Corporate Democrats are weaponizing identity politics to smear progressives | Arwa Mahdawi

Before we get started, some ground rules. You are, of course, completely free to disagree with everything I have to say here. However, doing so might mean that you’re racist, homophobic and/or sexist. (Not to boast, but I have a lot of oppression cards to play.) So, you might want to tread carefully, OK?That might sound ridiculous, but I don’t make the rules: I’m just taking a page from the corporate Democrat playbook. From Haley Stevens to Hakeem Jeffries, cynically weaponizing identity politics to ward off reasonable criticism seems to be all the rage.Let’s start with the soon-to-be-irrelevant Stevens who, as you may have noticed, is an adult human female. The Michigan representative is also a sore loser who attempted to torpedo Abdul El-Sayed’s senate campaign by endorsing his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, at the 11th hour.But don’t you dare quibble with her about any of that or she’ll cry sexism. In a softball interview with conservative commentator Scott Jennings before the midterms, Stevens seemed to imply that sexism played a part in why she wasn’t invited to an El-Sayed campaign event.“I gave [El-Sayed] an opportunity ... to unite around something that everyone could agree on, and then I got disinvited instead,” Stevens told Jennings. “This is what happens to women.”Stevens must have been born with an inability to experience embarrassment because, after El-Sayed won, she doubled down on this cringe weaponization of feminism. “For me, living my beliefs was never measured by who would win at the ballot box,” she posted in a lengthy essay on Twitter/X. “As a woman, I have the right to make a decision and to change my mind.”As a woman, I have the right to change the subject now and move on to Hakeem Jeffries, who is expected to be the next speaker of the House.Not everyone is thrilled by this for a number of reasons. There is the fact that he is very chummy with Aipac (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee), for example. Not only has he received money from the group, but Aipac has publicly boasted about supporting him. And on Thursday, Jeffries refused to say whether he supported or opposed controversial efforts to integrate the US and Israeli militaries.Jeffries also said this summer that he opposes Medicare for All, reversing his earlier position, and putting him at odds with a number of progressive Democrats who campaigned on the platform.He’s been consistently hostile to the progressive faction of his party, refusing to endorse Mamdani for New York City mayor for months. And it was recently revealed that Jeffries met with Jared Kushner in private before the midterms, which did not go down very well.“The American people demanded impeachment!” one protester yelled at Jeffries during an event on Friday. “Your version of accountability is shaking hands with the Trump family!”Many progressives view Jeffries as an establishment figure who offers no hope for meaningful change and want someone less beholden to corporate interests to be speaker. Jeffries and some of his allies, meanwhile, have suggested that denying him the opportunity to become the first Black speaker in US history would be, to quote Bloomberg, “racially insensitive”.During the June congressional primaries, when a picture of Jeffries came up on the screen at a victory party for Claire Valdez, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, the crowd yelled: “You’re next!”“It was very interesting to me, as observed by others, that there was almost zero diversity in that crowd,” Jeffries said in a CNN interview this week.I don’t know about that crowd, but there’s plenty of diversity amongst DSA-affiliated politicians. Zohran Mamdani, the first Muslim mayor of New York, is a DSA member. So are Nithya Raman and Janeese Lewis George, who just got elected as the respective mayors of Los Angeles and Washington DC. DSA members David Morales and Yousef Rabhi are going to be the next mayors of Providence, Rhode Island, and Ann Arbor, Michigan.If we’re going to continue to play identity politics, I should note all six of the DSA candidates elected to the House were Black, brown, or from marginalized backgrounds. You can certainly argue that DSA supporters skew white, but painting it as some sort of racist organization, as Jeffries seems to be doing, is intellectually dishonest.And we’ve seen this craven use of identity politics to smear progressive politics before, haven’t we? It’s the Bernie bros playbook all over again.Despite the fact that some polls found that young women supported Bernie Sanders in greater numbers than young men in the 2016 primaries, Sanders’ supporters were portrayed as misogynistic bros. Hillary Clinton’s campaign may not have coined the term, but they leaned heavily into this bad-faith narrative.Let’s not have a Bernie bros 2.0 moment, please. While a petition to make the progressive Massachusetts congresswoman Ayanna Pressley the speaker of the House reached around 100,000 signatures on Friday, Jeffries faces no real challengers. He is almost certainly going to be the next speaker.Instead of responding to criticism with identity politics, Jeffries has an opportunity to listen to reasonable concerns about his leadership and build a broad coalition that includes progressives instead of sidelining them. And that’s my opinion as a woman.Hungary eases abortion laws amid women’s rights reforms“We are proposing a comprehensive package of measures to curb all forms of violence against women, for the safety ⁠and dignity of Hungarian women,” the prime minister Peter Magyar said on Thursday. Magyar put an end to 16 years of soft autocracy by the far-right Viktor Orbán when he won a resounding election victory in April.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAfghan women are unable to get medical help“While there is no publicly announced restriction on male dentists treating women, a ban appears to have spread across the country,” the Guardian reports. “In most provinces, male doctors have also received orders and directives from the Taliban instructing them not to examine female patients.”Woman in Saudi Arabia sentenced to 100 lashes for giving birth outside marriage“It just shows the hypocrisy behind so-called Saudi reform,” the activist Maryam Aldossari told the Guardian. “We know MBS [Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince] has been trying to show the world that Saudi is becoming a modern country that empowers women, yet we see the court sentence a mother to 100 lashes.” Large swathes of the western press have been complicit in whitewashing Prince Mohammed (who has been described as a “psychopath” by an exiled intelligence officer), when it’s always been clear his “reforms” are a hollow PR exercise.What is Sad Nipple Syndrome?“People describe it as a sudden dysphoria … that follows nipple stimulation,” the Guardian writes. There’s not much scientific research into it, and it’s not an official medical diagnosis, but there are a lot of interesting theories.Even with Netanyahu gone, the killing won’t stop in Gaza“It is all too convenient to cast Netanyahu – wanted by the international criminal court for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity – as the bogeyman,” writes Owen Jones. “But the dehumanisation of Palestinians is so extreme that even their youngest, most defenceless members are regarded as legitimate targets by leading figures in both government and opposition.”Can we please stop using the phrase ‘honey trap’?Following revelations of Jensen Huang’s affair with a woman thought to be a Chinese spy, that phrase is everywhere. “The story behind the phrase is that a good, hardworking man was minding his own business when a serpent of a woman lured him off the righteous path by dishonest means and propositions he, being a man, simply couldn’t refuse,” writes Laëtitia Vitaud for FastCompany. “Can a 63-year-old billionaire CEO really be supposed to have no say over his sex life? Like a bear wouldn’t be able to resist honey?”The young women driving the US prenup boomWhile prenups may be all the rage right now, guess who doesn’t appear to have one? Jensen Huang’s wife.The week in pawtriarchyRemember poor Peanut the squirrel? He was euthanized by New York authorities and turned into a parable about Democratic government overreach by JD Vance. Now the squirrel’s former owner has been detained by ICE and may be deported. Is Vance going to come to her rescue? Somehow I do nut think so. Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist