vox--2020-02-20--Identity politics isn’t hurting liberalism. It’s saving it.

American liberalism is in desperate need of renewal .
Its ideas too often feel stale , its nostrums unsuited to beating back the authoritarian populist tide .
Yet there is an opportunity for revival — if liberals are willing to more forthrightly embrace the politics of identity .
To many liberals , such a suggestion will sound like blasphemy .
Since mere days after Donald Trump ’ s 2016 victory , an unending stream of op-eds and books have accused “ identity politics ” — defined loosely as a left-wing political style that centers the interests and concerns of oppressed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a moral and political cliff .
These critics accuse identity politics of being a cancer on the very idea of liberalism , pulling the mainstream American left away from a politics of equal citizenship and shared civic responsibility .
It is , moreover , political suicide , a woke purism that makes it impossible to form winning political coalitions — evidenced , in critics ’ minds , by the backlash to Bernie Sanders ’ s embrace of the popular podcast host Joe Rogan .
The idea that identity politics is at odds with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the American political and intellectual elite .
Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker has condemned contemporary identity politics as “ an enemy of reason and Enlightenment values.
” New York Times columnist Bari Weiss argues that the “ corrupt identity politics of the left ” amounts to a dangerously intolerant worldview .
And New York magazine ’ s Andrew Sullivan claims the “ woke left ” seems “ not to genuinely believe in liberalism , liberal democracy , or persuasion.
” This line of thinking is practically the founding credo of the school of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Web .
It is also deeply , profoundly wrong .
What these critics lambaste as an attack on liberalism is actually its best form : the logical extension of liberalism ’ s core commitment to social equality and democracy , adapted to address modern sources of inequality .
A liberalism that rejects identity politics is a liberalism for the powerful , one that relegates the interests of marginalized groups to second-class status .
But identity politics is not only important as a matter of liberal principle .
In the face of an existential @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the United States , liberals need to harness new sources of political energy to fight back .
This is not a matter of short-term politics , of whether being “ too woke ” will help or hurt Democrats in 2020 , but a deeper and more fundamental question : what types of organizations and activist movements are required to make liberalism sustainable in the 21st century .
And there is good reason to believe the passions stirred by identity politics can renew a liberalism gone haggard .
To say that liberalism and identity @ @ @ @ @ @ @ our political situation .
Identity politics isn ’ t merely compatible with liberalism ; it is , in fact , liberalism ’ s truest face .
If liberalism wishes to succeed in 21st-century America , it shouldn ’ t reject identity politics — it should embrace it .
All politics is , in a certain sense , identity politics .
Every kind of political approach appeals to particular aspects of voters ’ identities ; some are just more explicit than others .
But critics of identity politics have a very particular politics in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ organizing that prioritizes the concerns and experiences of historically marginalized groups , emphasizing the group ’ s particularity .
To understand why this kind of identity politics is so controversial — and what its critics often get wrong about it — we need to turn to the work of the late University of Chicago philosopher Iris Marion Young .
In 1990 , Young published a classic book titled Justice and the Politics of Difference .
At the time , political philosophy was dominated by internal debates among liberals who focused heavily on the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ both a philosopher and a left activist , found this narrow discourse unsatisfying .
In her view , mainstream American liberalism had assumed a particular account of what social equality means : “ that equal social status for all persons requires treating everyone according to the same principles , rules , and standards.
” Securing “ equality ” on this view means things like desegregation and passing nondiscrimination laws , efforts to end overt discrimination against marginalized groups .
This is an important start , Young argues , but not nearly enough .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ t eliminate all sources of structural inequality ; in fact , it can serve to mask and even deepen them .
Judging a poor black kid and a rich white one by the same allegedly meritocratic college admissions standards , for example , will likely lead to the rich white one ’ s admission — perpetuating a punishing form of inequality that started at birth .
Young sees an antidote in a political vision she developed out of experiences in social movements , which she calls “ the politics of difference.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ equality demands treating groups differently rather than the same .
“ The specificity of each group requires a specific set of rights for each , and for some a more comprehensive system than for others , ” Young writes .
The goal is identity consciousness rather than identity blindness : “ Black Lives Matter ” over “ All Lives Matter.
” She did not like using the term “ identity politics ” for this approach , arguing in her 2000 book Inclusion and Democracy that it was misleadingly narrow .
But two decades @ @ @ @ @ @ @ what we understand “ identity politics ” to mean .
Young ’ s philosophical precision allows us to understand what ’ s distinctive about contemporary identity politics .
It also helps us understand why critics see it as such a threat .
Identity politics ’ dissatisfaction with formal equal treatment is , in their view , fundamentally illiberal .
Its emphasis on correcting structural discrimination can morph into a kind of authoritarianism , an obsession with the policing of speech and behaviors ( especially from white , straight , cisgender men ) at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to individual rights , so the critics fret .
They see college students disinviting conservative speakers for being “ problematic , ” or “ canceling ” celebrities who violate the rules of acceptable discourse on race or gender identity , as evidence that identity politics ’ fundamental aim is overturning liberalism in the name of equality .
This approach is not only illiberal , the critics argue , but self-defeating .
The more emphasis that is placed on the separateness of American social groups , the less space there is for a politically @ @ @ @ @ @ @ only way to [ win power ] is to have a message that appeals to as many people as possible and pulls them together , ” Columbia professor Mark Lilla writes in his recent book The Once and Future Liberal .
“ Identity liberalism does just the opposite.
” Many of these critics see themselves as coming from a relatively progressive and firmly liberal starting point .
They tend to profess support for the ideals of racial or gender equality .
What they can ’ t abide is a political approach that emphasizes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ specific oppressions rather than universal ideals .
It is a philosophical argument with political implications : a claim that the essence of identity politics is illiberal , and for that reason its continued influence on the American left augurs both moral and electoral doom .
It ’ s hardly absurd for someone like Lilla to see tension between liberalism and identity politics .
Young herself described the politics of difference as not a species of liberalism but a challenge to it .
But her stance notwithstanding , political philosophers have come to see @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a vibrant liberalism .
In 1998 , Canadian scholar Will Kymlicka identified an “ emerging consensus ” among political philosophers on what he calls “ liberal multiculturalism , ” the idea that “ groups have a valid claim , not only to tolerance and non-discrimination , but also to explicit accommodation , recognition and representation within the institutions of the larger society.
” If we examine liberalism ’ s core moral commitments , Kymlicka ’ s consensus shouldn ’ t be a surprise .
The quintessential liberal value is freedom .
Liberalism ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a society where citizens are free to participate as equals , cooperating on mutually agreeable terms in political life and pursuing whatever vision of private life they find meaningful and fulfilling .
Freedom in this sense can not be achieved in political systems defined by identity-based oppression .
When members of some social groups face barriers to living the life they choose , purely as a result of their membership in that group , then the society they live in is failing on liberal terms .
Identity politics seeks to draw attention to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Consider the following facts about American life : • The median black family ’ s wealth is one-tenth that of the median white family .
• The average American woman spends over 11 more hours per week doing unpaid home labor than the average man .
• LGBTQ youth are about five times more likely to attempt suicide than ( respectively ) straight and cisgender peers .
There is no law saying black people can ’ t own houses , that women married to men must do the cooking and cleaning , or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ These problems have more subtle causes , including legacies of historical discrimination , deeply embedded social norms , and inadequate legislative attention to the particular circumstances of marginalized groups .
Identity politics ’ focus on the need to go beyond anti-discrimination works to open new avenues for dealing with the insidious nature of modern group-based inequality .
Once you understand that this is the actual aim of identity politics , it becomes clear that critiques of its alleged authoritarianism miss the forest for the trees .
It is of course true that one @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the name of identity politics : Think of the student group at the City University of New York that attempted to shout down a relatively mainstream conservative legal scholar ’ s lecture out of hostility to his views on immigration law .
But instances of campus intolerance are actually quite uncommon , despite their omnipresence in the media , and the idea that a handful of student excesses represent the core of “ identity politics ” is a mistake .
One can say the same thing for social media outrages .
It @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of identity politics send over-the-top tweets or pen Facebook posts calling for people to be fired without good cause .
It ’ s also true that some practitioners of every kind of politics do these things .
Holding up an outrageous-sounding tweet as representative of the allegedly authoritarian heart of identity politics is a basic analytical error : confusing a platform problem , the way social media highlights the most extreme versions of all ideologies , with a doctrinal defect in identity politics .
Merely because a liberal movement contains some illiberal components @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ; if it did , then slave-owning American founders and bigoted Enlightenment philosophers would have to be booted out of the liberal canon .
The key question is whether the agenda and aims of identity politics ’ adherents advance liberal freedom compared to the status quo .
On this point , it ’ s clear that the practitioners of “ identity politics ” are on the liberal side .
In recent years , we have seen champions of identity politics rack up impressive accomplishments — victories like defeating prosecutors with troubling records on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sexual assault allegations taken seriously in the workplace , and securing health care coverage for transition-related medical care .
These are hardly examples of woke Stalinism .
They are instead victories of liberal reform and democratic activism , incremental changes aimed at addressing deep-rooted sources of unfreedom .
