political Universalism is a scam. It is a cowardly response to the alt-right. The alt-right openly espouses white supremacy. Universalism pretends that white supremacy will end if the Left simply doesn’t mention race. From an excellent takedown of Universalism by Leo Casey in Dissent Magazine

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/perils-of-universalism-race-clas...

The political path to uniting Americans into a powerful citizenry that can successfully defend democracy is one that involves the open embrace of our multiracial character, with the explicit recognition that the citizenship rights of racialized others are being targeted and must be defended by all. It is the crafting of a new response to the famous litany of German pastor Martin Niemöller on the rise of Nazism: “first they came for the Muslims, and we said . . . not in our nation and not on our watch: Muslims are our fellow citizens.”

Some critics of identity politics dispute this conclusion as a matter of political strategy, while being careful not to question its moral authority. More than a few have accepted at face value the political analysis Trump political commissar Steve Bannon gave to American Prospect editor Robert Kuttner in an unsolicited interview from the Trump White House last August. “The Democrats,” he said, “the longer they talk about identity politics, I got ’em. I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.” Bannon uttered these words in the wake of the violent white supremacist and neo-Nazi demonstrations in Charlottesville, and after Trump refused to unequivocally condemn them. By all accounts, he urged Trump to adopt that stance: Bannon has long stoked white racial fear and resentment. It is certainly not an emphasis on race and identity in general that Bannon sees as politically deadly: rather, it is a politics of resistance to racism.

Yet there is something to be learned from Bannon’s alternative to identity politics, his “economic nationalism.” The economic and social damage caused by corporate globalization and “free trade” over the last four decades provides fertile ground for the cultivation of a politics that promises to undo it. One powerful source of the unexpected appeal of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign lay in the anti-corporate politics he advocated as a response to globalization.

For Bannon, economic nationalism is the way he seeks to combine his racialized appeal to white, working-class people with a larger conception of American self-interest. If he is successful, the two elements will merge: the economic well-being of the nation will be equated with the needs of white working people, and vice versa.

Rather than docilely accepting Bannon’s judgment that anti-racist politics are a death knell for Democrats, we should be asking ourselves what our plan for establishing an alternative political hegemony is. How do we identify the elements that are central to our values and critical in responding to the crisis of democracy, such as anti-racism, with a broader vision of the national interest and future? That road leads not through a binary opposition between the “universalism” of citizenship and class and the “particularity” of race, gender, and sexual identity, but in the hard work of constructing real political agency out of conceptions of “citizen” and “worker” that are opposed to racism, sexism, and homophobia at their core.

Too often, the American left operates as if a hegemonic political project on this order can be constructed through acts of recognition that employ a politics of symbols and gestures alone. It is tacitly assumed that once the left embraces the idea of a diverse mosaic of American citizenry and speaks in the name of a multiracial working class, the essential labor has been done.https://youtu.be/XbtNJMqAI-I

AA linked to video snippets of Joanna Williams ranting about identity politics. In the rant Williams criticizes #MeToo and the “demands” of transgenders to be accepted. Williams notes that she would probably fare better associating with white men than joining with women. Williams wants Universalism. She terrifies me. I’m looking at the mess that is the Kavanaugh nomination. Old white guys are deciding how charges against Kavanaugh will be handled. I would like to see at least some women in power involved in the decision. I believe Identity Politics has a useful role here.

Link to the panel discussion featuring Joanna Williams

https://youtu.be/XbtNJMqAI-I

When I hear demands for Universalism and for identity politics to go away. I am reminded of Martin Niemöller 

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Universalism wants me to shut up and wait for them to come for me.