Supporters of class-based identity will conflate their goals with those of the populists, but the ideas are parallel, not identical. Populist movements alternately either avoided or derided the issues of minority status. Their persistence throughout American politics has allowed class to serve as an acceptable form of identity politics. By folding in the economic struggles of farmers, miners, and laborers, the earliest constructs of identity politics nimbly evaded confrontation with the intersections of other identities, like race, gender, and sexual orientation. However, as those issues
...more