Time and again throughout American history , from abolitionism to the movement for same-sex marriage , members of marginalized groups have refused to abandon liberalism ’ s promises .
They put their lives on the line , risking death on Civil War battlefields and in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of liberal ideals .
When they demanded change , they won it through the push-and-pull of democratic politics and political activism that constitute the heart of liberal praxis .
In essayist Adam Serwer ’ s evocative phrasing : “ The American creed has no more devoted adherents than those who have been historically denied its promises.
” Today ’ s practitioners of identity politics are the proper heirs to this tradition .
Former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams , one of the most prominent defenders of “ identity politics ” in American public @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to an unimpeachably liberal cause — fighting restrictions on the franchise , particularly those that disproportionately affect black voters .
In a recent Foreign Affairs essay , Abrams made the case that one of the central aims of identity politics is bolstering liberalism — that it is “ activism that will strengthen democratic rule , not threaten it.
” In Abrams ’ s view , the persistence of structural oppression , and in particular the Trump-era backlash to social progress , requires careful attention to identity , and in particular what marginalized groups @ @ @ @ @ @ @ By embracing identity and its prickly , uncomfortable contours , ” Abrams wrote , “ Americans will become more likely to grow as one.
” The critics of identity politics have another complaint : that its hold on the Democratic Party can only lead to electoral perdition .
Abrams , as inspirational as many find her , did lose the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial race .
Maybe identity politics can be defended theoretically but in practice alienates too many people to be put in practice .
It ’ s possible to challenge the specifics @ @ @ @ @ @ @ t win , but it was a very tight loss in a historically red state ( in fact , 2018 was the closest Georgia gubernatorial election in the state in more than 50 years ) .
And you can point to many examples that go in the other direction — at the local , state , and national levels .
But it would be myopic to tie ourselves up in these near-term ( and frankly inconclusive ) tactical arguments .
We have a broader crisis to worry about .
Debating the interests of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rising illiberalism in the United States is a deeper problem than the Trump presidency .
To reckon with it , we need to take a longer view , looking at the beliefs and sources of activist energy that define the contours of what ’ s possible in American electoral politics .
Since World War II , liberalism and its core beliefs about rights and freedom have served as something like the operating system for democratic politics .
But in recent years , this consensus has come under severe stress .
Elite failures and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the financial and refugee crises — have caused Western publics to lose faith in the liberal order ’ s guardians .
Illiberal right-wing populism has emerged as a potent alternative model .
The West ’ s fundamental commitment to liberalism is coming into question .
Liberals are in the midst of war — and in it , giving up identity politics amounts to a kind of unilateral disarmament .
Today ’ s political contests , in both the United States and Europe , are increasingly defined by conflict surrounding demographic change and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ These are the central issues in our politics , the ones that most powerfully motivate people to vote and join political organizations .
The anti-liberal side has pegged its vision almost entirely to backlash politics , to rolling back the gains made by ethnic and racial minorities , women , and the LGBTQ community .
The challenge for liberals is not primarily winning over voters who find that regressive vision appealing ; no modern liberal party can be as authentically bigoted as a far-right one .
At the same time , liberals should @ @ @ @ @ @ @ like “ the white working class ” as unpersuadable .
Instead , the main task of liberal politics should be mobilizing those from all backgrounds who oppose the far-right ’ s vision — knitting together in common cause a staggeringly diverse array of people with very different experiences .
The 2017 Women ’ s March is a concrete example of how identity politics can help in this struggle .
The march was billed , at the time , as both an expression of feminist rage and the major anti-Trump action the weekend of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fretted that these goals were antithetical ; that the particularism of the event ’ s feminist rhetoric would end up dividing the anti-Trump coalition .
“ I think many men assume the ‘ Women ’ s March ’ is supposed to be women-only , which is why it was a bad name for the main anti-Trump march , ” New York magazine ’ s Jonathan Chait wrote .
“ There are many grounds on which to object to Trump .
Feminism is one .
I think [ the ] goal should be to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s concerns were clearly unfounded .
The 2017 Women ’ s March was by some estimates the largest single day of protest in US history , with somewhere in the range of 3 million to 5 million people attending the various marches nationwide .
Feminism , far from being a divisive theme , served to mobilize large numbers of people to get out and demonstrate against America ’ s illiberal turn .
But what happened next is particularly interesting : The experience of attending Women ’ s Marches seems to have galvanized @ @ @ @ @ @ @ women — to engage in sustained activism for both gender equality and the defense of liberalism more broadly .
In the years following the 2017 demonstrations , Harvard researchers Leah Gose and Theda Skocpol conducted extensive fieldwork among anti-Trump activists .
They found that the march helped mobilize many new activists — the bulk of whom were middle-class , educated white women in their 50s or older .
“ Following the marches , ” they found , “ clusters of women in thousands of communities across America carried on with forming local groups @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s March seems to have played a crucial role in turning these women into activists who not only opposed Trump but aimed to defend liberalism ’ s promise of equal freedom .
Activists interviewed by Gose and Skocpol frequently cited a concern for the health of American democracy as a reason for their engagement .
Despite being heavily white , they also worked on issues that are of particular concern to racial minorities — organizing against ( for example ) the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville and child separation .
“ As @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and Skocpol write , “ women ’ s civic activism may revitalize democratic engagement and promote a new birth of responsive government in communities across the land.
” In a recent working paper , political scientist Jonathan Pinckney took a close look at the impact of the Women ’ s March on three metrics : increase of size in Democratic-aligned activist groups , ideology of Democratic members of Congress , and the share of the Democratic vote in 2018 .
He found that areas with larger attendance at the 2017 marches later saw @ @ @ @ @ @ @ shifts in congressional voting scores , and a greater swing to the Democrats in the 2018 midterm elections.
” The Women ’ s March itself seems to have largely petered out , succumbing to fatigue and leadership infighting .
But its true legacy will be the activist networks it helped create , ones that contributed to sustained and impactful challenges to an illiberal presidency .
This kind of thing is what , in the long run , liberalism needs : a way to make its defense fresh and exciting , mobilizing specific groups @ @ @ @ @ @ @ far right .
Doing so will require meeting people where they are , engaging them on the identity issues that matter deeply and profoundly .
Knitting this latent energy into a durable and electorally viable coalition will be the work of a generation , but it ’ s hard to see how American liberalism can get off its heels without trying .
It ’ s true , of course , that the interests of members of marginalized groups are not always aligned , and that such groups also contain a lot of internal @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hard questions regarding building coalitions .
Should Sanders have denounced Joe Rogan ’ s endorsement ?
Is Pete Buttigieg ’ s dubious record on race and policing disqualifying ?
These are important questions , and there will be more like them .
They will lead to more fights among liberals and the broader left .
But political factions of all ideologies have to make tough judgment calls when it comes time to engage in electoral politics , and there ’ s nothing about identity politics that makes it uniquely poorly suited to the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is attuned to the specific experiences of social groups , it also contains a universalizing impulse : a sense that all structural injustices — stemming from racism , sexism , class structure , or whatever — are to be opposed .
There ’ s a core commitment to solidarity , to not only listening to the members of other groups but seeing their struggle as linked to your own .
“ Having to be accountable to people from diverse social positions with different needs , interests , and experience helps transform discourse from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Young writes in Inclusion and Democracy .
An anti-oppression framework gives people a moral language for articulating their disagreements and perspectives , for constructing a sense of unity and shared purpose out of difference .
That we ’ re having these conversations at all , and are agonizing over what exactly our liberalism should look like , is all to the good — because rebuilding liberalism around anti-oppression values , no matter how difficult it might seem in the moment , is its best hope for an enduring revival .
If all of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ identity politics not just to survive but to succeed , then an obvious question looms : How can it be adapted to take issues of identity more seriously ?
What might the ideals and aspirations of an identity-focused liberalism be , and how might it imagine making them possible ?
One good place to start is the work of CUNY philosopher Charles Mills .
Mills ’ s most famous book , The Racial Contract ( 1997 ) , is a fundamental critique of the Enlightenment political tradition , arguing that racist attitudes expressed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not some alien parasite on their theories , but vital to their intellectual enterprises .
It ’ s the kind of thoroughgoing dissection you might expect from a socialist or black nationalist , someone willing to scrap liberalism altogether .
Yet at the end of his most recent book , Black Rights/White Wrongs , Mills explains that his project is not aimed at supplanting liberalism but rather rescuing it — by developing what he calls “ black radical liberalism.
” Central to black radical liberalism is the idea of “ corrective justice ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has been practiced historically has fallen badly short of its highest ideals of guaranteeing equal freedom , and that the task of modern liberalism ought to be rectifying the racial inequalities of its past incarnations .
Mills ’ s approach is refreshing because it moves beyond the strange conservatism in so much liberal writing today .
His work is not an uncritical valorization of the Enlightenment nor a paean to dead white thinkers ; it does not aim to Make Liberalism Great Again .
It is instead a harshly critical account of liberalism @ @ @ @ @ @ @ advance liberalism ’ s core values and secure its greatest accomplishments .
