Democrats Embrace White Identity Politics

Plus, teachers unions try to torpedo Shapiro; press bias boosts Harris; Trump meets Netanyahu

A “White Dudes for Harris” Zoom event is scheduled for Monday, following a “white women” event that happened Thursday and raised a reported $8.5 million. 

Reason’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown listened in on the white women event and found it concerning:

There’s nothing wrong with organizing folks who share certain affinities in order to discuss and act on political goals. But convening a group as broad as white women based solely on the basis that they are white women feels like losing the plot. It assumes white women by and large are more similar than they are different, just by virtue of being white and women. It is collectivist to its core. It laughs in the face of individuality.

There’s an element of ends-justify-the means here. Some people find it okay to organize white affinity groups if the goal is organizing and raising money to elect a woman presidential candidate of black and south Asian background, but the same people would find “White Dudes for Trump-Vance,” or “White Dudes Against Affirmative Action and Against Gun Control, but for Stricter Abortion Laws,” repugnant.

To me, it’s ideologically revealing. Some people think the Republicans are the racist party. Yet the Democrats are so habituated, from the diversity-equity-and-inclusion ideology, to identifying everyone as part of a racial category that in some ways the Democrats are more deeply committed to racial and even gender identity than the Republicans are. President Biden, on Tuesday night, recapping his accomplishments as president while explaining his decision to drop out of the reelection race, said, “I kept my commitment to appoint the first Black woman to the Supreme Court of the United States of America.” He didn’t mention anything else about Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson other than her race and gender.

That approach is wearing thin even at Harvard, and even among black women. Here is Harvard professor Danielle Allen, in an interview with the university’s central-administration-published publication the Harvard Gazette:

Harris would be the first Black woman to be a party nominee for president, and the first with Jamaican and South Asian immigrant parents. She also has a chance to be the first woman president. How do you see these biographical facts affecting the race?

I think it’s time for us to stop counting firsts. We’re at the point in the life of this country where everybody’s going to be a first in some kind of way on some kind of dimension, and it’s time to really focus on the question of the person’s vision and what are they going to bring to the table to deliver on that vision? And that’s where we should put the focus of our analysis and our attention. That’s what people generally want. I think we are struggling to break out of a world where we start by analyzing everything in identity boxes. I think a lot of people are tired of that and are ready to break out of it.

It’s not clear how formally the Harris campaign is pushing these “white women” and “white dudes” groups, though they are certainly accepting the money that is raised and providing senior campaign surrogates as speakers for the events. 

Anyway, “white” is embraced as an identity these days mainly by two extremes. Far-right racists see immigrants as diluting American culture. And left-leaning “progressives,” with their talk of racial privilege, their focus on the lasting effects of slavery, and their defense of race-conscious policies from reparations to racial preferences in college admissions, wind up as almost the mirror image of the far-right in their racial determinism and racial essentialism. If you are a white person looking to whiteness as a source of community or belonging or meaning or purpose, it could be a sign that that sense of community or belonging or meaning or purpose is absent elsewhere.

Biden also said in his Tuesday night speech, “America is going to have to choose between moving forward or backward, between hope and hate, between unity and division.” It’s not exactly clear that “White Dudes for Harris” falls in the “unity” basket.

Teacher unions aim at Shapiro: A letter to Vice President Harris from “public education advocacy organizations”—many with backing from public employee unions—is asking Harris not to pick the governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, as her running mate. 

Shapiro “has supported education policies mirroring Project 2025,” the letter says, invoking a Heritage Foundation policy blueprint that even Trump has denounced as extreme. 

“This playbook has been pushed by Betsy DeVos’ American Federation for Children, the Kochs, the Heritage Foundation, and a wide range of well-funded billionaires who do not have the interests of our children or a multi-racial, thriving democracy at heart,” the letter says. 

“We urge you to select a nominee for Vice President who unabashedly supports and defends public education. For example, nominees such as Governors Roy Cooper (North Carolina), Andy Beshear (Kentucky), and Tim Walz (Minnesota) have been vocal champions for public education in their states,” the letter says. “We find it incumbent upon us to note that Governor Josh Shapiro (Pennsylvania) has not, and instead has supported voucher schemes pushed by well-funded billionaires from Pennsylvania like Jeffrey Yass.”

