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Identity politics

Indeed, it distracts us with options, entices us with pleasures we never knew we wanted (and maybe don’t require). Hence Sanders’s admonition to CNBC this week: “You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants when children are hungry in this country.”

The generation gap between Bernie Sanders and Chris Hayes is measured not only in years. It’s evident in their politics. While Sanders and Hayes probably agree on most everything, Sanders hails from a different sort of leftism, a universal, internationalist strain founded on the brotherhood of man, an ideology that treats social conflict ultimately as the consequence of an unjust economic system.

For the old socialists, you had to mobilize politically to command the economy, and then issues of race and ethnicity and religion would disappear. Since we’re all equal, the only relevant dispute was between classes. And once that dispute was settled—workers of the world, blah blah blah—we’d have nothing to worry about.

At least that’s the way it was supposed to happen. But socialism failed to achieve its goals—a planned economy, a classless society, economic growth with equal distribution—and the left shifted emphasis. Revolutionary transformation of the market wasn’t achievable, and perhaps not all that desirable. The left would have to make its peace with capitalism: more like a truce, with the welfare state keeping the market at bay.