The animating force of identity politics , what gives it such extraordinary power to mobilize , is deep wells of outrage at structural injustice .
Millions of people see the cruelties of the Trump administration — its detention of migrant children in camps , the Muslim ban , the plan to define transgender people out of existence by executive fiat , the president ’ s description of Charlottesville neo-Nazis as “ very fine people ” — and want to do something @ @ @ @ @ @ @ their arguments on bloodless abstractions like “ democratic norms ” and the “ liberal international order.
” I don ’ t deny that these things are important ; I ’ ve written in their defense myself .
But people aren ’ t angry about norm erosion in the way they are about , say , state-sanctioned mistreatment of migrant kids .
By making identity politics something not outside of liberalism but at the center of it , liberals can enlist the energies of identity to the defense of liberalism itself .
Doing that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
While this sort of identity liberalism would not reject the accomplishments of the past , it requires admitting their insufficiency .
It means accepting that liberalism is a doctrine that has failed in key ways , and that repairing its errors requires centering the interests of the groups that have been most wronged .
It means appealing to the specificity of group experiences , while also emphasizing their shared interests in the twinned fights against oppression and for liberal democracy .
This approach will require compromises from some mainstream liberals , who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and ideas they might not like .
They ’ ll need to get over squeamishness about student activists and their pain regarding political correctness , to recognize that their vision of balancing competing political interests won ’ t always win out .
That ’ s not to say they can ’ t argue for their ideas ; this type of liberal can and should be entitled to make the case for more cautious political approaches .
But liberals need to stop trying to play gatekeeper , to banish ideas like intersectionality to the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ identity politics are not illiberal .
They are , in fact , some of the best friends liberalism has today .
The sooner liberals acknowledge that , the closer we will be to a liberal revival .

American liberalism is in desperate need of renewal. Its ideas too often feel stale, its nostrums unsuited to beating back the authoritarian populist tide.
Yet there is an opportunity for revival — if liberals are willing to more forthrightly embrace the politics of identity.
To many liberals, such a suggestion will sound like blasphemy. Since mere days after Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, an unending stream of op-eds and books have accused “identity politics” — defined loosely as a left-wing political style that centers the interests and concerns of oppressed groups — of driving the country off a moral and political cliff.
These critics accuse identity politics of being a cancer on the very idea of liberalism, pulling the mainstream American left away from a politics of equal citizenship and shared civic responsibility. It is, moreover, political suicide, a woke purism that makes it impossible to form winning political coalitions — evidenced, in critics’ minds, by the backlash to Sen. Bernie Sanders’s embrace of the popular podcast host Joe Rogan.
The idea that identity politics is at odds with liberalism has become conventional wisdom in parts of the American political and intellectual elite. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker has condemned contemporary identity politics as “an enemy of reason and Enlightenment values.” New York Times columnist Bari Weiss argues that the “corrupt identity politics of the left” amounts to a dangerously intolerant worldview. And New York magazine’s Andrew Sullivan claims the “woke left” seems “not to genuinely believe in liberalism, liberal democracy, or persuasion.” This line of thinking is practically the founding credo of the school of internet thought known as the Intellectual Dark Web.
It is also deeply, profoundly wrong.
What these critics lambaste as an attack on liberalism is actually its best form: the logical extension of liberalism’s core commitment to social equality and democracy, adapted to address modern sources of inequality. A liberalism that rejects identity politics is a liberalism for the powerful, one that relegates the interests of marginalized groups to second-class status.
But identity politics is not only important as a matter of liberal principle. In the face of an existential threat from right-wing populists in Europe and the United States, liberals need to harness new sources of political energy to fight back. This is not a matter of short-term politics, of whether being “too woke” will help or hurt Democrats in 2020, but a deeper and more fundamental question: what types of organizations and activist movements are required to make liberalism sustainable in the 21st century. And there is good reason to believe the passions stirred by identity politics can renew a liberalism gone haggard.
To say that liberalism and identity politics are at odds is to misunderstand our political situation. Identity politics isn’t merely compatible with liberalism; it is, in fact, liberalism’s truest face. If liberalism wishes to succeed in 21st-century America, it shouldn’t reject identity politics — it should embrace it.
What is identity politics?
All politics is, in a certain sense, identity politics. Every kind of political approach appeals to particular aspects of voters’ identities; some are just more explicit than others.
But critics of identity politics have a very particular politics in mind — a mode of rhetoric and organizing that prioritizes the concerns and experiences of historically marginalized groups, emphasizing the group’s particularity.
To understand why this kind of identity politics is so controversial — and what its critics often get wrong about it — we need to turn to the work of the late University of Chicago philosopher Iris Marion Young.
In 1990, Young published a classic book titled Justice and the Politics of Difference. At the time, political philosophy was dominated by internal debates among liberals who focused heavily on the question of wealth distribution. Young, both a philosopher and a left activist, found this narrow discourse unsatisfying.
In her view, mainstream American liberalism had assumed a particular account of what social equality means: “that equal social status for all persons requires treating everyone according to the same principles, rules, and standards.” Securing “equality” on this view means things like desegregation and passing nondiscrimination laws, efforts to end overt discrimination against marginalized groups.
This is an important start, Young argues, but not nearly enough. The push for formally equal treatment can’t eliminate all sources of structural inequality; in fact, it can serve to mask and even deepen them. Judging a poor black kid and a rich white one by the same allegedly meritocratic college admissions standards, for example, will likely lead to the rich white one’s admission — perpetuating a punishing form of inequality that started at birth.
Young sees an antidote in a political vision she developed out of experiences in social movements, which she calls “the politics of difference.” Sometimes, Young argues, achieving true equality demands treating groups differently rather than the same. “The specificity of each group requires a specific set of rights for each, and for some a more comprehensive system than for others,” Young writes. The goal is identity consciousness rather than identity blindness: “Black Lives Matter” over “All Lives Matter.”
She did not like using the term “identity politics” for this approach, arguing in her 2000 book Inclusion and Democracy that it was misleadingly narrow. But two decades later, what she sketched out is what we understand “identity politics” to mean.
Young’s philosophical precision allows us to understand what’s distinctive about contemporary identity politics. It also helps us understand why critics see it as such a threat.
Identity politics’ dissatisfaction with formal equal treatment is, in their view, fundamentally illiberal. Its emphasis on correcting structural discrimination can morph into a kind of authoritarianism, an obsession with the policing of speech and behaviors (especially from white, straight, cisgender men) at odds with liberalism’s core commitments to individual rights, so the critics fret. They see college students disinviting conservative speakers for being “problematic,” or “canceling” celebrities who violate the rules of acceptable discourse on race or gender identity, as evidence that identity politics’ fundamental aim is overturning liberalism in the name of equality.
This approach is not only illiberal, the critics argue, but self-defeating. The more emphasis that is placed on the separateness of American social groups, the less space there is for a politically effective and wide-ranging liberalism.
“The only way to [win power] is to have a message that appeals to as many people as possible and pulls them together,” Columbia professor Mark Lilla writes in his recent book The Once and Future Liberal. “Identity liberalism does just the opposite.”
Many of these critics see themselves as coming from a relatively progressive and firmly liberal starting point. They tend to profess support for the ideals of racial or gender equality. What they can’t abide is a political approach that emphasizes difference, shaping its policy proposals around specific oppressions rather than universal ideals.
It is a philosophical argument with political implications: a claim that the essence of identity politics is illiberal, and for that reason its continued influence on the American left augurs both moral and electoral doom.
Why liberalism needs identity politics
It’s hardly absurd for someone like Lilla to see tension between liberalism and identity politics. Young herself described the politics of difference as not a species of liberalism but a challenge to it.
But her stance notwithstanding, political philosophers have come to see the politics of identity as part of a vibrant liberalism. In 1998, Canadian scholar Will Kymlicka identified an “emerging consensus” among political philosophers on what he calls “liberal multiculturalism,” the idea that “groups have a valid claim, not only to tolerance and non-discrimination, but also to explicit accommodation, recognition and representation within the institutions of the larger society.”
If we examine liberalism’s core moral commitments, Kymlicka’s consensus shouldn’t be a surprise.
The quintessential liberal value is freedom. Liberalism’s core political ambition is to create a society where citizens are free to participate as equals, cooperating on mutually agreeable terms in political life and pursuing whatever vision of private life they find meaningful and fulfilling. Freedom in this sense cannot be achieved in political systems defined by identity-based oppression. When members of some social groups face barriers to living the life they choose, purely as a result of their membership in that group, then the society they live in is failing on liberal terms.
Identity politics seeks to draw attention to and combat such sources of unfreedom. Consider the following facts about American life:
The median black family’s wealth is one-tenth that of the median white family.
The average American woman spends over 11 more hours per week doing unpaid home labor than the average man.
LGBTQ youth are about five times more likely to attempt suicide than (respectively) straight and cisgender peers.
There is no law saying black people can’t own houses, that women married to men must do the cooking and cleaning, or that LGBTQ teens must harm themselves. These problems have more subtle causes, including legacies of historical discrimination, deeply embedded social norms, and inadequate legislative attention to the particular circumstances of marginalized groups.
