In his 2017 column Racing Toward Racism, author and commentator Autry J. Pruitt examines the Democratic Party’s persistent reliance on identity politics and the destructive path it carves for American discourse. Drawing on Barack Obama’s push to normalize relations with Cuba, Pruitt notes the irony: Democrats can embrace forward-thinking approaches abroad, yet remain trapped in outdated, racially divisive tactics at home.
Pruitt highlights the Democratic National Committee’s playbook—splitting Americans into subsets of race, gender, or economic class, and pitting one group against another. While population data may suggest such a strategy could be effective, the results tell another story. During Obama’s presidency, Democrats lost more than 1,000 seats in Congress, governorships, and state legislatures. Still, rather than reconsider, the party doubled down.
The most striking example, Pruitt argues, came from Sally Boynton Brown, then-executive director of the Idaho Democratic Party and a candidate for DNC chair. Her claim that her role would be to “shut other white people down” was not only divisive but, in Pruitt’s view, openly racist. He likens this rhetoric to “Tillman Syndrome,” invoking former South Carolina governor and senator Benjamin Tillman, whose unapologetically racist politics dominated Democratic leadership 125 years earlier.
Pruitt underscores the hypocrisy: Democrats decry prejudice in Republicans while embracing racialized strategies of their own. Instead of fostering unity, they inflame division, sow discord, and mislabel it as progress. He warns that such a path is both politically ineffective and morally corrosive.
Ultimately, Pruitt’s critique is a call to recognize identity politics for what it is: a losing formula rooted in division. True leadership, he argues, requires ideas that unite, not rhetoric that isolates. Until Democrats abandon this approach, their “insanity” may continue—repeating the same failed strategy and expecting different results.
