Protesters gathering near the White House in June 2020, as considerations of race, gender and sexual orientation became urgent and unavoidable.
Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

In Shift From 2020, Identity Politics Loses Its Grip on the Country

There are signs that society is moving away from the progressive left’s often strict expectations about how to discuss culture and politics.

by · NY Times

The last time Kamala Harris ran for president, during the 2020 primaries, people were losing jobs or friends because something they said or posted online came off as insensitive.

An unfamiliar new language around identity was catching on, with terms like “Latinx” and “BIPOC.” The homeless were now “unhoused” and there were “pregnant people,” not women.

Back then, as the progressive movement tried to establish itself as a bulwark to the Trump White House, considerations of race, gender and sexual orientation became urgent and unavoidable. And some progressives tried to enforce a strict set of cultural and political expectations almost everywhere — inside classrooms and board rooms, movie studios and publishing houses, congressional offices and political campaigns.

Even Oprah came under attack, when angry fans accused her of supporting cultural appropriation when she promoted a white author’s novel about a Mexican family.

If some Americans thought the left’s code of conduct went too far, most were not willing to say so. Polls taken in 2020 showed that large majorities of people — including self-described Democrats and liberals — said that they did not always speak freely about their beliefs for fear of retaliation.

Today, in this presidential election between Vice President Harris and former President Donald J. Trump, politics still burns hot, and voters are just as deeply divided.

But the country is also in a starkly different place from four years ago. Case in point: Ms. Harris is boasting about protecting her home with a Glock, proclaiming her patriotism and campaigning with Republicans like Liz Cheney.

Yascha Mounk, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, is the author of “The Identity Trap,” which traced how academic theories about the shared injustices of certain identity groups spread to mainstream organizations.

Today, he said of progressives, “The brief era of their unquestioned dominance is now coming to an end.”

It’s not that Americans have become more accepting of or inured to discrimination. Polling has consistently found that a majority of the country believes racism remains a problem. Black, Latino and Asian people say it is a bigger concern than white people do. And the country is still fighting over how to address discrimination based on gender, race and education.

What seems to have shifted, according to scholars and political strategists who have closely watched how public views have evolved, is that people are now acknowledging that certain identity-focused progressive solutions to injustice were never broadly popular.

It is striking that this shift continues, seemingly unabated, as the country heads into another presidential election in which Mr. Trump has invoked racial stereotypes and stoked prejudice, falsely accusing Haitian immigrants of eating house pets and hosting a comedian at Madison Square Garden this week who disparaged Puerto Ricans, Mexicans and Black people.

The Harris campaign has tried to make sure voters remember that. But Mr. Trump is using identity politics in his own way, hoping to reach swing voters, including Black and Latino men, with an issue that progressive groups elevated during the 2020 primaries: transgender medicine. Mr. Trump and his allies have spent tens of millions of dollars on ads pointing out that Ms. Harris in 2019 pledged to progressive activists that she would make gender affirming care, including surgery, available to prisoners and undocumented immigrants in federal custody.

Mr. Trump’s attacks on the Democratic Party as captive to radicals and activists are not likely to mean much to many liberals. But some of the most effective pushback to the hard left has, in fact, come from within institutions sympathetic to progressive impulses.

In academia, many top universities no longer mandate diversity statements for job applicants. Some schools have rebuked student activists for heckling visiting speakers and suspended them for disrupting events. And to the consternation of free-speech supporters, they have cracked down on pro-Palestinian activists who have pitched tents in campus quads and taken over academic buildings.

In Hollywood, attempts at inclusive casting did not always attract audiences, who seemed uninterested in some rebooted movie franchises or TV classics, like the all-female “The Marvels” or “The Wonder Years” with a Black family.

Publishers, too, have sometimes pulled back. In Britain, an uproar followed the editing of Roald Dahl’s children’s novels, which included replacing the word “fat” with “enormous” and renaming the villainous “cloud men” from “James and the Giant Peach” as gender-neutral “cloud people.” Dahl’s American publisher announced last year that it had declined to make similar revisions.

Attempts to integrate academic terminology into the vernacular have also not caught on. For instance, when the Pew Research Center asked Latinos in 2020 if they used the gender-neutral term “Latinx,” 3 percent said yes. When Pew asked the same question this year, it was 4 percent.