Identity politics’ focus on the need to go beyond anti-discrimination works to open new avenues for dealing with the insidious nature of modern group-based inequality. Once you understand that this is the actual aim of identity politics, it becomes clear that critiques of its alleged authoritarianism miss the forest for the trees.
It is of course true that one can point to illiberal behavior by activists in the name of identity politics: Think of the student group at the City University of New York that attempted to shout down a relatively mainstream conservative legal scholar’s lecture out of hostility to his views on immigration law. But instances of campus intolerance are actually quite uncommon, despite their omnipresence in the media, and the idea that a handful of student excesses represent the core of “identity politics” is a mistake.
One can say the same thing for social media outrages. It’s certainly true that many practitioners of identity politics send over-the-top tweets or pen Facebook posts calling for people to be fired without good cause. It’s also true that some practitioners of every kind of politics do these things. Holding up an outrageous-sounding tweet as representative of the allegedly authoritarian heart of identity politics is a basic analytical error: confusing a platform problem, the way social media highlights the most extreme versions of all ideologies, with a doctrinal defect in identity politics.
Merely because a liberal movement contains some illiberal components doesn’t make it fundamentally illiberal; if it did, then slave-owning American founders and bigoted Enlightenment philosophers would have to be booted out of the liberal canon.
The key question is whether the agenda and aims of identity politics’ adherents advance liberal freedom compared to the status quo. On this point, it’s clear that the practitioners of “identity politics” are on the liberal side.
In recent years, we have seen champions of identity politics rack up impressive accomplishments — victories like defeating prosecutors with troubling records on race at the ballot box, getting sexual assault allegations taken seriously in the workplace, and securing health care coverage for transition-related medical care.
These are hardly examples of woke Stalinism. They are instead victories of liberal reform and democratic activism, incremental changes aimed at addressing deep-rooted sources of unfreedom.
Time and again throughout American history, from abolitionism to the movement for same-sex marriage, members of marginalized groups have refused to abandon liberalism’s promises. They put their lives on the line, risking death on Civil War battlefields and in the streets of Birmingham, in defense of liberal ideals. When they demanded change, they won it through the push-and-pull of democratic politics and political activism that constitute the heart of liberal praxis. In essayist Adam Serwer’s evocative phrasing: “The American creed has no more devoted adherents than those who have been historically denied its promises.”
Today’s practitioners of identity politics are the proper heirs to this tradition. Former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, one of the most prominent defenders of “identity politics” in American public life, has devoted her post-election career to an unimpeachably liberal cause — fighting restrictions on the franchise, particularly those that disproportionately affect black voters.
In a recent Foreign Affairs essay, Abrams made the case that one of the central aims of identity politics is bolstering liberalism — that it is “activism that will strengthen democratic rule, not threaten it.” In Abrams’s view, the persistence of structural oppression, and in particular the Trump-era backlash to social progress, requires careful attention to identity, and in particular what marginalized groups want from their political elites.
“By embracing identity and its prickly, uncomfortable contours,” Abrams wrote, “Americans will become more likely to grow as one.”
Why identity politics is good politics
The critics of identity politics have another complaint: that its hold on the Democratic Party can only lead to electoral perdition. Abrams, as inspirational as many find her, did lose the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial race. Maybe identity politics can be defended theoretically but in practice alienates too many people to be put in practice.
It’s possible to challenge the specifics of these arguments. Abrams didn’t win, but it was a very tight loss in a historically red state (in fact, 2018 was the closest Georgia gubernatorial election in the state in more than 50 years). And you can point to many examples that go in the other direction — at the local, state, and national levels.
But it would be myopic to tie ourselves up in these near-term (and frankly inconclusive) tactical arguments. We have a broader crisis to worry about.
Debating the interests of the Democratic Party confines the imagination; rising illiberalism in the United States is a deeper problem than the Trump presidency. To reckon with it, we need to take a longer view, looking at the beliefs and sources of activist energy that define the contours of what’s possible in American electoral politics.
Since World War II, liberalism and its core beliefs about rights and freedom have served as something like the operating system for democratic politics. But in recent years, this consensus has come under severe stress. Elite failures and global catastrophes — particularly the one-two punch of the financial and refugee crises — have caused Western publics to lose faith in the liberal order’s guardians. Illiberal right-wing populism has emerged as a potent alternative model. The West’s fundamental commitment to liberalism is coming into question.
Liberals are in the midst of war — and in it, giving up identity politics amounts to a kind of unilateral disarmament. Today’s political contests, in both the United States and Europe, are increasingly defined by conflict surrounding demographic change and the erosion of traditional social hierarchies. These are the central issues in our politics, the ones that most powerfully motivate people to vote and join political organizations.
The anti-liberal side has pegged its vision almost entirely to backlash politics, to rolling back the gains made by ethnic and racial minorities, women, and the LGBTQ community. The challenge for liberals is not primarily winning over voters who find that regressive vision appealing; no modern liberal party can be as authentically bigoted as a far-right one. At the same time, liberals should not write off entire heterogeneous demographic blocs like “the white working class” as unpersuadable. Instead, the main task of liberal politics should be mobilizing those from all backgrounds who oppose the far-right’s vision — knitting together in common cause a staggeringly diverse array of people with very different experiences.
The 2017 Women’s March is a concrete example of how identity politics can help in this struggle.
The march was billed, at the time, as both an expression of feminist rage and the major anti-Trump action the weekend of the inauguration. Some liberal identity skeptics fretted that these goals were antithetical; that the particularism of the event’s feminist rhetoric would end up dividing the anti-Trump coalition.
“I think many men assume the ‘Women’s March’ is supposed to be women-only, which is why it was a bad name for the main anti-Trump march,” New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait wrote. “There are many grounds on which to object to Trump. Feminism is one. I think [the] goal should be to get all of them together.”
Chait’s concerns were clearly unfounded. The 2017 Women’s March was by some estimates the largest single day of protest in US history, with somewhere in the range of 3 million to 5 million people attending the various marches nationwide. Feminism, far from being a divisive theme, served to mobilize large numbers of people to get out and demonstrate against America’s illiberal turn.
But what happened next is particularly interesting: The experience of attending Women’s Marches seems to have galvanized a significant number of people — overwhelmingly women — to engage in sustained activism for both gender equality and the defense of liberalism more broadly.
In the years following the 2017 demonstrations, Harvard researchers Leah Gose and Theda Skocpol conducted extensive fieldwork among anti-Trump activists. They found that the march helped mobilize many new activists — the bulk of whom were middle-class, educated white women in their 50s or older. “Following the marches,” they found, “clusters of women in thousands of communities across America carried on with forming local groups to sustain anti-Trump activism.”
The Women’s March seems to have played a crucial role in turning these women into activists who not only opposed Trump but aimed to defend liberalism’s promise of equal freedom. Activists interviewed by Gose and Skocpol frequently cited a concern for the health of American democracy as a reason for their engagement. Despite being heavily white, they also worked on issues that are of particular concern to racial minorities — organizing against (for example) the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and child separation.
“As before throughout American history,” Gose and Skocpol write, “women’s civic activism may revitalize democratic engagement and promote a new birth of responsive government in communities across the land.”
In a recent working paper, political scientist Jonathan Pinckney took a close look at the impact of the Women’s March on three metrics: increase of size in Democratic-aligned activist groups, ideology of Democratic members of Congress, and the share of the Democratic vote in 2018. He found that areas with larger attendance at the 2017 marches later saw “significantly increased movement activity, left-ward shifts in congressional voting scores, and a greater swing to the Democrats in the 2018 midterm elections.”
The Women’s March itself seems to have largely petered out, succumbing to fatigue and leadership infighting. But its true legacy will be the activist networks it helped create, ones that contributed to sustained and impactful challenges to an illiberal presidency.
This kind of thing is what, in the long run, liberalism needs: a way to make its defense fresh and exciting, mobilizing specific groups toward the collective task of defeating the far right. Doing so will require meeting people where they are, engaging them on the identity issues that matter deeply and profoundly. Knitting this latent energy into a durable and electorally viable coalition will be the work of a generation, but it’s hard to see how American liberalism can get off its heels without trying.
It’s true, of course, that the interests of members of marginalized groups are not always aligned, and that such groups also contain a lot of internal disagreements and diversity. There are always hard questions regarding building coalitions. Should Sanders have denounced Joe Rogan’s endorsement? Is former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s dubious record on race and policing disqualifying? These are important questions, and there will be more like them. They will lead to more fights among liberals and the broader left.
But political factions of all ideologies have to make tough judgment calls when it comes time to engage in electoral politics, and there’s nothing about identity politics that makes it uniquely poorly suited to the task.
While the politics of difference is attuned to the specific experiences of social groups, it also contains a universalizing impulse: a sense that all structural injustices — stemming from racism, sexism, class structure, or whatever — are to be opposed. There’s a core commitment to solidarity, to not only listening to the members of other groups but seeing their struggle as linked to your own.
