After LBJ's landslide in 1964, the Democratic consensus, according to Hunter S. Thompson in Songs of the Doomed, was that "The GOP was doomed, like the Whigs, to a cheap and meaningless fate."
   Today we hear many of the same predictions concerning the Republicans demographic problems in the Washington Post, New Republic, NY Times and all over the political blogs.
   The consensus is that all the Democrats have to do is wait, and the electoral victories will roll in.
There is no doubt that we will hear more delusional talk about demographics should Hillary win next week.

For forty years the Democrats have made a fundamental mistake, and there doesn't appear to be any effort to fix this problem.
    Thomas Frank, author of What's the matter with Kansas?, explained it in no uncertain terms.

 As I tried to make plain back in 2004, the big political change of the last 40 years didn’t happen solely because conservatives invented catchy conspiracy theories, but also because Democrats let it happen. Democrats essentially did nothing while their pals in organized labor were clubbed to the ground; they leaped enthusiastically into action, however, when it was time to pass NAFTA and repeal Glass-Steagall. Working-class voters had nowhere else to go, they seem to have calculated, and — whoops! — they were wrong.

 White voters, loyal New Deal Democrats for decades, abandoned the Democratic Party when the Democrats abandoned them.
Why should millennials be any different? Especially after how the primaries went.

And, naturally, liberals backing the Queen of Chaos have conveniently ignored the release of DNC emails proving that the Democratic primary was rigged in favor of Clinton and against Bernie Sanders. There’s far too much cognitive dissonance created by simultaneously recognizing the reality of how this election has already been stolen, and still supporting Hillary Clinton. Orwellian doublethink seems to be a prerequisite for being a card-carrying liberal Democrat these days. Not only must they ignore how Clinton stole the nomination from Sanders, they must also ignore the steaming piles of evidence proving the entire election is a sham; Debord and Baudrillard would be so proud.

I've lately come to realize that the Identity Politics that have come to dominate the political landscape of late, looks suspiciously like the Lifestyle Marketing that dominates the consumer culture.

  What got me thinking about this was the excellent documentary series The Century of the Self by Adam Curtis.
While the series is largely about marketing, public relations and how psychoanalysis fit into that, he also addresses how politicians have used the same tools.

  Consider for a moment car commercials. I remember growing up that car commercials at least mentioned what was in the car.
Now its difficult to determine what product exactly they are selling.
  The reason is because they aren't selling a product. They are selling a lifestyle. Simply put, you are what you drive.

  Adam Curtis identified the moment that this idea of marketing lifestyles to voters was adopted by politicians - Clinton's 1996 campaign. Like you being the car you drive, you are now the skin color, or gender, or sexual orientation, or other lifestyle defining attribute that you vote.
  Naomi Klein noticed this trend years before I did.

 Once we'd embarked on a search for new wells of cutting-edge imagery, our insistence on extreme sexual and racial identities made for great brand-content and niche-marketing strategies. If diversity was what we wanted, the brands seemed to be saying, then diversity was exactly what we would get. And with that, the marketers and media makers swooped down, air-brushes in hand, to touch up the colors and images in our culture...
   The shift in attitude was not the result of a mass political conversion but of some hard economic calculations. According to Rocking the Ages, a book produced in 1997 by leading U.S. consumer researchers Yankelovich Partners, “Diversity” was the “defining idea” for Gen-Xers, as opposed to “Individuality” for boomers and “Duty” for their parents.

 It's easy to dismiss this thinking, but the simple fact of the matter is that it works and we need to understand it.

Identity politics enabled many formerly silenced and displaced groups to emerge from the margins of power and dominant culture to reassert and reclaim suppressed identities and experiences; but in doing so, they often substituted one master narrative for another, invoked a politics of separatism, and suppressed differences within their own 'liberatory' narratives."
- Henry Giroux

 However, there is a natural limitation to what these groups can do, and even more importantly, there is a natural side effect from these movements: i.e. they are divisive by their very existence and definition.
  What's more, they all exist on the liberal side of the political spectrum where there is more toleration for excesses.

  And that's where the problem is, because the concept of the New Deal democratic tradition is based on a society of inclusiveness and working together for a common goal. Indentity Politics is incompatible with this idea.
  Historian Arthur Schlesinger writes that "movements for civil rights should aim toward full acceptance and integration of marginalized groups into the mainstream culture, rather than...perpetuating that marginalization through affirmations of difference."

Yet solidarity is the exact opposite of what liberals believe today. In it's place is hyper-sensitivity to differences.

Identity politics provides cover for, and diversion from, class rule and from the deeper structures of class, race, gender, empire, and eco-cide that haunt American and global life today – structures that place children of liberal white North Side Chicago professionals in posh 40th-story apartments overlooking scenic Lake Michigan while consigning children of felony-branded Black custodians and fast food workers to cramped apartments in crime-ridden South Side neighborhoods where nearly half the kids are growing up at less than half the federal government’s notoriously inadequate poverty level.

It's fair to compare this pursuit of purity of thought as an echo of another age, when the target was heretics and the objective was to purge our society of sin.
   The narcissism and Identity Politics go hand-in-hand. Statements that appear on face value to be about something entirely different, are actually all about you and something that offends you.
  What's more, the hurt feelings of any one person becomes more important that any form of political debate by the greater society. Not only that, the offense doesn't even have to be real because the hurt feelings are real and that is the only thing that matters.

