Thread. Many US leftists are super Eurocentric & the most naive are Scandinaviaboos, so I keep saying Latin American history is more relevant to where we are & where we might go. This is for presidential representation politics (NOT identity politics, representation politics):

Mexico in the 19th century achieved independence from Spain and went through massive social changes. Vicente Guerrero was a Black and Indigenous president who came to power in 1829, totally abolished slavery in Mexico, but was betrayed and executed by conservatives in 1831.

Guerrero is a state hero in Mexico today. Literally, the state of Guerrero is named after him.

Benito Juárez was the President from 1858-1872. He came from a rural Zapotec family and didn’t learn Spanish until he was twelve years old, so like Guerrero he started from the bottom.

Although like Guerrero he had to fight a lot of military battles, Juárez was a lawyer and left a longer mark as a President in terms of law and structure and modernization. He is also revered today and his home state of Oaxaca added "de Juárez" after itself in his honor.

It would have been unthinkable for people of their backgrounds to have ascended to power in the US in 1850 or even in 1950. This is not to say that Mexico isn’t a racist country, but in terms of culture, economics and politics, racism operates differently in different places.

The presidencies of Guerrero and Juárez marked important social change and were net positives for the country itself in terms of kicking out the Spanish and then French and eroding white supremacy, but they did NOT “solve” the problems of Black or Indigenous people in Mexico.

These groups still suffer from economic exploitation and massive prejudice. And for Indigenous groups, some of Juárez’ laws even weakened traditional land-sharing structures, modernizing them in such a way that Indigenous lands became more vulnerable to capitalist exploitation.

When exceptional (for whatever reason) people from marginalized groups achieve top positions of power, it always means something, it is always something culturally symbolic and overdetermined, but that “something” is confusing to onlookers, so they look for simpler narratives.

Anarchist and libertarian socialist theories about power have answers to this long running confusion, but even if you’re not an anarchist, you can look at history and see that representation is an important part of the picture, but still only one part of the picture.

You cannot entirely separate an individual from a group, but you can't entirely combine the two concepts either. Hopefully people can keep this in mind and also not abuse the term "identity politics" when they mean representation politics.

Anyone (such as many modern day liberals) who overtly or subconsciously believe that representation politics and a succession of "firsts" will lead slowly to utopia are of course proved wrong by history. But there's also a radical leftist tendency to believe the inverse:

That a succession of "firsts" and the installation of individuals from marginalized groups at the top of normative power structures is an insidious plot to quell bottom-up revolutions by those marginalized people. And that's not true either. Juárez did not preclude Zapata!

OK I'm done here but I'm gonna tack on at the end the difference between identity politics and representation politics because some people seem confused about that. Here are key differences:

1. Identity Politics is a specific theory rooted in Black feminist thought and is first articulated in the Combahee River Collective Statement of 1977. Representation politics is a generic, simple, and very ancient way of power sharing among disparate groups.

(A feudal dynastic marriage uniting two separate kingdoms is an example of representational politics, for example. Or if a part of the conquered state grows restless, the foreign emperor perhaps appoints a governor of their own ethnic group).

2. Identity is only the START of "identity politics". The idea is to take (constructed) identities as a basis for solidarity with others experiencing the same oppression, forming solidarity, then together taking down the structures which oppress you.

These oppressions absolutely include class oppression, which intersects with all other kinds of oppression anyway in some form, and as such, identity politics is totally compatible with socialism and in fact many of the articulaters of the statement were socialists.

Representation politics is simply about power sharing and identity is the end point, not the start point.

3. Identity politics is bottom up & focused on dismantling oppressive power structures. Representation politics is top down and focused on maintaining the power structure.

That's it. Many people tend to use "identity politics"/"idpol" in a way completely disconnected from the original meaning, which erases the Black feminist and socialist history of the term. There's not enough education about the origins and too much misinformation.