“Having to be accountable to people from diverse social positions with different needs, interests, and experience helps transform discourse from self-regard to appeals to justice,” Young writes in Inclusion and Democracy.
An anti-oppression framework gives people a moral language for articulating their disagreements and perspectives, for constructing a sense of unity and shared purpose out of difference. That we’re having these conversations at all, and are agonizing over what exactly our liberalism should look like, is all to the good — because rebuilding liberalism around anti-oppression values, no matter how difficult it might seem in the moment, is its best hope for an enduring revival.
Toward a liberal radicalism
If all of this is right, and liberalism needs identity politics not just to survive but to succeed, then an obvious question looms: How can it be adapted to take issues of identity more seriously? What might the ideals and aspirations of an identity-focused liberalism be, and how might it imagine making them possible?
One good place to start is the work of CUNY philosopher Charles Mills. Mills’s most famous book, The Racial Contract (1997), is a fundamental critique of the Enlightenment political tradition, arguing that racist attitudes expressed by philosophical giants like Immanuel Kant are not some alien parasite on their theories, but vital to their intellectual enterprises.
It’s the kind of thoroughgoing dissection you might expect from a socialist or black nationalist, someone willing to scrap liberalism altogether. Yet at the end of his most recent book, Black Rights/White Wrongs, Mills explains that his project is not aimed at supplanting liberalism but rather rescuing it — by developing what he calls “black radical liberalism.”
Central to black radical liberalism is the idea of “corrective justice”: the notion that liberalism as it has been practiced historically has fallen badly short of its highest ideals of guaranteeing equal freedom, and that the task of modern liberalism ought to be rectifying the racial inequalities of its past incarnations.
Mills’s approach is refreshing because it moves beyond the strange conservatism in so much liberal writing today. His work is not an uncritical valorization of the Enlightenment nor a paean to dead white thinkers; it does not aim to Make Liberalism Great Again. It is instead a harshly critical account of liberalism’s history that nonetheless aims to advance liberalism’s core values and secure its greatest accomplishments.
The animating force of identity politics, what gives it such extraordinary power to mobilize, is deep wells of outrage at structural injustice. Millions of people see the cruelties of the Trump administration — its detention of migrant children in camps, the Muslim ban, the plan to define transgender people out of existence by executive fiat, the president’s description of Charlottesville neo-Nazis as “very fine people”— and want to do something.
Today’s liberals often focus their arguments on bloodless abstractions like “democratic norms” and the “liberal international order.” I don’t deny that these things are important; I’ve written in their defense myself.
But people aren’t angry about norm erosion in the way they are about, say, state-sanctioned mistreatment of migrant kids. By making identity politics something not outside of liberalism but at the center of it, liberals can enlist the energies of identity to the defense of liberalism itself.
Doing that successfully requires a level of Millsian radicalism. While this sort of identity liberalism would not reject the accomplishments of the past, it requires admitting their insufficiency. It means accepting that liberalism is a doctrine that has failed in key ways, and that repairing its errors requires centering the interests of the groups that have been most wronged. It means appealing to the specificity of group experiences, while also emphasizing their shared interests in the twinned fights against oppression and for liberal democracy.
This approach will require compromises from some mainstream liberals, who will need to start welcoming in people and ideas they might not like. They’ll need to get over squeamishness about student activists and their pain regarding political correctness, to recognize that their vision of balancing competing political interests won’t always win out. That’s not to say they can’t argue for their ideas; this type of liberal can and should be entitled to make the case for more cautious political approaches. But liberals need to stop trying to play gatekeeper, to banish ideas like intersectionality to the illiberal wilds.
Because the practitioners of identity politics are not illiberal. They are, in fact, some of the best friends liberalism has today. The sooner liberals acknowledge that, the closer we will be to a liberal revival.


vox--2020-02-20--Burnt radio stations and 18-month newsprint blockades: Inside the slow culling of Nicaragua’s free p

Burnt radio stations and 18-month newsprint blockades: Inside the slow culling of Nicaragua’s free press

Most repressive countries interested in censoring information and the media try to lock down the internet , but for the past two years , Nicaragua has had an old-school solution : just remove the tools of the trade .
Police have seized a TV station ’ s broadcast facility , government supporters have burned down radio stations , and for nearly the last year and a half , customs officials have blockaded shipments of newsprint and ink for print newspapers .
This month , that last restriction , at least , was finally lifted .
President Daniel Ortega ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ago , loosening its grip on the independent press just enough so that the country ’ s paper of record , La Prensa , can avoid shutting down .
The country ’ s other dailies haven ’ t been so lucky .
Since August 2018 , La Prensa ’ s daily print edition has slowly shrunk from 32 pages to eight , before they finally had to switch to printing the shorter issue on regular , locally available — and more expensive — paper .
“ The blockage on the press and on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ La Prensa director Jaime Chamorro said two weeks ago at a press conference as the materials arrived .
“ I think this is a good sign , not just for other media outlets that have been closed but also for the opening up of Nicaragua.
” The paper , which has been the daily staple of Nicaraguan news since its founding in the 1920s , received no explanation for why the materials were being released now , Chamorro said .
The Nicaraguan customs office declined to comment .
“ I think it benefitted @ @ @ @ @ @ @ just us , ” Chamorro said after suggesting the paper ’ s pressure campaign might have finally helped end the blockade .
“ Because imagine it , if La Prensa had been closed down , we would have been the first country in the world without a print newspaper.
” It ’ s another sign that Ortega ’ s administration is trying to quietly restore normalcy to the country after nearly two years of heightened repression — without admitting any wrongdoing .
After winning reelection in 2006 , Ortega implemented several social programs @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” initiative , that benefited many .
But he and his now vice president-cum-first lady Rosario Murillo have also consolidated power over the courts and Supreme Electoral Council , removed constitutional term limits , and restricted the independent media ’ s access to official government sources .
That all came to a head in April of 2018 , when state security forces ’ violent suppression of protests transformed a narrow complaint about proposed social security reforms into a broad anti-government movement .
The months of ensuing civil uprising — and the government ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ dead , a hamstrung economy , and a country deeply divided over issues of free speech and government abuses .
Today , Nicaragua is aggressively trying to project an air of normalcy , courting the tourists who fled .
And , to an extent , the country has succeeded .
2018 ’ s ubiquitous protest graffiti is white-washed over ; 20-somethings shout to be heard in packed nightclubs that were barricaded shut during the crisis ; and some well-known political activists are even returning from self-imposed exile .
This month ’ s decision @ @ @ @ @ @ @ top diplomat in Nicaragua , comes just weeks after the storied outlet published an editorial hinting it might have to close .
The once-national paper had to cut staff and limit distribution to just the capital of Managua and one or two other provinces , said Eduardo Enríquez , La Prensa ’ s long-time managing editor .
“ We were a hundred journalists before April [ when the crisis began ] , and now we ’ re less than 30 ; the business has been hit hard , ” he said at the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s staff had continued publishing online for their 2 million unique monthly visitors , distributing on WhatsApp , and producing other multimedia content .
In fact , the digital team won the Inter-American Press Association ’ s Excellence in Journalism award for its coverage of the 2018 crisis .
But for many readers , it ’ s newsprint or nothing .
“ [ T ] here is a big part of the population that likes to read the paper every morning , ” Enríquez told Vox last fall .
“ Some people @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it in the paper , they feel like we haven ’ t talked about it or published anything about it.
” La Prensa , owned by members of the same Chamorro family that has included leaders of opposition political parties , is a vocal critic of Ortega .
Its editorial line for years was to call him the “ unconstitutional president , ” starting when he ran for a then-unconstitutional third term in 2011 .
Thankfully , Enríquez said , its journalists weren ’ t individually targeted during the crisis as some journalists @ @ @ @ @ @ @ administration , which has kept up pressure on Managua as part of a broader effort to target socialist Latin American countries , celebrated the release of the newsprint .
Michael Kozak , the State Department ’ s acting assistant secretary for the Western Hemisphere , tweeted his support — and a call for the return of “ property confiscated from other independent outlets.
” Nicaragua ’ s stance toward the independent press is still adversarial , however , and Murillo —as chief of communications — keeps a tight grip on government information .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Rosario authorizing it , ” Enríquez told Vox .
“ Their supporters say , ‘ If the comandante knew about this , ’ but he knows , and she knows.
” The last two years have been rough for Nicaraguan journalists It ’ s not only La Prensa that nearly stopped printing , or the other two daily papers who were run out of the print business ; a wave of independent and opposition outlets have been forced to close their doors in Nicaragua .
The environment for journalists took a nosedive as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ out in April 2018 .
According to an annual global report by Article 19 , Nicaragua had one of the largest drops in press freedom from 2017 to ’ 18 .
Some outlets the administration didn ’ t need to target .
They were the victims of the generalized anti-media climate the administration created .
Taking a page out of the book used by Trump and authoritarians everywhere , state journalists and officials regularly called critical journalists and reporters covering protests “ traitors ” and “ golpistas ” ( coup-plotters ) .
Henry @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Radio Darío , an independent station in the city of León , told Vox last year that “ you could never practice journalism completely freely … but everything became more complicated in April 2018.
