1/ I am seeing THE DEMS UNDERPERFORMED CUZ IDPOL takes and OH OKAY SO YOU'RE BLAMING IDPOL EVEN THOUGH BIDEN IS PROBABLY GOING TO WIN WITH THE MOST VOTES EVER takes and I think they are both off-base. If you're a liberal, what should concern you is that during an election in

2/which the Dems talked more about identity than ever before, they appear to have done significantly *worse* with multiple important minority groups, despite the existence of the most objectionable incumbent imaginable. How could you not be concerned by this? Something is failing

3/ to resonate, and a bunch of us have been banging the drum, for awhile, that there has been a shift in the way progressives talk about race and identity away from accessible, universalist appeals, and toward consultant/academic jargon that most people simply hate*. Our

4/ position is often caricatured as OH SO U R SAYING WE CAN'T TALK ABOUT RACE or OH SO U R SAYING DEMS SHOULD BE RACIST. This is asinine. Countless politicians have successfully talked about race and identity and justice in accessible, bread-and-butter language that resonates

5/ widely. Barack Obama talked about race! But he didn't talk about race as though he were in his first day of a sociology seminar trying to impress a professor.

(*When I say almost everyone hates this mode of speech, I mean that. The problem is that the most culturally/

6/ academically influential group in the country, and the group that buys the most books and trainings -- white liberals -- LOVES this stuff and can't get enough of it. That's why so many of your favorite outlets have become increasingly unreadable on these subjects of late.)

7/ In conclusion, to repeat something I said in April 2019, when you zoom out, there is in fact only a limited market for left-wing identitarianism. Just because the media is falling into this hole doesn't mean the Democratic Party should. https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/slate-pete-buttigieg-and-the-limited

8/ And the bizarre debate over whether Elizabeth Warren was 'intersectional,' which really just came down to whether she used the right buzzwords, was a good example of how in-the-weeds and divorced from people's material needs this stuff gets. https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/is-elizabeth-warren-running-the-first