Why We Got It So Wrong by David Brooks
Thoughtful words on the insanity of identity politics.
Why We Got It So Wrong
By David Brooks
The New York Times
Published November 14, 2024
Jesse Rieser for The New York Times
Let me ask you a few questions:
If the Democrats nominated a woman to run for president, would you expect her to do better among female voters than the guy who ran in her place four years before?
If the Democrats nominated a Black woman to run for president, would you expect her to do better among Black voters than the white candidate who ran in her place four years before?
If the Republicans nominated a guy who ran on mass deportation and consistently said horrible things about Latino immigrants, would you expect him to do worse among Latino voters over time?
If the Democrats nominated a vibrant Black woman who was the subject of a million brat memes, would you expect her to do better among young voters than the old white guy who ran before her?
If you said yes to any of these questions, as I would have a month ago, you have some major rethinking to do, because all of these expectations were wrong.
In 2024, Kamala Harris did worse among Black voters than Joe Biden did in 2020. She did worse among female voters. She did much worse among Latino voters. She did much worse among young voters.
She did manage to outperform Biden among two groups: affluent people and white voters, especially white men. If there is one sentence that captures the surprising results of this election, it is this one from the sociologist Musa al-Gharbi: “Democrats lost because everyone except for whites moved in the direction of Donald Trump this cycle.”
Going into this campaign, I did not have that one on my bingo card.
Why were so many of our expectations wrong? Well, we all walk around with mental models of reality in our heads. Our mental models help us make sense of the buzzing, blooming confusion of the world. Our mental models help us anticipate what’s about to happen. Our mental models guide us as we make decisions about how to get the results we want.
Many of us are walking around with broken mental models. Many of us go through life with false assumptions about how the world works.
Where did we get our current models? Well, we get models from our experience, our peers, the educational system, the media and popular culture. Over the past few generations, a certain worldview that emphasizes racial, gender and ethnic identity has been prevalent in the circles where highly educated people congregate. This worldview emerged from the wonderful liberation movements that highlighted American life over the past seven decades: the civil rights movement, the women’s liberation movement, the gay rights movement, the trans rights movement.
The crucial assertion of the identitarian mind-set is that all politics and all history can be seen through the lens of liberation movements. Society is divided between the privileged (straight white males) and the marginalized (pretty much everyone else). History and politics are the struggle between oppressors and oppressed groups.
In this model, people are seen as members of a group before they are seen as individuals. When Biden picked his running mate in 2020 and his Supreme Court nominee in 2022, he told us he was going to pick a Black woman before he decided who it was going to be. In both cases her identity grouping came before her individual qualities.
In this model, society is seen as an agglomeration of different communities. Democrats thus produce separate agendas designed to mobilize Black men, women and so on. The goal of Democratic politics is to link all the oppressed and marginalized groups into one majority coalition.
In this model, individual cognition is de-emphasized while collective consciousness is emphasized. Groups are assumed to be relatively homogeneous. People are seen as representatives of their community. Standpoint epistemology reigns. This is the idea that a person’s ideas are primarily shaped not by individual preferences but by the experience of the group. It makes sense to say, “Speaking as a gay Hispanic man …” because a person’s thoughts are assumed to be dispatches from a communal experience.
This identity politics mind-set is psychologically and morally compelling. In an individualistic age, it gives people a sense of membership in a group. It helps them organize their lives around a noble cause, fighting oppression.
But this mind-set has just crashed against the rocks of reality. This model assumes that people are primarily motivated by identity group solidarity. This model assumes that the struggle against oppressive systems and groups is the central subject of politics. This model has no room for what just happened.
It turns out a lot of people don’t behave like ambassadors from this or that group. They think for themselves in unexpected ways.
It turns out that many people don’t see politics and history through the paradigm of liberation movements. They are concerned with all kinds of issues that don’t fit into the good-versus-evil mind-set of oppressor versus oppressed: How do you fix inflation? How can we bring down crime? What should our policy on Ukraine be?
Plenty of people are exhausted by the crude generalizations that are so common today. For example, analysts talk about gender wars and hypermasculine Trump supporters. But in most elections, as in this one, there’s not a vast difference between how men and women vote. The differences within the male and female populations are greater than the differences between these populations.
A lot of the group categories that identity politics rely on don’t make much sense. For example, the category “Hispanic voter” includes people of Mexican descent whose families have been in Texas for 350 years as well as families from Chile who came to New York a decade ago.
The category “people of color” doesn’t make sense, either, as a way to group individuals as a political force. America has been uniquely wretched to Black Americans, practicing structural racism that shows up today, for example, in the horrendous wealth gap between Black and white people. The diverse communities we call Asian and Hispanic Americans came here largely voluntarily. Many of them have been able to prosper and experience educational and income trajectories that are different from those of a community that has suffered hundreds of years of slavery and discrimination.
Even the most solid identity group categories are fluid. As a recent Pew Research Center study found, among people who married in 2022, 32 percent of Asian Americans married outside their ethnic group, as did 30 percent of Hispanics, 23 percent of Black people and 15 percent of white people. In one Pew survey 58 percent of Hispanics also identified as white.
The identity politics mind-set has made it harder to deal with nuts-and-bolts issues like how to address the homelessness crisis or reduce opioid deaths and how to run an institution in which people treat one another decently. Have you noticed that the places most rife with this mind-set (progressive cities and elite universities) have experienced one leadership failure after another?
This is a time when we all should be updating our mental models and making our view of society more complex. And I’m seeing a lot of that around me as people try to learn from what just happened.
But I’m also seeing many people who are still victims of conceptual blindness. They are so imprisoned by their mental models, they can interpret these results only in identity politics terms: Harris lost because America is racist (even though she did virtually the same as Biden did among white voters). Harris lost because America is sexist (even though she underperformed among women). Some people blamed white women for abandoning their Black sisters, as if lack of gender solidarity were the main thing going on here.
Identitarian takes are strewn across the media. The New Yorker ran an analysis piece headlined “How America Embraced Gender War.” Slate ran a piece called “Men Got Exactly What They Wanted.” The Guardian ran a piece called “Our Mistake Was to Think We Lived in a Better Country Than We Do.” If the election didn’t come out the way we wanted, it must be because of their groups’ bigotry against our groups.
As I try to update my own models, a few stray thoughts enter my mind. First, you don’t reduce racial, ethnic and gender bigotry by raising the salience of these categories and by exaggerating the differences between groups. Second, integration is better than separatism. Diverse societies prosper when people in different categories cooperate in respectful ways on a day-to-day basis, not when we divide people into supposedly homogeneous enclaves. Third, assimilation is not a dirty word, as long as it’s voluntary; it’s not a sin to feel that your love for America transcends your love for your ethnic group, and you don’t really love America if you despise half its people. Fourth, most of the world’s problems are caused by stupidity and human limitation, not because there’s some malevolently brilliant group of oppressors keeping everybody else down.
Fifth, seeing groups in all their complexity requires seeing individuals in all their complexity. To see people well, you have to see what makes them unique. You also have to see which groups they belong to. You also have to see their social location — where they fit in the economic, social and status hierarchies. When you’re able to see people at all three levels of reality, you’re beginning to see them holistically.
Finally, we need a social vision that doesn’t rely on zero-sum us/them thinking. During his first term, Trump unleashed a cultural assault based on his version of identity politics. The left responded by doubling down on its identitarian mind-set. We have to do better this time.
In 1959 the British jurist Patrick Devlin made a point that should haunt us: “Without shared ideas on politics, morals and ethics, no society can exist.” He added, “If men and women try to create a society in which there is no fundamental agreement about good and evil, they will fail; if having based it on common agreement, the agreement goes, the society will disintegrate.”
We need a social vision that is as morally compelling as identity politics but does a better job of describing reality. We need a national narrative that points us to some ideal and gives each of us a noble role in pursuing it. That’s the gigantic cultural task that lies ahead.
David Brooks is an Opinion columnist for The Times, writing about political, social and cultural trends. @nytdavidbrooks