” As protests broke out that month , Blanco witnessed state repression against both demonstrators and reporters rapidly escalate : “ on April 20 … we began seeing videos of journalists being attacked.
” While Blanco sat in Radio Darío ’ s transmitting booth on the 20th , relaying the breaking news that another station , Tu Nueva Radio @ @ @ @ @ @ @ government supporters , the station received an anonymous call promising violence against his team of reporters by sundown .
Shortly thereafter , another call — this time from a head of the governing party — made the threat even more explicit , telling reporters in the station that , if they did not stop broadcasting about government violence over the air , they would be killed .
At 7:25 pm , as some of Radio Darío ’ s team sat down to eat a quick working dinner in the office , they heard @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the station ’ s front door , then an explosion .
“ Suddenly , ” Blanco said , “ the [ recording ] booth was ablaze.
” Trapped in the burning station , and worried that beyond the front entrance were men armed with guns , Blanco remembers that some of his colleagues were so paralyzed by fear they “ couldn ’ t do anything but cry.
” Blanco and his colleagues narrowly escaped through a backdoor , but no firefighters or police answered their calls .
The group of reporters watched their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ terrorizing of the press didn ’ t end when Ortega reconsolidated power that summer .
In December of that year , two independent stations who ’ d criticized the government and amplified live videos of violence in the streets , Confidencial and 100 % Noticias , were raided by the police , who seized equipment and prevented journalists from reentering the premises .
“ I wanted to go film it , ” Lucía Pineda , news director of the still-shuttered 100 % Noticias , told Vox , recalling when she learned the station @ @ @ @ @ @ @ suddenly opened the door to our office and I ran down the stairs and hid under the staircase and there broadcast my final report , that the police had taken control of the station.
” She and the station ’ s director Miguel Mora were jailed for nearly six months , on charges of “ inciting violence and hate ” and “ promoting terrorism.
” They ’ ve been released , and the station ’ s journalists continue to broadcast online .
But the channel ’ s offices are still shuttered , under @ @ @ @ @ @ @ even the newly liberated La Prensa says it ’ s going to have to “ study ” how and when to reexpand its print edition — though its leaders vowed to continue practicing its critical journalism that speaks truth to power : “ La Prensa has been doing that for 93 years , it ’ s not going to change , ” Enríquez said .
But one critical paper does not a robust , independent press make .
“ The channel 100 % Noticias must be returned to its owners and Confidencial must @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” he continued .
“ Other media outlets are still in trouble , and we , as independent media , still have no access to government information .
... All this has to open up before we can even begin to think that there is freedom of the press , freedom of expression and access to information.
” Reporting for this story was supported by the Justice for Journalists Foundation .

Most repressive countries interested in censoring information and the media try to lock down the internet, but for the past two years, Nicaragua has had an old-school solution: just remove the tools of the trade.
Police have seized a TV station’s broadcast facility, government supporters have burned down radio stations, and for nearly the last year and a half, customs officials have blockaded shipments of newsprint and ink for print newspapers. This month, that last restriction, at least, was finally lifted.
President Daniel Ortega’s administration released the impounded materials two weeks ago, loosening its grip on the independent press just enough so that the country’s paper of record, La Prensa, can avoid shutting down. The country’s other dailies haven’t been so lucky.
Since August 2018, La Prensa’s daily print edition has slowly shrunk from 32 pages to eight, before they finally had to switch to printing the shorter issue on regular, locally available — and more expensive — paper.
“The blockage on the press and on press freedom has been opened,” La Prensa director Jaime Chamorro said two weeks ago at a press conference as the materials arrived. “I think this is a good sign, not just for other media outlets that have been closed but also for the opening up of Nicaragua.”
The paper, which has been the daily staple of Nicaraguan news since its founding in the 1920s, received no explanation for why the materials were being released now, Chamorro said. The Nicaraguan customs office declined to comment.
“I think it benefitted [the government] too, not just us,” Chamorro said after suggesting the paper’s pressure campaign might have finally helped end the blockade. “Because imagine it, if La Prensa had been closed down, we would have been the first country in the world without a print newspaper.”
It’s another sign that Ortega’s administration is trying to quietly restore normalcy to the country after nearly two years of heightened repression — without admitting any wrongdoing. After winning reelection in 2006, Ortega implemented several social programs, such as his “Zero Hunger” initiative, that benefited many. But he and his now vice president-cum-first lady Rosario Murillo have also consolidated power over the courts and Supreme Electoral Council, removed constitutional term limits, and restricted the independent media’s access to official government sources.
That all came to a head in April of 2018, when state security forces’ violent suppression of protests transformed a narrow complaint about proposed social security reforms into a broad anti-government movement. The months of ensuing civil uprising — and the government’s response — culminated with over 300 dead, a hamstrung economy, and a country deeply divided over issues of free speech and government abuses.
Today, Nicaragua is aggressively trying to project an air of normalcy, courting the tourists who fled. And, to an extent, the country has succeeded. 2018’s ubiquitous protest graffiti is white-washed over; 20-somethings shout to be heard in packed nightclubs that were barricaded shut during the crisis; and some well-known political activists are even returning from self-imposed exile.
This month’s decision, brokered by the Vatican’s top diplomat in Nicaragua, comes just weeks after the storied outlet published an editorial hinting it might have to close.
The once-national paper had to cut staff and limit distribution to just the capital of Managua and one or two other provinces, said Eduardo Enríquez, La Prensa’s long-time managing editor.
“We were a hundred journalists before April [when the crisis began], and now we’re less than 30; the business has been hit hard,” he said at the press conference this month.
La Prensa’s staff had continued publishing online for their 2 million unique monthly visitors, distributing on WhatsApp, and producing other multimedia content. In fact, the digital team won the Inter-American Press Association’s Excellence in Journalism award for its coverage of the 2018 crisis. But for many readers, it’s newsprint or nothing.
“[T]here is a big part of the population that likes to read the paper every morning,” Enríquez told Vox last fall. “Some people, if we don’t put it in the paper, they feel like we haven’t talked about it or published anything about it.”
La Prensa, owned by members of the same Chamorro family that has included leaders of opposition political parties, is a vocal critic of Ortega. Its editorial line for years was to call him the “unconstitutional president,” starting when he ran for a then-unconstitutional third term in 2011. Thankfully, Enríquez said, its journalists weren’t individually targeted during the crisis as some journalists were.
President Donald Trump’s administration, which has kept up pressure on Managua as part of a broader effort to target socialist Latin American countries, celebrated the release of the newsprint. Michael Kozak, the State Department’s acting assistant secretary for the Western Hemisphere, tweeted his support — and a call for the return of “property confiscated from other independent outlets.”
The long-overdue decision to release @laprensa’s paper & ink from Nicaraguan customs is a step in the right direction.
Now Ortega should return property confiscated from other independent outlets like @confidencial_ni and @100noticiasni. Freedom of expression is a #HumanRight. — Michael G. Kozak (@WHAAsstSecty) February 7, 2020
Nicaragua’s stance toward the independent press is still adversarial, however, and Murillo —as chief of communications — keeps a tight grip on government information.
“Nothing happens here without Ortego or Rosario authorizing it,” Enríquez told Vox. “Their supporters say, ‘If the comandante knew about this,’ but he knows, and she knows.”
The last two years have been rough for Nicaraguan journalists
It’s not only La Prensa that nearly stopped printing, or the other two daily papers who were run out of the print business; a wave of independent and opposition outlets have been forced to close their doors in Nicaragua.
The environment for journalists took a nosedive as the country’s civil crisis broke out in April 2018. According to an annual global report by Article 19, Nicaragua had one of the largest drops in press freedom from 2017 to ’18.
Some outlets the administration didn’t need to target. They were the victims of the generalized anti-media climate the administration created. Taking a page out of the book used by Trump and authoritarians everywhere, state journalists and officials regularly called critical journalists and reporters covering protests “traitors” and “golpistas” (coup-plotters).
Henry Blanco, a 30-year-old street reporter for Radio Darío, an independent station in the city of León, told Vox last year that “you could never practice journalism completely freely … but everything became more complicated in April 2018.”
As protests broke out that month, Blanco witnessed state repression against both demonstrators and reporters rapidly escalate: “on April 20 … we began seeing videos of journalists being attacked.” It was a chaotic scene, with both pro- and anti-government protestors targeting media.
While Blanco sat in Radio Darío’s transmitting booth on the 20th, relaying reports that another station, the pro-government Tu Nueva Radio Ya, had been burned down by protesters, the station received an anonymous call promising violence against his team of reporters by sundown.
Shortly thereafter, another call — this time from a head of the governing party — made the threat even more explicit, telling reporters in the station that, if they did not stop broadcasting about government violence over the air, they would be killed.
At 7:25 pm, as some of Radio Darío’s team sat down to eat a quick working dinner in the office, they heard a gunshot blast open the lock on the station’s front door, then an explosion. “Suddenly,” Blanco said, “the [recording] booth was ablaze.”
