Greetings.

This is not an episode of The Dig.

It is me, Daniel Denver, the host of The Dig, but it's me appearing on another podcast.

Citation's needed.

A wonderful program about the intersection of media, PR, and power, hosted by Nima Shirazi

and Adam Johnson.

The interview they did with me is about this commonplace argument that so-called wokeness,

left or liberal identity politics, is what's driving people, particularly working class

white men, into MAGA.

Regular listeners to The Dig will know that I do certainly think that there are harmful

forms of identity politics, forms that liberal elites deploy to displace anti-racist working

class struggles in favor of spectacles of representation and recognition.

I had a really great discussion about that just a few months back with political scientist

Jared Clemens.

But even the notion that those harmful and obnoxious forms of identity politics are the primary

cause of working class white realignment to the right is, as I argue in this interview,

simply absurd.

The Democratic Party, alongside the Republicans and capitalists, eviscerated the power of

labor unions, the very institutions that mediated and mediate working class people's political

relationships, including their relationship to the Democratic Party.

Indeed, the new Democrats under Bill Clinton actively and explicitly sought to sell out

their working class base and find a new constituency with affluent professional suburbanites,

...