title:  Two VERY Different Visions For The Future Of The Democratic Party Are Battling It Out
text: Following a traumatic Election Night and Donald Trump s unexpected win (of the electoral college), Democrats have been scrambling to figure out what went wrong. Beyond finding out where polling malfunctioned, liberals are struggling to understand what has happened within the party and how to go about fixing it. But as usual, there are some very different ideas about where the problem lies and how to remedy the situation   even when it comes to diversity.Two very different visions for the future of the Democratic PartyAccording to Mark Lilla of the New York Times, we need to quit focusing on our individual identities if we hope to save the Democratic party. In his piece The End of Identity Liberalism, he writes that we have been taught to celebrate  our differences. However, he argues that  this is a splendid principle of moral pedagogy   but disastrous as a foundation for democratic politics in our ideological age. In recent years American liberalism has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing. Our focus on teaching diversity in schools, Lilla said,  has produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups, and indifferent to the task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life. Lilla said that Hillary Clinton s great mistake was appealing to each individual group, which left out the white working class. National politics in healthy periods is not about  difference,  it is about commonality. And it will be dominated by whoever best captures Americans  imaginations about our shared destiny. He rejected the  whitelash  theory but also failed to acknowledge the blatant racism of Trump s campaign. He writes,  the whitelash thesis is convenient because it absolves liberals of not recognizing how their own obsession with diversity has encouraged white, rural, religious Americans to think of themselves as a disadvantaged group whose identity is being threatened or ignored. However, Lilla said nothing about the racism, anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia that was the basis of Trump s campaign. Trump used the racial tensions that resulted from having a black man in the white house and stoked the fires of bigotry. From the first day Trump announced that he was running for president, he used xenophobia to rally white America behind him. He was endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan and has now installed a white nationalist as his chief strategist.Trump never, at any point, offered a real plan for  making America great again  other than to promise that he would make life hell for anybody who isn t a straight white Christian male. But bigotry was enough to rally white America behind him.Lilla then warned that  Liberals should bear in mind that the first identity movement in American politics was the Ku Klux Klan, which still exists. Those who play the identity game should be prepared to lose it.  He concludes that  we need a post-identity liberalism,  and argued that taking on the concerns of specific minorities can be risky.We need a post-identity liberalism, and it should draw from the past successes of pre-identity liberalism. Such a liberalism would concentrate on widening its base by appealing to Americans as Americans and emphasizing the issues that affect a vast majority of them. It would speak to the nation as a nation of citizens who are in this together and must help one another. As for narrower issues that are highly charged symbolically and can drive potential allies away, especially those touching on sexuality and religion, such a liberalism would work quietly, sensitively and with a proper sense of scale. (To paraphrase Bernie Sanders, America is sick and tired of hearing about liberals  damn bathrooms.)Steve Phillips at the Nation has a radically different solution to what he feels is the problem facing progressives, as he wrote in his article, It s Time to Diversify the Democratic Party Leadership. And this picture says it all:Phillips explains that  nearly the entire top level of progressive leadership that controlled $1.5 billion in spending was made up of white people.   All of the individuals in the above table are good people, but none of them are from the hood. They don t hang out in black barbershops and beauty salons. They don t feel their hearts race when they see a police car s lights shining in their rear view mirror. They don t have family facing deportation to Mexico. They ve never been told to  go back to where you came from,  called a racial slur, or told to speak English. They ve never been detained at an airport because they look suspicious. They haven t lived the experiences of the people who comprise almost half of all Democratic voters.To win elections in an increasingly multiracial nation requires leadership and top staff who come from, understand, and are committed to the rapidly growing communities of color that are transforming the composition of the country. Whereas Lilla says we need to move away from identity, Phillips argues that now is the time, more than ever, to embrace our diversity at the top level of the Democratic party s leadership.  As last week s election revealed, the foundation of the Democratic home is structurally unsound. The time is now to focus on and fix the problem, and the first step in that direction is putting in place party leadership who understand how to build power and win elections in a racially combustible environment,  Phillips concluded.I tend to think it is a mixture of both these philosophies. Without a doubt, we need more diversity at the top. Even though Lilla got so much wrong, he was right in that we must find the common threads that unite us all as Americans. Yet, it is impossible to do that without acknowledging individuality and cultural diversity. To do that, we must do exactly as Phillips said and make sure the leadership of our party reflects the ever more diverse makeup of the country.Featured image via insurestory.com