Trapped in the burning station, and worried that beyond the front entrance were men armed with guns, Blanco remembers that some of his colleagues were so paralyzed by fear they “couldn’t do anything but cry.”
Blanco and his colleagues narrowly escaped through a backdoor, but no firefighters or police answered their calls. The group of reporters watched their station burn to the ground.
The terrorizing of the press didn’t end when Ortega reconsolidated power that summer.
In December of that year, two independent stations who’d criticized the government and amplified live videos of violence in the streets, Confidencial and 100% Noticias, were raided by the police, who seized equipment and prevented journalists from reentering the premises.
“I wanted to go film it,” Lucía Pineda, news director of the still-shuttered 100% Noticias, told Vox, recalling when she learned the station had been seized. “But police suddenly opened the door to our office and I ran down the stairs and hid under the staircase and there broadcast my final report, that the police had taken control of the station.”
She and the station’s director Miguel Mora were jailed for nearly six months, on charges of “inciting violence and hate” and “promoting terrorism.” They’ve been released, and the station’s journalists continue to broadcast online. But the channel’s offices are still shuttered, under the state’s control.
And even the newly liberated La Prensa says it’s going to have to “study” how and when to reexpand its print edition — though its leaders vowed to continue practicing its critical journalism that speaks truth to power: “La Prensa has been doing that for 93 years, it’s not going to change,” Enríquez said.
But one critical paper does not a robust, independent press make.
“The channel 100% Noticias must be returned to its owners and Confidencial must be allowed to return to their offices” he continued. “Other media outlets are still in trouble, and we, as independent media, still have no access to government information. ... All this has to open up before we can even begin to think that there is freedom of the press, freedom of expression and access to information.”
Reporting for this story was supported by the Justice for Journalists Foundation.
Correction: Tu Nueva Radio Ya was a pro-government station, which was burned by protesters.


vox--2020-02-20--The slow implosion of Joe Biden’s big bet on South Carolina, explained

Joe Biden has banked his presidential campaign on winning South Carolina — a bet that is looking less and less likely to pay off .
For one , the latest polls don ’ t bode well for the former vice president .
While Biden once held a 20-point lead in South Carolina , he ’ s up by just 5 points in a January Post and Courier poll .
Similarly , the RealClearPolitics average has him less than 4 points ahead of Sen. Bernie Sanders , followed closely by billionaire activist Tom Steyer .
“ Joe Biden didn ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and his base of support has eroded , ” Anton Gunn , President Barack Obama ’ s 2008 South Carolina political director , told Vox .
“ South Carolina voters are smart and they don ’ t want a campaign that ’ s on life support.
” Biden has long been counting on a decisive win in South Carolina , a diverse early primary state where the Democratic electorate is 60 percent African American .
He ’ s developed a strong base among older African American voters , many of whom associate him @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the best option to take on President Donald Trump .
Tapping into this support is now critical for his floundering campaign .
Biden ’ s fourth- and fifth-place performances in Iowa and New Hampshire , however , are giving voters some pause .
And the direct competition he ’ s gotten in the state from candidates like Steyer , who has spent significant time , along with more than $ 18 million on advertising , has offered a marked contrast to his more understated campaign .
The former vice president trails several other @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he ’ s held in the state up to this point .
“ What I have said from the very beginning is that it is presumptuous to think , and certainly to say , that you have the black vote in your pocket , ” says Johnnie Cordero , the head of the state ’ s Democratic Black Caucus , who has endorsed Steyer .
Biden ’ s campaign , however , notes that it has not taken the state for granted and is further building up its ground game as the primary @ @ @ @ @ @ @ still on track to win South Carolina — albeit at margins that are much less favorable to him than the ones he was seeing in polls last year .
A close victory by Biden is sure to hold less sway moving forward than what was once expected to be a landslide .
But , as his campaign adds , the margin of victory might still surpass what we ’ ve seen candidates achieve in other early states .
The results , too , could point to the fracturing of Biden ’ s support @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that ’ s central to many other primary states down the line .
“ If he was previously going to win by 15 points and now he wins by 5 , that allows him to limp into Super Tuesday , ” Gunn says .
The Biden camp has been counting on South Carolina , but its presence in the state has been lackluster For months , Biden ’ s aides have tried to cushion potentially lukewarm showings in Iowa and New Hampshire and hinted that South Carolina is where he ’ d really @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the New Hampshire primary , Biden himself decamped to South Carolina in order to hold another campaign event and process the results .
“ I want you all to think of a number : 99.9 percent , ” he told supporters .
“ That ’ s the percentage of African American voters who have not yet had a chance to vote in America.
” Biden ’ s reliance on the state makes a lot of sense : If he could pull off a 20-point win there , he ’ d go into Super @ @ @ @ @ @ @ riding a swell of momentum .
And he was polling far ahead of pretty much everyone for months , buoyed by his connection to Obama and deep in-state ties .
“ I think we ’ re going to support somebody we know .
And the only person who ’ s favored by this analysis is Joe Biden , ” said South Carolina State Sen. Marlon Kimpson , a Biden backer .
Treating South Carolina as a guaranteed victory , though , has been perceived as a misstep by both political observers and voters @ @ @ @ @ @ @ far haven ’ t done much to instill confidence in his ability to win , let alone bolster the case he ’ s made for himself as the most “ electable ” candidate .
Although the outcome in South Carolina is set to be very different from both Iowa and New Hampshire , research by College of Charleston political science professor Gibbs Knotts finds that the first two states do have some effect on the Palmetto State .
“ Are we disappointed ?
Yes , ” Kimpson acknowledged .
“ Because one of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ appeal to white working-class workers.
” But the recent election results aren ’ t the only thing that has contributed to concerns about Biden ’ s candidacy .
Despite his repeated allusions to the state as an important base for him , he also hasn ’ t held quite as many events as other frontrunners , a proxy for face time , in the state .
According to a tracker from the Post and Courier , Biden has held 24 events in South Carolina , coming in behind other candidates who ’ ve @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro .
Other frontrunners , Steyer and Sanders , meanwhile , have held 40 and 35 events each .
When it comes to staffing , too , Biden lags behind both Steyer and Sanders .
Steyer now has 102 staffers in the state while Sanders has 70 — and Biden has 60 and counting .
And , according to CNN , Steyer has spent over $ 18.7 million in advertising aimed at South Carolinians , while as of last week Biden had spent $ 857,000 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s recent defeats and his less-than-robust presence on the ground — have both been called out as reasons he ’ s seen an erosion in support .
Both Steyer and Sanders are close behind Biden , but they probably won ’ t surpass him The candidate who ’ s seen the largest gains in recent months is Steyer , driven heavily by his increase in spending as well as the targeted emphasis he ’ s put on the state ’ s African American voters .
“ I think Tom Steyer is overachieving and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ because he has a very strong team on the ground , who is organizing , ” Gunn says .
“ I ’ ve heard about Tom Steyer going to family reunions.
” Some observers emphasized that Steyer ’ s investments in the state , which included the decision to hire minority businesses for campaign needs and a cognizant push to bring on local staffers , had resonated with voters .
According to Molly McInerney of Change Research , the polling firm that conducts the Post and Courier ’ s state surveys , Steyer @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and January 2020 .
Among African American voters , Steyer ’ s support spiked from 6 percent in December to 24 percent in January .
In the same time , Biden ’ s support among African American voters dipped from 37 percent to 30 percent , and Sen. Elizabeth Warren saw declines , too .
Sen. Bernie Sanders , meanwhile , has remained relatively steady , with his overall support staying at 20 percent across both months and 16 percent among African American voters .
Dalhi Myers , vice-chair of the Richland County @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Biden supporters who has looked elsewhere .
She now backs Sanders , who she views as a more aspirational candidate .
“ We all started out a Biden family , ” she said of her own parents and sibling .
“ We all thought that Joe Biden was the person to get us to a better place .
I changed my mind because I decided that Joe Biden ’ s prescriptions were all , ‘ let ’ s get back to where we were.
’ ” Based on a ranked-choice poll by FairVote @ @ @ @ @ @ @ votes were distributed across a few candidates : Sanders , Warren , and Steyer were the ones who saw the most gains .
The race is still fluid and will have big stakes for the rest of the primary Much like the elections in Iowa and New Hampshire , there are many voters in South Carolina who are still making up their minds — a contrast to past Democratic primaries in the Palmetto State .
“ This is much more muddled for Democrats than I ’ m used to seeing in South Carolina @ @ @ @ @ @ @ professor Danielle Vinson .
According to the Change Research poll conducted at the end of January , 41 percent of voters had landed on a candidate but said they could still change their minds .
Another 9 percent said that their picks were more up in the air .
The size and characteristics of the Democratic field this cycle could mean a very different South Carolina primary compared to the ones that have taken place in recent elections .
In 2016 and 2008 , Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama won their respective primaries @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 2020 might not be so apparent .
“ It ’ s been an all-or-nothing type of thing .
It ’ s certainly possible we are in a new era without Clinton or Obama in the election , ” Knotts told Vox .
“ You could end up fragmented.
” South Carolina ’ s role in the primary is significant .
