Cam Tierney – Cam Tierney

American slavery was as evil as it gets on the planet, and the ugliness and violence of white supremacy carried forth from there, through the Jim Crow laws and the lynchings, the bombings and the beatings and the segregation in all its forms. It is absolutely true that America has never properly reckoned with this despicable legacy. To the extent that they are finally initiating such a process, the George Floyd protests bring welcome progress.

It is also true that systemic racism is very much alive in America today. This seems most apparent not just in certain cop shootings but maybe even more so in the criminal justice system, in the mind-boggling numbers of young, black men railroaded into American prisons. To the extent that they are pushing for reform of these corrosive systems, again, the protests are necessary and good.

That said, it would be a mistake to assume or imply, as the protests surely do, that systemic racism is the biggest problem, or even the biggest injustice, facing America in 2020.

Our biggest problem, and our biggest injustice, for blacks and whites alike, is economic inequality. This might be considered an inconvenient truth in our current moment. But it is the truth.

My point here is not to downplay the reality or significance of racism. It’s real and it deeply impacts the lives of black people. It’s just that income inequality has become so massive that it surpasses even race (again no small feat) as an oppressive force in America today.

On June 19 the New York Times published an opinion piece outlining the gaps between white and black people in a range of categories: median income; home ownership; life expectancy; prison time; and unemployment.

Of course there were significant gaps between white and black across all categories. But what happens when we compare these race gaps with the gaps generated by wealth disparity?

Honestly? The race gap seems almost quaint by comparison.

Does the New York Times expect us to be shocked and outraged that the average white person lives 3.5 more years (78.8 to 75.3) than the average black person?

Do they know what the gap in life expectancy is between the richest people in our society and the poorest?

How about 10 to 15 years.

The life expectancy gap between the races is less than the gap between women and men, which runs closer to six years, favoring women of course.

It is also less than the gap between all Americans and residents of many comparable developed nations. To be an American in the first place, black or white, may sometimes be more hazardous to your health than being black as opposed to white within our borders.

But, come on, what about prison? That’s all about race, right?

According to the Times, black people are six times more likely to be sentenced to prison. Definitely a problem there.

But not as big a problem as we see with the wealth disparity, where males born into families in the bottom 10 percent on the economic scale are 20 times more likely to go to jail than their counterparts from families in the richest 10 percent.

As Vox Media put it: “Want to stay out of prison? Choose rich parents.”

Note, they didn’t say, “Choose white parents.” That would assume that race matters more than class.

And the evidence simply does not support that.

Same goes for college graduation rates. White people are not quite 1.5 times more likely to complete four years of college than black people (36 percent to 26 percent). Wealthy people are eight times more likely to graduate than the poor.

And while there’s a three point gap between the races in unemployment (3.5 percent for whites; 6.5 percent for blacks), a report in 2019 found that unemployment rates for the poorest American families (those earning less than $20,000 per year) exceeded 21 percent, near Great Depression levels, as opposed to a negligible 3.2 percent for wealthy families.

And this was prior to the global pandemic, which may very well push the gap between rich and poor even higher.

(No need to run through median income and home ownership, as these categories pretty much speak for themselves.)

Again, the point is not to deny the presence and power of racism in America. It’s just to say that wealth inequality has risen to such obscene levels that it is now a more reliable predictor of life outcomes than race.

One could make the argument that the biggest problem for black people is that they are disproportionately poor, or certainly less than wealthy. Now of course one could argue in return that black people are disproportionately poor due to systemic racism. No doubt race and wealth work together. Inequality is complex. But it undeniably has powerful limiting effects on both whites and blacks, regardless of how the mechanisms at work may differ in each case.

Either way, if we’re looking for solutions, I can think of about a thousand ideas more promising than “defund the police.”

How many black lives would universal access to health care save each year? Tens of thousands.

How about drug legalization, or at the very least decriminalization, as a way to decrease black imprisonment? Why is nobody talking about that?

