s such a perfect mirror image of Democratic idpol that he overstates his connection to his group, and even code-switches, throwing a little of the down-home accent on in front of friendly crowds.

You don’t have to look far to see Trump doing similar things. Liberals love to say it’s Nazism, but I think Trump’s promise of retribution for his coalition hews much closer to the reparations promised by Democratic identity politics.

Picture this: someone online is whining about how bad society has it in for her group. She points to evidence of economic disparities and a lack of representation in entertainment media. In order to rectify the problem, she suggests that the tax code and social programs be retuned in favor of her group, and that more cartoons be made centering her group’s unique perspective.

Four years ago, it would be an easy guess which party she was in. Now it isn’t so clear. Democrats have offered us means-tested social programs, didactic adult television, and promises of reparations for a few election cycles. Republican politics have shifted to become a more explicit mirror image over the last decade. Naturally, this involves anti-woke adult cartoons, but in real life, they offer tax cuts for business owners and tax hikes for blue-state salary earners who pay a lot of state and local tax. They promise to end “DEI” mandates and hire more white guys. They, too, have begun to view the levers of the state as a way to divert existing capital from enemies to friends.

The economic “experts” say Trump’s proposed tariffs and deportation of illegal immigrants would be diametrically bad for the econonomy; the experts fail to consider that they’ve averaged away a crucial distinction - namely, that between consumers of labor and producers of labor. The blue-state expert class, by and large, benefits from driving down the cost of actual labor. We all work laptop jobs and love to buy cheap goods. The new Republican coalition draws its power from the Rust Belt, which was once the American manufacturing base, until labor overseas got so cheap that American workers couldn’t compete. Economic incentives to onshore manufacturing may very well make goods more expensive. But those goods aren’t more expensive because God said they would be; buyers would be paying the price to feed, house and clothe American workers in American towns, which is significantly more expensive than Vietnamese or Indian labor costs. This could very well suck for people in Seattle who live off DoorDash and Amazon and cheap electronics, but it could be very good for people who live in Scranton and Bethlehem. (Don’t send me economics counter-arguments. I reject the premise that you can infer anything useful about society from an equation with two variables.)

The central unspoken premise of identity politics is scarcity. It is the assertion that the size of the pie is fixed or shrinking. Some identity groups have too much and others too little, and the objective of our politics is zero-sum redistribution. It’s a bleak race to the bottom; it’s sitting on the carcass of a magnificent society and fighting over the scraps. Over the last decade, we witnessed an entire business cycle of left-wing identity politics. It didn’t end well; when you start from scarcity, everyone digs into their positions and is unwilling to give. This iteration of the American left is dying because as demographics shifted, it’s been unable to bring anyone new on board. All the resources overseen by the identity-politics world model were already allocated to progressive NGOs, rotting academic institutions and subsidies to de-risk private investment in new technology. Everything they didn’t account for was hoovered up by private equity.

One of the reasons young men swung so hard for Trump is that the Democrats had nothing to offer them. Faced with shrinking opportunities to join the middle class and build wealth through education, instead of proposing a general solution, the progressives just allocated those opportunities to women. In college, women-specific mentoring opportunities, networking groups and even fellowships have persisted long after women overtook men as the degree-earning gender. Zero corrective efforts have been made. To justify this scheme, the Democratic movement leans on rhetoric from a bygone world, one where women had just entered the workforce and couldn’t open their own credit cards and bank accounts. Anyone looking at the data on today’s gender balance sees a profound mismatch here, and the people who don’t directly benefit are driven away. Why would you expect someone to play against their own side in a zero-sum game?

Trump’s election and his party’s rhetoric suggests the pendulum may swing back for a time. It’s tit-for-tat, back and forth. Your side’s identity politics wins when enough groups feel excluded from the other side’s identity politics. But it’s far from a stable configuration; as we’ve seen, the game changes fast and the demographic alliances change with it. In a democracy like ours, for a political order to be sustained, it needs to rest on a worldview that is stable enough to handle these shifts. It needs to articulate a vision for the future that uplifts everyone.

The simplest way to accomplish this is to reject scarcity outright. The truth is that for the first time in human history, the elimination of most forms of scarcity is within reach. Labor productivity has more than tripled since 1950. People work more, but much of their time is spent jiggling mice on Microsoft Teams, trying to look busy in cubicles, or frittering away time behind the espresso machine. Our economy has shifted to favor weightless exports like software and nonproductive service-industry work that doesn’t benefit anyone beyond the person drinking the $8 latte. These are deliberate choices. The state could bring construction in-house and build tons of apartments for cheap. We could reprioritize domestic manufacturing with an explicit focus on meeting Americans’ material wants and needs. We could subsidize healthy crops and grow enough of them in ways that are good for the soil instead of paying billions of dollars to engineer a second Dust Bowl to make corn syrup.

The chief obstacle to this is that scarcity is the fuel that runs the companies who, in turn, run our economy. As society advances, scarcity has to be found in ever-stranger ways. It’s perverse, but at this point, one of the biggest things our economy produces is scarcity itself.

Let’s look at housing, for instance. In 2024, the stability of the real estate market relies on housing being extremely scarce. Tons of companies, and tons of individual homeowners, are super leveraged on crazy expensive property, and they’ll be fucked if house prices ever become attainable. We are building new housing, but the rate and pricing is constrained in order to maintain that scarcity. The prices are kept artificially high by local governments and their financial backers. There’s no way in hell it costs nearly as much to build houses new as the prices would suggest. Wanna know how I know? Because the developers who build those shitty plastic gentrifier buildings and sell units for $1.2 mil still make a killing. Their ability to enjoy handsome profits at these rents and house prices suggests the existence of tons of surplus value that the government could undercut. In order to solve the issue, we’ll have to turn away from an economics based on scarcity towards a new model of resource allocation more fit for our technological advancement. This is far from a settled question, and it won’t be straightforward to figure it out. But our society will fail to reproduce itself if we don’t try.

In a sense, the Democratic consultants and CNN anchors are correct. Democratic identity politics is dead, but the underlying ideology lives on. Given time, Republican identity politics will likely go through the same cycle. Farming out the work of goverment to unaccountable nonprofits in Berkeley didn’t fix homelessness, and auctioning it off to private corporations won’t be any more effective. Eventually, Republicans will fail to deliver and the same flaky two million people in the same seven states will flip Democratic again, and the cycle of doing nothing will continue. As long as we start from the premise that we cannot grow the pie, our politics is doomed to collapse. But we live in the future now, and the pie can be as big as we want it to be. Anyone serious about winning in the 21st century needs to start from this fact, and build something exciting from there.