> Agreed that centrists (or more precisely, “moderate Democrats”) are more aligned to Clinton/Obama wing, but the idea that Clinton/Obama are the identitarians rather than the progressive wing (Warren, AOC, Pressley, Tlaib, Omar, etc) is beyond belief.
> Clinton and Obama might’ve capitalized on their identities in pandering to the progressive wing
If you look at where Hillary Clinton’s support was vs. Bernie’s , Bernie’s was on the economic left, Clinton’s was with all the identity-politics factions. (Not just what is predictable by “exploiting her identity” as straigh cisgender heterosexual white woman.)
It can be confusing, because there is also a leftist/progressive identity politics which is highly intersectional and also highly integrated with class politics, but the dominant neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party has long been deeply dependent on the very different bourgeois identity politics which rejects the class struggle, as what distinguishes them from the more moderate fringes of the Republican Right (this was especially true during the period of the neoliberal consensus, less so since Trump replaced corporate capitalism with a side order of culture war social politics to energize the base with White nationalist culture war populism as the center of the Republican Party.)
> Do you think Warren, AOC, Omar, etc are really “moderate Democrats” or do you disagree that they are committed identitarians?
I think all of them (even Warren, who remains overtly pro-capitalist and is more centrist than the others) center economic/class issues more than identity politics, and all but Warren do so fairly explicitly because the kind of identity politics they engage in are precisely the progressive/left kind, not the bourgeios kind.
> Clinton and Obama might’ve capitalized on their identities in pandering to the progressive wing
If you look at where Hillary Clinton’s support was vs. Bernie’s , Bernie’s was on the economic left, Clinton’s was with all the identity-politics factions. (Not just what is predictable by “exploiting her identity” as straigh cisgender heterosexual white woman.)
It can be confusing, because there is also a leftist/progressive identity politics which is highly intersectional and also highly integrated with class politics, but the dominant neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party has long been deeply dependent on the very different bourgeois identity politics which rejects the class struggle, as what distinguishes them from the more moderate fringes of the Republican Right (this was especially true during the period of the neoliberal consensus, less so since Trump replaced corporate capitalism with a side order of culture war social politics to energize the base with White nationalist culture war populism as the center of the Republican Party.)
> Do you think Warren, AOC, Omar, etc are really “moderate Democrats” or do you disagree that they are committed identitarians?
I think all of them (even Warren, who remains overtly pro-capitalist and is more centrist than the others) center economic/class issues more than identity politics, and all but Warren do so fairly explicitly because the kind of identity politics they engage in are precisely the progressive/left kind, not the bourgeios kind.