By picking Shapiro, Harris could send a message that she’s not captive to the teacher unions or to the anti-Israel interest groups that also oppose him. By avoiding Shapiro, she could avoid picking a fight with those activists.

Al Gore faced a similar situation when he picked school-choice supporter Senator Joseph Lieberman as his running mate in 2000. 

Press bias: Sometimes the media bias is so blatant it’s funny.

That was my reaction to the Sunday New York Times headline “A Global Reputation for a Steely Resolve and Deft Diplomacy,” over a news article reporting that “the consensus among foreign officials and diplomats is that Ms. Harris has a firm grip on international affairs.”

This is funny on so many levels. 

If Harris is such a “deft” diplomat, why is the world such a mess, with the Middle East aflame, Ukraine at war with Russia, and migrants flowing over the U.S.-Mexico border and into American cities?

If foreign officials and diplomats thought Harris was a blunderbuss, would they candidly say so to the New York Times, and risk poisoning their relations with someone who might be the next president of the United States?

And isn’t the true test of the foreign-policy deftness of an American political leaders not what the “foreign officials and diplomats” think of her, but what the American people who elected her think of her? After all, her job isn’t mainly to make the other countries happy, it’s to advance American interests. Sometimes those two things overlap, but they don’t always. It reminds me of the story about Gerge Shultz inviting to his office foreign service officers about to be posted overseas. Shultz would ask the diplomats to point to their country on a globe. When the diplomats picked out a nation in Europe or Asia or Africa where the U.S. embassy they were to be assigned to was situated, Shultz would correct them by pointing to America and telling them that’s their country.

The lead Times reporter on the article, Brussels bureau chief Matina Stevis-Gridneff, “was born and raised in Athens, Greece,” and attended Oxford and the London School of Economics, according to her New York Times bio. The Times article also carries the byline of Zolan Kanno-Youngs and says, “Reporting was contributed by Adam Satariano from London; Anton Troianovski and Christopher F. Schuetze from Berlin; Patrick Kingsley and Adam Rasgon from Jerusalem; Choe Sang-Hun from Seoul; John Eligon from Johannesburg; Michael D. Shear and Erica L. Green from Washington; Jody García from Guatemala City; Emiliano Rodríguez Mega from Mexico City; Camille Elemia from Manila; and Alexandra Stevenson from Hong Kong.” 

It’s a good example of how a newspaper can have 15 reporters work on a story from bureaus around the world, but without editors to add some skill, sense, skepticism and perspective, all those reportorial resources don’t really add much value for readers.

It’s not clear what the motive is. It could be just the incompetence of large institutions like the Times, or an effort by the journalists to ingratiate themselves with the incoming Biden administration, or to get back in the good graces of left-leaning subscribers who fault the Times for being too harsh on the aging Biden, or general ideological alignment between the Times journalists and the U.S. and foreign diplomatic crowd. Whatever the motive, though, it damages whatever is left of the Times’s reputation for deft editing and steely independence. 

Trump meets Netanyahu: After a great speech by Prime Minister Netanyahu to Congress, the next few days in the U.S. for Netanyahu were rougher. First Vice President Harris publicly berated him for “dead children” and “desperate hungry people fleeing for safety” in Gaza. 

Then Netanyahu showed up in Florida Friday to meet with Trump, and Trump announced that had Trump been elected in 2020, “one week after the election, we could have had a deal with Iran.” What that “deal” would have meant for Israel, and how it would have been enforced, was unexplained, but it’d be worth exploring.

Netanyahu sat there while Trump called Harris “a destroyer” and Trump said, “I actually don’t know how a person who is Jewish can vote for her.” That’s awkward, given that Harris could wind up as the president, and Netanyahu could have to deal with her. “We have incompetent people running the country,” Trump said, with Netanyahu sitting there like a stage prop for a Trump campaign event. Harris did a somewhat similar thing to Netanyahu a few months ago by meeting with Netanyahu’s political rival Benny Gantz, but the whole scene sure doesn’t bode well for future relations between a President Harris and Prime Minister Netanyahu. Perhaps Netanyahu is betting on a Trump win, or perhaps he didn’t know what Trump was going to say when the television cameras came in. Either way, Trump seemed not so concerned about making trouble for a Harris-Netanyahu relationship. 

I guess from Trump’s point of view, his job is to get himself elected, not to ease relations between a President Harris and a Prime Minister Netanyahu. 

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