In which an apolitical American political party wonders about its choice of masks

Comment published on New York Times online blog in response to opinion essay by Astead W. Herndon and Matt Flegenheimer, “Should a white man be the face of the Democratic Party in 2020?” April 20, 2019:

The Democratic Party ought to be more concerned with ideas and less with persons and faces. Elections should not be beauty pageants that crown a star. The Democrats need to renounce identity politics, without of course renouncing the project of inclusion or being sensitive to the problems felt most keenly by particular minorities.

Identity politics was the Democratic strategy for decades. It is a cheap solution. Its function is to get votes. And to do this by representing not what people want but who they are. A background to this is that of politicians being beholden not to voters and constituents so much as lobbyists representing the "interests" of "stakeholders" (these can be private or public, right, center, or left). This gives the idea of representative democracy, or at least government, a strange twist. For then politics becomes like war and everyone wants to win every discussion, since arguments are fights.

But politics today is not the moral equivalent of war. Those who think it is could aid the movement towards fascism, or authoritarian militarism, as a general ethos by backing right into it. It will recognize minority groups; Italian Fascism called this "corporatism" after corpus, body. It may be that the solution to this problem is not stronger communities as some claim, but a more truly democratic society. Politicians: Don't ask me who I am but what I want; don't tell me who you are but what you can do for me, or us.