of governance, but so too have America’s working and middle classes. Since the mid-1950s, the share of the American workforce that is unionized has declined from a high of more than 30 percent to fewer than 10 percent today.6 The decline of the union movement has contributed to a massive upward redistribution of wealth since the late 1970s. In 1965, the average CEO earned forty times as much as the average worker; today, that number is more than 300 times as much. Since 1980, wages for the top 1 percent of wage earners have risen ten times faster than those of the bottom 90 percent of workers. Today, the top 5 percent of households possess nearly 75 percent of the nation’s wealth, while the bottom 60 percent of American households have actually lost wealth over the past few decades. And the atrophy of the public sector—wrought by privatization schemes and tax breaks for the nation’s wealthiest citizens and corporations—has not only contributed to the decay of America’s infrastructure, but state budget cuts to public higher education have likewise resulted in soaring college tuition costs.7
All of this is to say that there really was an outsider candidate in 2016 who ran on a platform aimed at addressing the problems impacting working people in the United States, and his name was Bernie Sanders.
The pain inflicted on the nation’s working and middle classes notwithstanding, I had presumed that a quarter-century of bipartisan commitment to neoliberalism’s central doctrines ensured that a presidential campaign that sought to reinfuse New Deal liberalism into US politics would be crushed by corporate media and Democratic elites before it even got off the ground. So when Sanders announced his 2016 presidential campaign, I could never have imagined he would ultimately win twenty-three of fifty-seven Democratic primary contests. Even if the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC’s) decision to stack the deck of primary races in favor of Hillary Clinton was cause for outrage, the fact that Sanders’s platform resonated with 43 percent of Democratic primary voters was cause for optimism about the prospects for a progressive political agenda capable of pushing back against the neoliberal assault on working people.
But if the strength of Sanders’s primary challenge gave reason to believe that neoliberalism’s grip on the electorate’s political imagination had weakened, the Democratic and identitarian-left backlash to Sanders and his supporters revealed a deeply rooted reactionary tendency in contemporary liberal discourse related to race and inequality. Democrats and many self-identified progressives not only dismissed the utility of Sanders’s platform for African Americans—characterizing his redistributive agenda as “class reductionist”—but they coalesced around putatively left identitarian formulations to attack his program from the right.
The charge that Sanders was a class reductionist was, and still is, a red herring. Desperate to shore up its support among black voters, the Clinton campaign deftly used identitarian constructs to deflect attention from the full implications of their commitment to market-friendly neoliberal policies. Representative James Clyburn (SC), for example, opposed Sanders’s call for a return to taxpayer-funded (free) higher education by arguing that Sanders’s plan—which Clyburn grossly mischaracterized—would hurt historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) by diverting resources to publicly funded, predominantly white institutions (PWIs).8 Clyburn, who sat on the board of a private HBCU, ignored the benefits of Sanders’s proposal for both publicly funded HBCUs and the large number of poor and working-class African American students who can only finance their college education by taking on student loans.
Hillary Clinton likewise deployed the language of structural racism and intersectionality to obscure the impact of her husband’s legislative agenda on disproportionately black voters. Without so much as a hint of irony, Secretary Clinton asserted that Sanders’s calls for banking regulations and redistributive policies were of little importance to black and brown Americans as such proposals would do nothing to end the systemic racism that, she claimed, was the root cause of the subprime mortgage crisis and mass incarceration.9 Beyond the fact that African Americans have been overrepresented among victims of predatory mortgage lending and the carceral state thanks, in no small part, to laws enacted by President Bill Clinton, regulation of the banking industry and the establishment of a living wage would likely do much to redress disparities in both wealth and the criminal justice system. Indeed, banking regulation could eliminate predatory lending altogether. And as political scientist Marie Gottschalk has shown, income inequality, cuts to state indigent legal services programs and the return of for-profit prisons are at the heart of African Americans’ overrepresentation in the criminal justice system.
Curiously, liberal critics frequently cast Sanders’s platform as anachronistic, but without any formal acknowledgment that he was simply calling for a return to the kind of public-interest approach to governance—ushered in by the Democratic party of Roosevelt—that not only grew the American middle class but had also helped lay the foundation for the civil rights movement. Those progressive critics who did reference American history, such as the acclaimed public intellectual Ta-Nehisi Coates, often did so to no good effect. Though Coates ultimately declared his support for Sanders, he too cast the Vermont senator as “class reductionist.” Specifically, Coates rebuked Sanders for proposing a platform that sought to “ameliorate the effects of racism through broad, mostly class-based policies—doubling the minimum wage, offering single-payer health-care, delivering free higher education.” According to Coates, Sanders’s proposed redistributive policies were just “the same ‘A rising tide lifts all boats’ thinking that dominated Democratic anti-racist policy for a generation.” Sanders’s proposals thus, Coates claimed, suffered from the same wrongheaded presumption that doomed the War on Poverty—postwar liberals’ refusal to acknowledge that racism was not merely “a relative of white poverty and inequality,” but it was “an active, distinct evil” of its own.10
Coates’s historical analogy failed on its merits, insofar as he conflated the Johnson administration’s efforts to mitigate poverty via a conservative growth agenda with Sanders’s progressive redistributive proposals. Still, had Sanders’s platform been wed to calls to repeal extant antidiscrimination legislation, Coates’s fear that blacks would not benefit equally from the Vermont senator’s proposals might not have been unreasonable. However, Sanders did not run on a pledge to end or even “mend” affirmative action or any other antidiscrimination policies. The Democratic presidential candidate who had run on that platform was Secretary Clinton’s husband.11
To be clear, I have no interest in relitigating the 2016 Democratic primary race. In fact, the specter of a Trump presidency not only motivated me to vote for Hillary Clinton in the general election, but I encouraged others to do the same.12 Still, the 2016 Democratic primaries revealed a critical fault line within Democratic and progressive politics. Just as the popularity of Sanders’s call for a return to a public-good-oriented approach to governance drew attention to a broad cross section of the electorate’s disillusionment with a quarter-century of neoliberal hegemony, liberals’ dismissal of Sanders as a “class reductionist” announced corporate Democrats’ and a stratum of identitarian progressives’ commitment to a class politics—shrouded in a language of identity and attitudes, uncoupled from political economy—that has long failed disproportionately black and brown working people.
There is little doubt that Secretary Clinton (much like Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and other contenders this time around) and her surrogates’ strategic use of racial identity politics reflected the convergence of issues that were unique to the second decade of the twenty-first century. Sanders’s strong showing in the Democratic primaries and caucuses forced the centrist-Clinton campaign to the rhetorical left on trade, education and wage policies. To counter the insurgency, Clinton needed to shore up her support with black voters, who were a reliable, economically diverse constituency that—as Clinton had learned in 2008—wielded disproportionate influence over Southern primaries. Clinton thus shrewdly wrapped herself in the legacy of the nation’s first (neoliberal) black president—a strategy that would have been all the more appealing given Donald Trump’s racist and xenophobic campaign stump—helping her win “the black vote” handily, despite the disproportionate damage inflicted upon African Americans by President