The protesters seem to be on to the idea of investing in the inner cities, but why are they so stuck on paying for it by defunding the police? How about defunding the plutocracy by raising taxes on the uber rich? That’s where the money is, folks.

Free college. Job programs. Social services. There is so much to think and talk about, so many things we can do. In order to be truly effective, however, we have to open up the conversation to make room for the fact that racism is not the only factor. Economic inequality is a massive part of the problem, and addressing it is an utterly necessary part of the solution.

And here’s the good news: you could get there much faster by uniting blacks and non-wealthy whites rather than pitting them against one another.

As much as the past and the present, the right and now the left, would conspire to drive wedges between the races, the crucial reality is that their fates are wholly intertwined.

There is no doubt that the weight of history bears heavily on these protests. Perhaps one could argue that it is irrelevant what the ultimate source of our problem is today. We need to atone for the past.

Again, do we need to reckon with our history on race? Yes we do. Tearing down Confederate statues is a beautiful start.

Do we need to completely rethink and reform policing and criminal justice? Absolutely.

But there is an opportunity cost to focusing on race at the expense of all else.

If you really want to improve the lives of black people, it could be a mistake to let justified rage, built up over centuries, distort the central fact that, in this important moment, black people have a lot more in common with their fellow non-wealthy Americans, yes even the white ones, than this movement as yet seems willing or able to acknowledge.

There’s no shame in losing a presidential primary run. Many fine people have. But the way Elizabeth Warren lost hers, the steep descent from high expectations and one-time near frontrunner status to the complete wreckage of Super Tuesday, was jarring.

How did Warren fall so far so fast? It’s a compelling question, and one that supporters and pundits alike are struggling to make sense of.

Understandably, the feminist left has strong feelings, with a deluge of pieces in the New York Times and elsewhere viewing Warren’s withdrawal strictly through the “sexist/misogynist” lens.

Of course sexism is in the mix when it comes to presidential politics. It’s a worthy topic for discussion.

But as an overarching explanatory device for why Warren ultimately failed? Nonsense.

Warren’s own campaign staffers seem to understand this. As Politico reported, most of the Warren advisors and allies they spoke with acknowledged that “sexism doesn’t capture the entire story.”

Okay, getting warmer. More from Politico: “Some [Warren staffers] argued [sexism] is just a distraction to paper over missteps.”

Uh-huh.

“Warren was the Democratic frontrunner for weeks in the fall, they noted, and victory slipped through their grasp.”

Now we’re getting somewhere.

So, what, exactly, was the problem?

If you really want to understand why Warren failed in 2020, you have to start with this: she didn’t run in 2016.

Despite considerable clamoring for her to run as the progressive foil to the more centrist Hillary, Warren took a pass. Quite likely this was part of the larger attempt to clear the path for Clinton in 2016, with Warren being deferential, not wanting to step on the toes of the presumptive first female president.

(One wonders, if the 2016 Democratic frontrunner had been a man, would Warren have run? It’s an interesting question. If the answer is yes, then hyper gender-awareness may have been her original sin.)

Either way, of course, Bernie Sanders seized the moment and filled the void on the left. In so doing, he firmly established himself as the leader of the progressive wing of the party, generating a pre-existing political condition that would cause headaches galore for the 2020 Warren campaign.

As Warren commented after dropping out, “I was told at the beginning of this whole undertaking that there are two lanes, a progressive lane that Bernie Sanders is the incumbent for and a moderate lane that Joe Biden is the incumbent for and there is no room for anyone else in this. I thought it was possible that that wasn’t the case, that there was more room, and more room to run another kind of campaign. But evidently that wasn’t the case.”

Correct. In fact, the collapse of the 2020 Warren campaign might be viewed as a series of errors they were forced into by their increasingly frantic attempt to somehow reshuffle the deck, to distinguish themselves from the stubbornly intractable Bernie machine assembled in 2016 while Warren sat and watched.

Many have cited Warren’s healthcare plan rollout in November of 2019 as a misstep that robbed her of early momentum. Here she seemed to try and split the difference between the medicare-for-all purists on the left and public option proponents in the center. In practice, she only seemed to alienate voters in both camps.

