How identity politics blew up in Democrats' faces

What's the matter with America? That seems to be the burning question on the tongues of many liberals in the wake of Donald Trump's stunning upset victory over Hillary Clinton. And in a way, that question is a mash-up response to two popular theories on America's political landscape, the first laid out in Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas?, and the second in The Emerging Democratic Majority by John Judis and Ruy Teixera. These books offer a clear window into how liberals understand not only the broad political landscape, but themselves and their actions within it.

In the latter book, Judis and Teixera claim that America's "shifting demographics were giving rise to a strong new Democratic-voting population base," an "alliance between minorities, working and single women, the college educated, and skilled professionals," as the authors put it in a 2012 article crowing about Barack Obama's re-election victory. They called this majority "McGovern's Revenge," since the 1972 Democratic nominee bet on precisely such a coalition and got walloped.

If 2012 was McGovern's Revenge, then 2016 was Nixon's Revenge. To put it bluntly, it turns out that whites are still a majority in America, and that if you polarize the electorate along racial lines, the majority group will be the winning coalition. It's arithmetic.

But do Americans really vote along racial lines? In some ways, that's what Frank argued in 2005's What's the Matter with Kansas. In his view, Republicans had essentially conned working-class whites into voting against their economic interests by agitating them with racial and social conservative appeals. It seemed unfathomable to Frank and plenty of other liberals that poor and working-class white people in states like Kansas could back Republicans when Democratic economic policies were (supposedly) so much better for these voters.