If Trump wins, it’s because he’s called out ‘the last acceptable prejudice’

Identity politics is something usually associated with the left. Vice President Kamala Harris is often mocked by the right-wing commentariat as a “diversity pick”.

Donald Trump’s choice of running mate – a working-class white man from a heartland state – was meant to underline the point, until Harris herself countered by selecting another working-class white man from the heartland. Senator J.D. Vance and Governor Tim Walz spent last week in an amusing “hillbillier-than-thou” spat. “The hillbillies I grew up with didn’t go to Yale,” said Walz of Vance.

A supporter watches as the Republican presidential candidate, former president Donald Trump, speaks in Florida.Credit: AP

American scholar Francis Fukuyama, in his 2018 essay, Identity, traces the origins of identity politics to the mid-20th century evolution of Marxism from a theory in which social relationships are dictated by economic power in a society stratified by class, to a broader theory of inequality in which considerations other than purely economic ones determine relative power. Left-wing politics was no longer just about empowering the working class. Other disempowered groups – women, ethnic minorities, gays and other minorities – came increasingly to be its focus.

What started as an attempt – originating in particular with intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Herbert Marcuse and, later, Michel Foucault – to renovate Marxism, quickly moved into the political mainstream, as the aspirations of groups such as women’s liberation, the civil rights movement, Stonewall and others were embraced by liberal opinion. Identity politics became a liberal cause.

The social change that, in less than half a century, saw greater equality and better life chances for women and minority group members came, though, at an unexpected cost. As the claims of the previously disempowered were increasingly satisfied, working-class people – who were not thought of as members of a minority group – began to feel forgotten, as their traditional champions pursued equality for identity-based groups. As Fukuyama writes: “The problem with the contemporary left is the particular forms of identity that it has increasingly chosen to celebrate. Rather than building solidarity around large collectivities such as the working class or the economically exploited, it has focused on ever smaller groups being marginalised in specific ways.”

As the empowerment of minorities enjoyed ever-greater success, so people from low socio-economic groups, with poorer educations and fewer life chances, came to feel abandoned — not defined by a discrete identity, who spoke up for them in the Babel of minority voices? Meanwhile, they saw their traditional values ridiculed, their lifestyles scorned, their religious faith insulted. As the left celebrated inclusiveness, poorly educated working-class whites were mocked as rubes and rednecks. Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel once described this as “the last acceptable prejudice”.

Trump supporters in Montana on Friday.Credit: AP

And so the narrative of victimhood – one of the main tropes of identity politics – came to be adopted by the right. To quote Fukuyama again: “Trump has played a critical role in moving the focus of identity politics from the left, where it was born, to the right, where it is now taking root ... What is notable ... is how the right has adopted the language and framing of identity from the left: the idea that my particular group is being victimised, that its situation and sufferings are invisible to the rest of society, and that the whole of the social and political structure responsible for this situation [read: the media and political elites] needs to be smashed.”

In his recent memoir, Chasing Hope, the celebrated New York Times columnist, Nick Kristof – a paladin of the liberal establishment – recounts visiting the poor rural community in Oregon where he grew up, and reflects on the conceit of the liberal elite: “Just as it’s reprehensible for conservative Christians to stereotype gay people, it’s wrong of liberals to stereotype or mock people of faith ... Even before Trump, many rural people felt neglected and condescended to. They were poor, but what they wanted most of all wasn’t a redistribution of wealth but a redistribution of respect. They didn’t see why elite lawyers, investment bankers, professors and senators – or New York Times columnists, for that matter – should be looked up to, while farmers, truck drivers and factory workers who actually did tangible and important work should occupy a lower social tier.”

These are Trump’s people. As the Democrats abandoned the working class, the MAGA Republicans embraced it. The language of the Trump campaign is the self-same voice of protest as that of the old left – a cry not just for equality, but for respect.

It shows how far the Republican Party has moved from being the party of Wall Street that at its convention last month, for the first time, it gave a keynote speaking slot to the president of the Teamsters Union.

Disrespected and scorned by coastal elites now dominated by members of yesterday’s marginalised minorities, who have in many cases overtaken them in wealth and influence, the new Republican coalition is based on people who feel that they are the new disempowered. As they defend a shrinking political and cultural space, they have adopted the attitudes of identity politics: grievance, defensive self-consciousness, victimhood.

Trump is their champion because he poses as the victim-in-chief. The more his enemies throw at him, the better that pose works. Mithridates-like, every hostile occasion makes him stronger. Vance, introducing Trump at a rally a fortnight ago, said: “They couldn’t beat him politically so they tried to bankrupt him; they failed at that so they tried to impeach him; they failed at that so they tried to put him in prison; they even tried to kill him.”

The narrative is absurd. But the metaphor is perfect.

George Brandis is a former high commissioner to the UK, and a former Liberal senator and federal attorney-general. He is now a professor at ANU.