I wrote a lot, which believe it or not I try not to do, so to summarize I'll just say this: your argument, essentially, is that given a stat like "Black Americans represent 12.7% of Americans, but make up between 30-40% of police killings", the people causing the problem are the ones saying it's unacceptable, not those responsible for a system that kills ~3x more Black Americans than White Americans. I find that to be absurd.

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> identity has become a hugely popular issue on the American left in the last decade

I know we're sparring on this in another thread, but it really gets to me when people dismiss the concerns of Black Americans, LGBTQ Americans, Women, Native Americans, etc. as "identity" issues. It's undeniable that people in these groups have an entirely different, objectively worse experience than straight cis White men. My arguments here are slavery, forced incarceration and sterilization, and genocide, to say nothing of ongoing discrimination and prejudice and institutional problems today. This country hasn't been dealing with "identity" for a decade, it's been dealing with it from before the time its 1st president was a slaver. The idea that this has only been a problem roughly since Obama was president is... the nicest thing I can say here is naive.

> Moreover, many people (myself included) think that this identity politics stuff is tearing at our social fabric, not only by fostering racial divides, but also because Americans of all stripes are losing trust in institutions which have increasingly rejected aspirational neutrality and objectivity in favor of progressive activism.

It's true that there are more voices at the table, voices protesting police violence (a real problem), the wage gap (a real problem), the epidemic of domestic violence and sexual assault (a real problem), mass incarceration (a real problem). Addressing these problems is gonna be pretty hard, and accountability has to be a part of it. That means when White dudes sexually harass women at work, or when White women threaten to bring down state violence against Black birdwatchers minding their own business, or when cops murder people, they're gonna face consequences (hopefully, anyway). It's easy to see how that creates resentment amongst those currently in power: the rules are changing and mostly not in their favor.

So if you think the problem is that people are talking about this stuff, then I guess a reasonable solution is for them to shut up about it. But if you think the problems are the problems themselves, then shutting up is actively harmful. Hence slogans like "silence is violence", etc.

> the Iraq/Afghan wars were bipartisan

Nah, Bush/Cheney lied [0]. A lot.

> I don't think deregulation is a clear and universal evil

Totally agree, for example before Carter deregulated airlines they were a hilarious mess. But like, rolling back EPA standards is an obvious bad idea, unless you're a company that's only profitable by ignoring climate destruction externalities.

I think loss of faith in institutions is less that they're moving in the direction of progressive activism (honestly can't come up with any examples here, regardless my counterexample is SCOTUS) and more that they're blatantly partisan and corrupt: like the widely panned CDC halving of quarantine times right around peak holiday travel time. I think we've been frog boiled so long in corruption we don't even notice it anymore. My partner was listening to NPR the other morning and they had the exchange at the end:

> INSKEEP: Oh, that's right. Trump was not happy with Kemp because Kemp told the truth about the 2020 election. Is it possible, though, that Greene could actually be thrown off the ballot?

> FOWLER: Well, the short answer is no. A federal judge did rule that this complaint process could continue, but it'll be a high bar to meet to remove Greene. Also, remember; the final decision rests with the secretary of state. That's Brad Raffensperger, who's facing a Trump-backed primary challenge next month, too.

Great, public servants not doing their job because of party affiliation. After decades (centuries?) of this, how could Americans not be cynical about public institutions?

> I consider Democrats' empty words and gestures (as they pertain to climate) to be just another kind of inaction

Democrats have tried again and again to get something going, but Republicans continue to block it. And hey guess what, fossil fuel energy companies are huge Republican donors and essentially run many State parties. I'll give you Joe Manchin though, I guess he is technically a Democrat?

Re: carbon pricing, it's a little involved but basically it's very politically unviable: businesses tend to push these costs onto consumers and these kinds of policies can fail under misinformation campaigns [1]. The fossil fuel industry knows this, which is why their lobbyists push it [2], because they know it will never pass, because they're very able to launch an intense misinformation campaign against it.

> if you believe (as I do) that the world is really burning, why don't Democrats offer a budget proposal which reflects that

Because of Republicans (corrupted by the fossil fuel industry) and the filibuster. Remember that one time the Obama administration invested in green energy companies? The right refers to it as the Solyndra scandal, the left refers to it as "the policies that gave us Tesla".

> Why did they allow themselves to be completely and wholly fixated on an obviously fake crisis of racist police killings for the better part of the last decade?

It is extremely not fake. The stats are totally off balance [3]. Black Americans represent 12.7% of Americans, but make up between 30-40% of police killings.

> Why do we allocate so much of our national debate bandwidth to pronouns and bathroom policies if we believe we're veering toward mass extinction?

This is a wedge issue pushed by Republicans to try and get Democrats to defend "icky" trans people in competitive elections. Democrats aren't the ones pushing this. We'd love it if conservatives were just polite and used people's preferred pronouns and stayed out of our private lives (bathrooms, bedrooms, and doctors' offices, for example).

> That said, I think it's super destructive to use Republican behavior (or in many cases, a caricature thereof) to excuse every criticism of Democratic behavior.

Oh I hate whataboutism, but that's not what I'm doing here. You were making an argument about Democrats tearing our country apart with identity politics in the last decade, and I counterargued that identity polities are extremely important, and not new. I'm also assailing a false equivalency between Democrats' identity policies (stipulating they're bad, which they're not) with Republicans'... all other policies. There's not a "both sides" to be had here. The Republican party is bankrupt, policy-wise, and the way they win elections is through wedge issues and fake (Fox) news to get their voters frothed up with rage and resentment. It works, sure, but it's Faustian, and we're seeing the effects of decades of that kind of politics.

[0]: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2016/02/hillary-clinton-...

[1]: https://earth.org/carbon-tax-pros-and-cons/

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5v1Yg6XejyE&t=85s

[3]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...