Carrie Sheffield, a conservative commentator, is the founder of Bold, a digital news network committed to bipartisan dialogue. The opinions expressed in this commentary are her own.
(CNN)Identity politics is dehumanizing, no matter who your target is. Sadly, Democrats don’t seem to realize this, including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, arguably the most powerful Democrat in office.
Pelosi told The Boston Globe that, when it comes to top leadership positions in government, “It’s important that it not be five white guys at the table, no offense.”
“I have no intention of walking away from that table,” she said, according to the newspaper.
Pelosi’s troubling words, dividing rather than uniting, follow the same playbook that lost Democrats the White House and kept them from gaining the congressional majority in 2016. They’re the same type that perpetuates conflict in our political discourse rather than abiding by our national motto, “E pluribus unum” — out of many, one. Pelosi’s words echo Hillary Clinton’s unabashed embrace of playing “the woman card.”
Clinton went so far as to mail physical “Woman Cards” to voters. One recipient of this Woman Card was the household of a white male acquaintance of mine, from the swing state of Ohio, who said it left him uninspired. His state went red in 2016 despite having twice gone blue for Barack Obama.
Chloé Valdary, a millennial, African-American writer formerly of The Wall Street Journal editorial page, sums up nicely the perils of Pelosi’s type of identity-based virtue signaling: “PSA. The following are virtues: ‘patience, courage, humility, resourcefulness, reason, justice, and creativity.’ The following are not virtues: One’s skin color, the reproductive organs one has, who one sleeps with, dietary choices, or the ability to scream in order to attempt to get one’s way.”