“People who think with their epidermis or their genitalia or their clan are the problem to begin with. One does not banish this specter by invoking it. If I would not vote against someone on the grounds of 'race' or 'gender' alone, then by the exact same token I would not cast a vote in his or her favor for the identical reason. Yet see how this obvious question makes fairly intelligent people say the most alarmingly stupid things.”
― Christopher Hitchens

This oversensitivity has gone to such levels that it is harming the people that want to support it. Consider this blog essay where someone who is genuinely progressive minded is emotionally torn by what can be described as abuses against "good people pushed out and marginalized in left-wing circles because they didn’t use the proper set of social and class signals to satisfy the world of intersectional politics."

“If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him”
-  Cardinal Richelieu

The entire purpose of identity politics, and it's identical twin, cultural politics, is to serve the ruling elite.

My only reservation here as to the question of the candidates’ essential sameness is that, in opposition to my radical colleagues, I view cultural politics less as a test of fundamental civil liberties and civil rights than as a popular diversion from the democratization of structure, power, and the abrogation of imperialism, nuclear war, and racial discrimination.
I know how unpopular such a position is among radicals, and yes, as separate issues I’d of course favor abortion rights and those pertaining to the LGBT community as essential to the wider process of democratization, but (a) less so than equitable income-and-wealth distribution, and (b) on condition that, unlike Clinton, who treats them in a vacuum, the issues such as abortion are joined to wider issues on war and peace, corporate power, indeed, the retention of capitalism, especially in its present form. Conceivably, one could advocate for the full range of demands in cultural politics, and still favor centrist fascism in its systemic-structural-cultural attributes. Clinton embodies such a view, which is one reason I think she cannot be sufficiently distinguished from Trump. Wall Street can absorb cultural politics; it cannot, by definition, steps leading to the advent of socialism. Authenticity of, and gradations of, radicalism are matters of extreme importance, not simply for analytical purposes, but on the practice of capitalistic absorption of discontent. Currently, cultural politics are the help-mate of the status quo.

Where Identity Politics, Political Correctness, intersectional politics, or whatever term you want to use for what is happening on the progressive side of politics today has gone totally off the rails:

   It's lost its sense of humor.

  This to me is a line in the sand. Any political movement that can't laugh at itself is not a political movement worth being associated with.
  So what proof is there that Identity Politics progressives have lost their sense of humor? Ask almost any professional comedian out there.
 Bill Maher and Dennis Miller
 John Cleese
 Jerry Seinfeld
   That's just to name a few.
  Oh, wait. Those are all white males, so that disqualifies them, right? No. What would disqualify them is if they aren't funny. They know comedy, so their opinions on comedy matter.
  But in case that logic isn't enough for you, consider what Chris Rock said.

 I stopped playing colleges... [it's] their willingness not to offend anybody. Kids raised on a culture of “We’re not going to keep score in the game because we don’t want anybody to lose.” Or just ignoring race to a fault. You can’t say “the black kid over there.” No, it’s “the guy with the red shoes.” You can’t even be offensive on your way to being inoffensive.
...This is not as much fun as it used to be.

  I remember making fun of conservatives back in the 80's and 90's, and telling them how they were typifying the stereotype of the "humorless conservative". Progressives have shot themselves in the foot by giving away one of their most powerful weapons.
The old Daily Show crew should take note of this warning.

Many of the most effective ideas and weapons of the right were originally created by the left and then warped and twisted to be used against the people they were supposed to have helped. Don't be surprised when they censorious nature of Identity Politics and Political Correctness is adopted by the right and used against us before long.

The good news is that a Hillary victory will probably be the beginning of the downfall of identity politics.

The presence of a Democrat in the nominal top U.S. job can be usefully instructive for young workers and citizens. It helps demonstrate the richly bipartisan nature of the American plutocracy and Empire. The people need to see and experience how the intolerable misery and oppression imposed by capitalism and its evil twin imperialism live on when Democrats hold the White House. At the same time, the presence of a Republican in the White House tends to fuel the illusion among progressives and others that the main problem in the country is that the wrong party holds executive power and that all energy and activism must be directed at fixing that.
...
But there’s more good news here about a Hillary presidency. Not all Democratic presidents are equally good at shutting progressive activism down. As the likely Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein (for whom I took five minutes to early vote in a “contested state” three weeks ago) noted in an interview with me last April, Hillary Clinton will have considerably less capacity to deceive and bamboozle progressive and young workers and citizens than Barack Obama enjoyed in 2007-08. “Obama,” Stein noted, was fairly new on the scene. Hillary,” by contrast, “has been a warmonger who never found a war she didn’t love forever!” Hillary’s corporatist track record – ably documented in Doug Henwood’s book My Turn: Hillary Clinton Targets the Presidency (her imperial track record receives equally impressive treatment in Diana Johnstone’s volume Queen of Chaos: The Misadventures of Hillary Clinton) – is also long and transparently bad. All that and Mrs. Clinton’s remarkable lacks of charisma and trustworthiness could be useful for left activism and politics in coming years.

It's more than likely that Democrats will be eating their own in four years.