In the 2020 presidential election, most Democrats running in the primaries, including Ms. Harris, tried to appeal to the progressive left that Senator Bernie Sanders had energized in 2016 — a premise that President Biden knocked down by defeating them for the nomination.

“By the middle of the 2020 primary, Democrats were engaged in policy debates that no voters asked for — and that had no enduring constituency,” said Lis Smith, a senior adviser to Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign, which targeted voters closer to the center-left of the party.

The primary debates featured candidates declaring support for slashing law enforcement funding, repealing laws that made unauthorized border crossings illegal and ending private health insurance.

Since then, candidates who aligned themselves with progressive activists have fared poorly in many high-profile races, even in deep blue bastions.

In 2021, Seattle voters elected a Republican as city attorney after a violent outbreak of protests downtown. This year in Portland, Ore., a former Republican defeated the incumbent district attorney, a Democrat, who had praised a law decriminalizing the possession of small amounts of drugs.

In congressional races, discontent with progressive candidates was evident even before the defeats this summer of Representatives Jamaal Bowman of New York and Cori Bush of Missouri — two members of “the squad,” whose victories in 2020 seemed to signal the ascendence of progressive politics.

In Oregon, the left’s favorite to win in the Fifth District, Jamie McLeod-Skinner, was handily defeated this spring by the party establishment’s candidate; in the Third District, an endorsement from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was not enough for Susheela Jayapal, the sister of Pramila Jayapal, a squad ally and chair of the Progressive Caucus.

“The whole party is being shadowed by what happened in 2020, and now it’s trying to outrun that shadow,” said Rahm Emanuel, a former senior adviser to Presidents Clinton and Barack Obama. Many in his party, he said, incorrectly assumed that most voters were sympathetic to slogans like “defund the police,” despite rising crime rates and polling that showed only 15 percent of Americans overall and 22 percent of Black Americans supported abolishing police departments in 2020, according to Gallup.

After President Biden ceded the Democratic nomination to Ms. Harris in July, it was an open question how she would address her 2019 campaign.

Her answer came soon enough: The candidate who had to fend off charges from the left that she enforced regressive and overly punitive policies as a prosecutor — “Kamala is a cop,” was one meme attack — was now discussing protecting her home with a Glock and reminding voters of the drug dealers she put in prison.

On the sensitive and divisive issue of gender identity, Ms. Harris’s change in tone is especially telling. In 2019, she introduced herself at a CNN town hall by saying, “My pronouns are she, her and hers.”

Today, she changes the topic when asked whether she would honor her pledge to guarantee that detained immigrants, prisoners and anyone else under the government’s care can access gender affirming surgery.

“I think we should follow the law,” she said in a recent interview with NBC News, moving on quickly to other health care concerns like the cost of insulin.

At the same time, Ms. Harris has not explicitly acknowledged any distance from the party’s left flank. And many leaders of the progressive movement, including Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, have used their influence to try to rally progressive voters to support Harris.

That speaks to the danger that Democrats see in Mr. Trump’s candidacy — and the need to scrap for every last vote. But there is also little doubt that many institutions today have adopted a more progressive culture. They acknowledge bias and power imbalances between people of different genders and races. Despite efforts to roll back D.E.I. programs, few businesses or schools would doubt the importance of recruiting people from different backgrounds. A range of progressive causes — climate change reduction, workplace protections and higher taxes on the wealthiest Americans — remain popular.

The question for those in the progressive wing of the party is whether they continue to pursue some of their more polarizing ideas about identity. “Even as these ideas start to be debated more openly, and some of their worst excesses are being rolled back, they continue to gain more influence in many contexts,” said Mr. Mounk, the scholar of identity politics.

Whether Ms. Harris wins or loses next week, few expect full capitulation or retreat.

“It’s clear now that they have failed to take over the Democratic Party,” said Mark Mellman, a Democratic strategist who is also president of the Democratic Majority for Israel, which has challenged and defeated progressive candidates like Mr. Bowman and Ms. Bush.

“They thought this was going to be a much quicker process,” he added. “But I think they’re in it for the long term. The battle is going to continue.”

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