While she did take a dip in the polls at this point after previously emerging as a frontrunner, Warren remained very much in the hunt alongside Bernie, Biden, and possibly Buttigieg through December and into the new year. Still, her campaign grew increasingly frustrated by their inability to overtake Sanders in the progressive lane. While they were in line for a respectable showing, the path to the nomination appeared in jeopardy.

With Iowa and New Hampshire looming, and with the growing realization that she could not overtake Bernie on the basis of her progressive economic agenda alone, Warren turned in near-desperation to the one remaining thing that distinguished her most sharply from the competition: her gender.

In a series of moves throughout January and February, she lurched in the direction of identity politics. In a mid-January debate, she claimed that Sanders once told her in a private meeting that a woman could not win the presidency. This was followed by a hot mic confrontation after the debate in which Warren refused to shake her rival’s hand.

Regardless of whether her accusation was true, it did not achieve the desired effect. Quite the contrary, Warren immediately dipped in New Hampshire polls. After regaining some momentum in subsequent weeks, she nevertheless continued to play identity politics. At the end of January she doubled down on a previous suggestion that a nine year-old transgender child should interview and approve any prospective nominee for Secretary of Education.

Mark this down as the point where the 2020 Warren campaign officially jumped the shark.

By early February, Pete Buttigieg, a gay man who, like Barack Obama previously, had eschewed the path of highlighting identity difference, was now surging in New Hampshire while Warren sputtered.

Black voters in South Carolina appeared particularly unimpressed with Warren’s shift towards the woke left. In December the Massachusetts Senator had been at 19% in polls there. By February she was in single digits, which is right where she wound up.

Later in the month, still hopeful of making a comeback splash on Super Tuesday, Warren attempted yet another identity-fueled grand gesture with her spectacular attack on Michael Bloomberg in a February 20 debate. While this may well have succeeded in effectively ending Bloomberg’s campaign, it did nothing to help Warren’s.

It may be hard for Warren’s feminist supporters to wrap their minds around this, but hectoring the man for using the phrases “fat broads” and “horse-faced lesbians” over thirty years ago won her no new converts.

As they did throughout the primary season with virtually every candidate who went there, rank and file Democratic voters rejected identity politics, never more decisively as they did with Warren.

And here it is important to clarify: this rejection of identity politics is not itself a mark of sexism. It is, in fact, a justified and predictable response to a tactic that is essentially divisive and hostile towards large chunks of the electorate.

As David Brooks noted on PBS, Warren did not have a gender gap problem. She had an education gap problem. In the end, she was unable to extend her appeal beyond a relatively small group of highly educated predominantly white voters. Though her gender-based attacks may have appealed to these woke left elites, they alienated pretty much every other segment of the electorate, steadily whittling down her base rather than extending it as any winning politician must do.

To the extent that the feminist left wants to lash out at the sexist injustice of it all, let’s keep in mind who they are lashing out at: Democratic voters, working class people, many of them women, black, and Hispanic. These are the people who turned away from Liz Warren.

Should we now have a bunch of highly educated and economically privileged white people lecturing these folks on how sexist and misogynist they are? How ignorant and, yes, maybe even deplorable?

Not a good look.

Here’s an alternate suggestion: take a page from the Obama/Buttigieg playbook. Instead of emphasizing your differences and your victimhood (what else can we call it?), set your identity aside. Reach across the divide. Yes there is sexism out there. But it’s not as entrenched and decisive as you think. People are essentially good. (Even working class white males.) Believe it. Appeal to it. There are connections to be made.

Each time Elizabeth Warren prioritized gender politics over her fundamentally unifying progressive economic message, she moved further away from making that connection.

Admittedly, the bar is higher for women. This is unfair. It may take a female candidate with Obama-esque charisma and personal appeal to eventually break the presidential glass ceiling.

But it will also take one with his ability to resist the fool’s gold of identity politics in order to build a winning coalition.