It takes place right before the all-important Super Tuesday , which includes 14 states and more than 1,300 delegates .
Given Biden ’ s sluggish start in the primary , South Carolina — @ @ @ @ @ @ @ him to project strength going into the March 3 contests , which also include southern states Alabama , Texas , and North Carolina .
For Biden and other candidates , South Carolina will be a clear marker of how much support they ’ ve been able to secure from African American voters and a signal of their potential viability moving forward .
Candidates that have very little African American support , for example , will be forced to confront why they ’ ve failed to appeal to a critical Democratic constituency — and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ campaigns .
“ For [ Biden ] and any other candidate , that almost is the death knell for their campaigns if they don ’ t do well in South Carolina , ” Cordero told Vox .
South Carolina and Nevada were added in 2008 to the set of four early states that vote in the Democratic primary in an attempt to ensure that voters of color had a say closer to the start of the process .
Since then , no Democratic candidate has won the nomination without South Carolina .
“ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ after South Carolina .
I think it will be a very defining moment and a game-change moment , ” Democratic strategist Antjuan Seawright told Vox .

Joe Biden has banked his presidential campaign on winning South Carolina — a bet that is looking less and less likely to pay off.
For one, the latest polls don’t bode well for the former vice president. While Biden once held a 20-point lead in South Carolina, he was up by just 5 points in a January Post and Courier poll. Similarly, the RealClearPolitics average has him less than 4 points ahead of Sen. Bernie Sanders, followed closely by billionaire activist Tom Steyer.
“Joe Biden didn’t capitalize on the default position he had, and his base of support has eroded,” Anton Gunn, President Barack Obama’s 2008 South Carolina political director, told Vox. “South Carolina voters are smart and they don’t want a campaign that’s on life support.”
Biden has long been counting on a decisive win in South Carolina, a diverse early primary state where the Democratic electorate is 60 percent black. He’s developed a strong base among older black voters, many of whom associate him positively with Obama and see him as the best option to take on President Donald Trump. Tapping into this support is now critical for his floundering campaign.
Biden’s fourth- and fifth-place performances in Iowa and New Hampshire, however, are giving voters some pause. And the direct competition he’s gotten in the state from candidates like Steyer, who has spent significant time, along with more than $18 million on advertising, has offered a marked contrast to his more understated campaign. The former vice president trails several other candidates in the number of events that he’s held in the state up to this point.
“What I have said from the very beginning is that it is presumptuous to think, and certainly to say, that you have the black vote in your pocket,” says Johnnie Cordero, the head of the state’s Democratic Black Caucus, who has endorsed Steyer. Biden’s campaign, however, notes that it has not taken the state for granted and is further building up its ground game as the primary approaches.
For now, Biden is still on track to win South Carolina — albeit at margins that are much less favorable to him than the ones he was seeing in polls last year. A close victory by Biden is sure to hold less sway moving forward than what was once expected to be a landslide. But, as his campaign adds, the margin of victory might still surpass what we’ve seen candidates achieve in other early states. The results, too, could point to the fracturing of Biden’s support from older black voters, a constituency that’s central to many other primary states down the line.
“If he was previously going to win by 15 points and now he wins by 5, that allows him to limp into Super Tuesday,” Gunn says.
The Biden camp has been counting on South Carolina, but its presence in the state has been lackluster
For months, Biden’s aides have tried to cushion potentially lukewarm showings in Iowa and New Hampshire and hinted that South Carolina is where he’d really take off.
On the night of the New Hampshire primary, Biden himself decamped to South Carolina in order to hold another campaign event and process the results. “I want you all to think of a number: 99.9 percent,” he told supporters. “That’s the percentage of African American voters who have not yet had a chance to vote in America.”
Biden’s reliance on the state makes a lot of sense: If he could pull off a 20-point win there, he’d go into Super Tuesday — just three days later — riding a swell of momentum. And he was polling far ahead of pretty much everyone for months, buoyed by his connection to Obama and deep in-state ties.
“I think we’re going to support somebody we know. And the only person who’s favored by this analysis is Joe Biden,” said South Carolina State Sen. Marlon Kimpson, a Biden backer.
Treating South Carolina as a guaranteed victory, though, has been perceived as a misstep by both political observers and voters.
Biden’s disappointing finishes so far haven’t done much to instill confidence in his ability to win, let alone bolster the case he’s made for himself as the most “electable” candidate. Although the outcome in South Carolina is set to be very different from both Iowa and New Hampshire, research by College of Charleston political science professor Gibbs Knotts finds that the first two states do have some effect on the Palmetto State.
“Are we disappointed? Yes,” Kimpson acknowledged. “Because one of the arguments is that Joe Biden would appeal to white working-class workers.”
But the recent election results aren’t the only thing that has contributed to concerns about Biden’s candidacy. Despite his repeated allusions to the state as an important base for him, he also hasn’t held quite as many events as other frontrunners, a proxy for face time, in the state.
According to a tracker from the Post and Courier, Biden has held 24 events in South Carolina, coming in behind other candidates who’ve already dropped out including Rep. Tim Ryan and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro. Other frontrunners like Steyer and Sanders, meanwhile, have held 40 and 35 events each.
When it comes to staffing, too, Biden lags both Steyer and Sanders. Steyer now has 102 staffers in the state while Sanders has 70 — and Biden has 60 and counting. And, according to CNN, Steyer has spent more than $18.7 million in advertising aimed at South Carolinians, while as of last week Biden had spent $857,000.
These two factors — Biden’s recent defeats and his less-than-robust presence on the ground — have both been called out as reasons he’s seen an erosion in support.
Both Steyer and Sanders are close behind Biden, but they probably won’t surpass him
The candidate who’s seen the largest gains in recent months is Steyer, driven heavily by his increase in spending as well as the targeted emphasis he’s put on the state’s black voters.
“I think Tom Steyer is overachieving, and I think his ability to overachieve is because he has a very strong team on the ground, who is organizing,” Gunn says. “I’ve heard about Tom Steyer going to family reunions.”
Some observers emphasized that Steyer’s investments in the state, which included the decision to hire minority businesses for campaign needs and a cognizant push to bring on local staffers, had resonated with voters.
According to Molly McInerney of Change Research, the polling firm that conducts the Post and Courier’s state surveys, Steyer saw a 13-point jump between December 2019 and January 2020. Among black voters, his support spiked from 6 percent in December to 24 percent in January. In the same time, Biden’s support among black voters dipped from 37 percent to 30 percent, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren saw declines, too.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, meanwhile, has remained relatively steady, with his overall support staying at 20 percent across both months and 16 percent among black voters.
Dalhi Myers, vice chair of the Richland County Council, is one of the former Biden supporters who has looked elsewhere. She now backs Sanders, whom she views as a more aspirational candidate.
“We all started out a Biden family,” she said of her parents and sibling. “We all thought that Joe Biden was the person to get us to a better place. I changed my mind because I decided that Joe Biden’s prescriptions were all, ‘Let’s get back to where we were.’”
Based on a ranked-choice poll by FairVote from December, Biden’s second-choice votes were distributed across a few candidates: Sanders, Warren, and Steyer were the ones who saw the most gains.
The race is still fluid and will have big stakes for the rest of the primary
As with the elections in Iowa and New Hampshire, many voters in South Carolina are still making up their minds — a contrast to past Democratic primaries in the state.
“This is much more muddled for Democrats than I’m used to seeing in South Carolina,” says Furman University political science professor Danielle Vinson.
According to the Change Research poll conducted at the end of January, 41 percent of voters had landed on a candidate but said they could still change their minds. Another 9 percent said that their picks were more up in the air.
The size and characteristics of the Democratic field this cycle could mean a very different South Carolina primary compared to the ones that have taken place in recent elections. In 2016 and 2008, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama won their respective primaries by double-digit margins. A victory in 2020 might not be so apparent.
“It’s been an all-or-nothing type of thing. It’s certainly possible we are in a new era without Clinton or Obama in the election,” Knotts told Vox. “You could end up fragmented.”
South Carolina’s role in the primary is significant. It takes place right before the all-important Super Tuesday, which includes 14 states and more than 1,300 delegates.
Given Biden’s sluggish start in the primary, South Carolina — along with Nevada — remains important for him to project strength going into the March 3 contests, which also include the Southern states Alabama, Texas, and North Carolina.
For Biden and other candidates, South Carolina will be a clear marker of how much support they’ve been able to secure from black voters and a signal of their potential viability moving forward. Candidates that have very little support from black voters, for example, will be forced to confront why they’ve failed to appeal to a critical Democratic constituency — and, possibly, the end of their campaigns.
“For [Biden] and any other candidate, that almost is the death knell for their campaigns if they don’t do well in South Carolina,” Cordero told Vox.
South Carolina and Nevada were added in 2008 to the set of four early states that vote in the Democratic primary in an attempt to ensure that voters of color had a say closer to the start of the process. Since then, no Democratic candidate has won the nomination without South Carolina.
“One of the hard resets will happen after South Carolina. I think it will be a very defining moment and a game-change moment,” Democratic strategist Antjuan Seawright told Vox.