Democrats need to make a decision. They can either continue their decades-long accommodation of billionaires, banks and corporate interests, while deploying Diversity/Equity/Inclusion (DEI) to massage the consciences of liberal America without upsetting the power structure, or embrace an agenda that directly challenges concentrated economic power. But simply condemning the Trump government will not be enough. 

The material needs of working-class Americans continue to be obscured and co-opted by team red and blue. While Republicans and the right address some of these problems, they do so by luring people through bombastic rhetoric and culture-war BS. On the other side, Democrats and liberals police and enforce a DEI, cancel-culture paradigm built by elites that diverts working-class Americans from ever engaging in meaningful connection and change.

DEI draws it’s legitimacy from the civil rights movement but Martin Luther King Jr. was not just concerned with simply diversifying corporate or government offices with a few black or brown faces in places of power. His goal was to redistribute economic power to the masses of people who don’t have it, including white people. In the run up to MLK’s famous “I have a Dream” speech the civil rights leaders discussed their goals. They spent little time discussing the need to train racist white people out of their attitudes. They didn’t talk about their choice of pronouns or how they pined for a black woman as press secretary at the White House. Instead, they talked about the needs of ordinary people who were being denied the opportunity to live decent lives. For example, the full name of the famous 1963 march was the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.”

At the end of his life Dr King railed against American involvement in Vietnam and was organizing a Poor Peoples March on Washington before he was assassinated. I believe that his emphasis on economic justice and the American empire got him killed.

This story rarely gets told because any criticism of DEI gets you labeled as a racist or sexist or transphobe, but that’s unfortunate because Trump is doing liberals and the Democrats a favor in eliminating DEI and taking away their bogus cover story.

Now, instead of carping about Trump’s diabolical “populism” the Democrats have the opportunity to dial up an authentic economic populism and define themselves as the champions of working- and middle-class Americans against the oligarchs. The upcoming political battles with Trump will provide the Democrats a fresh opportunity for a resurrection of a New-Deal populism. Not just the extent of corporate power, but also over the wealth and influence of the 1 percent and oligarch class that will provide them an opportunities to declare a principled opposition to powerful corporations, condemn their lawbreaking, and put forward legislation offering concrete material benefits.

A capitalist country, such as the US, will always have a political party that represents capital, but it becomes problematic when both parties do. We desperately need a labor party in this country and presently the Democrats are not it. Rather than a liberal pejorative, populism is a political approach to thinking about the power big business and oligarchs like Elon Musk hold over our daily lives and finances, and addressing that power through policy and the law to ensure it is dispersed away from corporations and billionaires to workers, consumers, and honest businesses. It’s returning to the roots of a constitutional republic, where the present financial monarchy is to be restrained by the separation of powers and laws our founders envisioned.

It’s like politics for dummies.

Unfortunately, the Democrats are downright allergic to any policies their billionaire benefactors disapprove of, as the treatment by the Biden Administration of it’s amazingly successful anti-trust efforts. In one of the few bright spots, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Justice Department cracked down on corporate mergers and dusted off decades-old anti-trust laws as justification, but Biden and Harris treated this as radioactive. Billionaire Democratic donors Barry Diller and Reid Hoffman provided a clue for this behavior when they instructed presidential nominee Kamala Harris to fire FTC head Lina Khan for her successful efforts at blocking more economic concentration.

As a result of this and decades of such behavior, I believe the Democratic Party is too far gone to change course. It’s human nature, when the magnitude of your error is so huge, there is no way you can have even reach self criticism. They can’t admit they were wrong. Instead, as we saw with the Democrats treatment of Bernie Sanders, the professional/managerial/caste (PMC), who comprise the party, view left-wing populism with revulsion and project DEI as a magic-shield of virtue.

Diversity politics has long been an elite project–a way for major corporations or government offices to whitewash themselves with a few token hires or irrelevant seminars or programs that send the signal to America’s liberals that they’re the good guys. In the wake of de-industrialization and the off-shoring of millions of middle-class jobs the PMC sided with capital, preferring to kick down, while sucking-up to the billionaires it once despised.

In 2020 every Fortune 500 company in America was humping diversity, equity and inclusion, because it was painless. They certainly were not paying their employees more or urging the US government to implement universal paid leave and guaranteed health care. Diversity politics has given them a way to painlessly massage the consciences of liberal America without upsetting the power structure at all. There’s a reason that everyone from corporate CEOs to the leaders of elite school districts were so comfortable embracing Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. Nothing these anti-racist writers said or did actually threatened the power structure in America. Instead, the focus on DEI is classic divide and rule, deployed by the PMC to maintain their status as the political and economic elite.

Leftist intellectuals used to recognize that identity-politics was a cul-de-sac. They properly understood that promoting ethnic chauvinism or racial set asides does little to solve the big problems in any ethnic community let alone the wider country. Today, this seems like something only Marxists and conservatives debate, as liberals have ceded the field to critical theory and DEI fixation.

The 2024 election made it obvious that voters comprehensively rejected this status quo which has been catastrophic for the majority of Americans, going all the way back to NAFTA, but also including Gaza and the proxy-war in Ukraine, and the neocon/Democratic foreign policy establishment that produced it.

Tellingly, the Democrats reject out of hand arguments that Trump’s victory signals a need to reconsider their neoliberal economic policies and continue to insist that redistributive social and economic policies are less meaningful to voters than cultural or racial group identities. For the past decade, neoliberal Democrats have been particularly insufferable in wielding it as a weapon to advance pro-corporate politics, whether it’s Hillary Clinton saying that breaking up the big banks wouldn’t end racism and sexism, or MSNBC anchors and politicians like Barack Obama endlessly complaining about Bernie Sanders being a white man who didn’t talk enough about race and gender.

It’s fitting that the Democrats reliance on DEI and identity politics as their virtuous talisman has backfired, but it sucks for the rest of us. Now that Americans are tired of the hectoring Trump and the DOGE minions have hit on what they think is a winning formula. Whenever they want to eliminate government agencies, fire staffers or allow one of their crony corporations to plunder the commons, they just say they’re fighting “Wokeness” or “DEI.” 

The Democrats and PMC supporters have been “Hoisted by their own petard”.

Update: Lambert at Naked Capitalism lays out the stakes. “I think it’s pretty simple: The Republicans are directly assaulting the economic capital of the Democrat base, the PMC, by taking their jobs away. This is true whether the assault be on NGOs (foreign and domestic), DEI administrators, or government workers, including scientists (with more assaults on teachers to come). In addition, the PMC face the ascendancy, indeed the formidable combination, of two demon figures: Putin and Trump.”