Can I recognize winning when it happens?  That's the question behind this post, really.  

Some background:

Since before 2016, I've been having an argument with friends and colleagues over whether identity or economic issues are more powerful political motivators for people in our current situation.  In fact many of us, around the world, are having this argument.  It's an old argument--it goes back to Marxist analyses, in fact, which people like me see as too-ruthlessly reductionistic.  Our opponents mostly disagree, and think that identity issues--race, sex, gender, nationality--are more or less "superstructures" on a material economic interest.  This is why you hear so many people talk about "voting against their interests."  They cannot see that the "interests" they think people are voting against are not really the interests they care about at all. Or so I think.

Well, it seems that again and again, the data has shown the "identity trumps class" case to be stronger, and that "economic interest" arguments are not supported by the evidence.  The latest piece summarizing the findings--now amplified by the live experiments of the Corbyn Labour campaign in December of last year, and Sanders's primary campaign that just ended--is out now.  It's not surprising that I think this is a good piece.  The following few paragraphs lay out part of what I find compelling about it (but note, I have serious questions to raise after you've read these):

Sanders had success in shifting the Democratic Party in his direction on policy. But the strategy for winning power embraced by his partisans depended on a mythologized and out-of-date theory of blue-collar political behavior, one that assumes that a portion of the electorate is crying out for socialism on the basis of their class interest. Identity, in all its complexities, appears to be far more powerful in shaping voters’ behaviors than the material interests given pride of place in Marxist theory.…

There used to be a time when this kind of class politics was quite powerful — both in the United States and, especially, in Europe. For much of the 20th century, one’s class was a powerful predictor of who won was likely to vote for across the Western world.

Yet this has changed. In recent decades, the Alford Index — a metric political scientists use to measure the role of class in voting patterns — has been in decline across Western democracies. The working class is no longer overwhelmingly likely to support left-wing parties, the upper classes no longer joined by their support for right-leaning ones.

Instead, class division has been replaced by education divides. Highly educated high income voters have tended to defect to center-left parties — think doctors — while non-college low-income voters have defected to the right. This reflects the fact that debates over social issues like immigration and gender roles, rather than issues of material redistribution, are the primary cleavages dividing Western publics. Attitudes surrounding tolerance and diversity, not redistribution, are the clearest predictor of which kind of party you’re interested in supporting nowadays.…

The problem is a theory of change that assumes the outcome it’s aiming for. The goal of socialist politics is to reactivate the working class as a political force, but a sweeping wave in a national primary or general election is a really tough place to do that. Socialist rhetoric and policy platforms aren’t enough to change the deep logics that guide the way voters think about the world, which centers on identity issues like partisanship, race, and immigration.

You can see this problem at work in some of the American data on white working class ideology. A new survey of all white voters by YouGov, on behalf of Data for Progress, asked voters a battery of questions about their view of government and economic policy. Whites who fit the Sanders 2016 coalition profile — non-college, rural, low-income — were consistently less likely to express support for social democratic ideas.

For example, YouGov’s pollsters asked respondents whether government had gotten bigger because “the problems we face have become bigger” or government had “has gotten involved in things that people should do for themselves.” College-educated whites picked the former over the latter by a 53-47 margin, while non-college whites said the opposite by a sizable 41-59 margin.

Similarly, voters were asked what they believed was closer to their views: “the less government, the better” or “there are more things that government should be doing.” By a 58-42 margin, rural voters opted for the former over the latter.

OK.  It's pretty compelling.  At least, it is for me.  I agree--I've always agreed.  It's confirming my priors!  My presumptions are right!  Truth is mine!!  Everyone else in the world is wrong!!

Isn't that special.  But the question is, once we have this knowledge, what do we do now?  Or, as a more recent work puts it: what comes next?

Here's what I mean.  I think I've been so focused on this argument because I find the other position so infuriatingly blind to things that I think are manifestly obvious.  And so I concentrated my attention on winning the argument.  But once the argument is won, what do we do with this knowledge?  I suppose that's what political thinking is about--not gloating, not revelling in your triumphs, but moving forward to capitalize on success, or achieved insight.

It's not at all clear to me what precisely this insight gets us.  Is it that liberal politics must find a way to reformulate a concept of identity powerful enough to appeal but also inclusive enough to encompass the broader electorate on the left?  Should there be multiple strategies employed?  A diversity of idioms?  Or once we realize that people act out of their identities, ought we to treat that not as something to be exploited, but something to be acknowledged as a danger, and work around it?  (That seems to be the way that some people think about identity--not me, though.)

Anyway, I'm realizing now that victory in this philosophical contest is not victory in the political contest to come.  That latter matter still looms.