By David Bittinger | December 19, 2025

Identity politics are still the clogged heart of America’s largest political party — still! It’s been decades since grocery stores stopped plaguing shoppers with elevator-rock music and that long wait in line while some goof writes a check for a loaf of bread. But after decades of contrary evidence, Democrats still believe their resentment-mongering identity politics are good for the country.

Utopian belief survives failure. That’s reflected in the party’s star players now proudly identifying as Democratic Socialists. The heart is ailing, the diagnosis wrong, but the beat goes on.

Politicizing inborn identities became the Democrats’ main 20th century agenda when they had no other marketable ideas. In this century, their racial pandering and demands for identity obedience are producing diminishing domestic popularity; hence, their free everything for countless millions of the world’s impoverished recruited progressives.

Meanwhile, they’ve moved on to a class-focused version of identity politics, one they never acknowledge. Having become increasingly attached to rich elites and the dependent poor, increasingly far-left Dems gradually abandoned people in the middle. Easy decision. The middlers kept getting poorer and less easily herded.

Their political calculations quietly produced a diffuse unworthy identity: the private-sector middle class, the middle outside Democrats’ warm embrace of 23.5 million government jobs (a huge majority unionized and voting for the correct party).

Have you been seeing fewer middle class people lately and far fewer happy ones? Look soon before they disappear. Or just look at California, where a middle class once large and healthy now has two options: accept more misery enforced by tax-happy, incompetent government or join the flight to a less miserable state.

If your identity is now deemed ignorable by progressive deemers, well, too bad for you. Like the no-bail, anti-prosecution policies that put repeat criminals back on streets of the cities Democrats control, middle class invisibility is a doctrine they don’t talk about.

Dems never gave up the politics of racial identity. Broad-minded, they expanded their reach to include Hispanic / Latino, Asian, Native American, and Pacific Islander (of course, not Long Islander).

Then they took identity politics international. In a 2019 presidential debate, Joe Biden — at that point still able to recite talking points carefully explained to him — addressed a global identity. He urged potential immigrants to “surge to the border” as “people are seeking asylum.”

That promoted an enlarged parade to the U.S. of 10 -15 million more of the world’s indigent or criminal, hardly any being political victims, virtually all eager for free food and shelter, free education and health care, and — for certain street merchants — ready cash customers.

There’s also a religious identity favored by Democrats, now an important constituency for them in two northern states. It’s not Christian.

I probably missed some other worthy identities. Please don’t send me to re-education camp.

One identity ineligible for Democrats’ political merchandising remains obvious. It includes most hockey fans, most collectors of vintage lunch boxes, most people who dance awkwardly — you know, people who find croquet exciting.

Of course, gender identity is also marketable now. If you missed the lettered identity update (I did until I looked it up just now) it’s grown to LGBTQIA+. The boring traditional option is now called cisgender or cis, potentially confusing, especially if you have a sister you called “Sis.” Identity politics keep getting more challenging.

The Socialist-Marxist left now raging through our streets and the pages of The New York Times keeps villainizing the especially unworthy identities electorally (the 77 million who voted for you-know-whom) and recognized dermatologically (you might have noticed them ballroom dancing).

Since Democrats can’t pander to everyone, this identity abandonment required a trade-off. So, they off-loaded a class they’d earlier claimed to champion, though that claim was then delivered on black-and-white televisions.

During the Obama years their message shifted from “We’re all for the working people” to “You people should learn how to code.”

Consider the private-sector middle class blithely abandoned by Democrat strategists in the 21st century: small business owners, tradespeople, mid-level corporate employees, self-reliant entrepreneurs, self-employed strugglers, people who don’t live on government paychecks, people whose economic security has been strangled while the left’s identity politics conversation consumed all the oxygen.

“Plutocracy,” is defined as” a country or society governed by the wealthy.” Democrats’ 21st century politics might be called Two-Tiered Plutocracy. Seems strange that a political party can thrive on two dramatically polar bases:

— one fueled by the fortunes and posturing of the doctrinally-educated wealthy, these worthies safe behind gated walls and lifetime security

— one scraping by in failing cities with street camps, depended on to produce large voting majorities and never-ending appetites for government support

But one party is sure trying.

Democrats’ dual focus on big-money interests and little-money interests actually makes cynical sense. They established a polarized power base that no longer needed the riff-raff declining in the middle.

When your “progressive” movement is tight with the likes of Bill Gates and George Soros, The New York Times and most every faculty except Hillsdale’s, plus everyone whose survival depends on government benefits or paychecks, you don’t need Linda the landscaper or some guy struggling to make a living on a small feed store in Iowa.

Criticism of identity politics needn’t deny that real discrimination has occurred or that addressing its remnant is valid. It does raise the question of whether identity politics has become a substitute for economic justice rather than an advancement of it.

So, if you’re in the shrinking private-sector middle class, how worthy is your identity? As judged by the left’s legacy media, faculty lounges everywhere, Hollywood and TV elites, and the party being overtaken by the faction that wants to “seize the means of production,” you’re not just unworthy, you’re unseen.

You might have voted for the presidential candidate recently described by Rep. Nancy Pelosi (soon retiring after running Congress and a magical investment portfolio for what seemed like forever) as “. . . just a vile creature. The worst thing on the face of the Earth.” Your vote and 77 million others made that vile creature victorious, even though only defeating a candidate who spoke in giggling baby talk.

Trump populism seems to have slightly turned back the tide of middle-class marginalization. But the forces behind Two-Tiered Plutocracy, perpetually contemptuous about everything outside government control, will never give up. Their war against capitalism has angry armies of seizure on both coasts, Chicago, even the “Minnesota Nice” Twin Cities.

Decent armies need to fight back with ballots and common sense. At least as much as the entitled rich and the patronized poor, America’s once-healthy middle class is worth saving. The alternative is the United States of California.

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Correctly foreseeing that Chicago would in the future elect mayors far dumber than Bilandic, Bittinger moved from Chicago to a cheese-based land just north. It felt familiar because its Democrats were also enthusiastic about tax gouging and election conniving. He misses proximity to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the occasional victorious White Sox game, but enjoys writing for JKN’s savvy subscribers and still lives for the day when he can tell the Packers fans who surround him, “Hey there, Cheesy, who sucks now?”