Evan Barker’s great new book, Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative, is about how identity politics destroyed the party for which she used to work as a successful fundraiser. It’s easy for a conservative like me to read it with self-satisfaction, thinking, We told you so! Because hey, we did. But Barker’s book ought to be read as a warning to the right as well. We had better pay attention.
Barker, now 33, is a white woman from a working-class family in the Midwest. During one post-campaign period when she had no place to live before the next political cycle, Barker couldn’t go home, because there was no room for her in the house trailer where her mother and grandmother lived together to save money.
Born with a rare and potentially fatal genetic condition, Barker got into Democratic politics in the hope of improving the healthcare system she had struggled with her whole life. She also wanted to see political programs address the economic precarity her extended family lived under. This is why she became a Bernie Gal in 2016, and discovered she had a real gift for campaign fundraising.
As Barker details in Nothing Left (which The Free Press recently excerpted), her years working within the Democratic machine taught her some painful lessons. For one, she saw how party bigs sabotaged not only Bernie Sanders in 2016, but subsequent progressives contending for office in Democratic congressional primaries. As she puts it, party leadership would rather have seen progressive Democrats lose than surrender message control.
Her deeper warning, however, is that the party has become entirely controlled by both its donor class and its activists, who share the same destructive obsession with identity politics. In Barker’s view, the Democrats have become a party of man-hating girlbosses who prioritize race and gender over everything else, and who despise white people. The fact that many of these same people are themselves white is part of the party’s pathology.
