For context, the relevant excerpt from a much-longer article:
Every Thursday for the past few years, 26-year-old Sean McElwee, an autodidact political consultant and leftist Twitter personality known for his Abolish ICE activism, has hosted a socialist happy hour in a dank East Village bar. (McElwee told me I couldn’t name the bar because if I did, it might get stormed by the alt-right Proud Boys.) The happy hour used to be a marginal event, like a sad but beloved open-mic night. Now Democratic politicians in nice clothes Uber in to kiss McElwee’s ring and gain the trust of New York’s young socialist power elite. Like Mike Gianaris, a state senator from Queens standing by the bar one Thursday in November who had originally supported the Amazon deal but, his finger to the wind, reversed himself and turned into an anti-Amazon firebrand. Soon he and McElwee were co-authoring op-eds and retweeting each other. Also there was Jumaane Williams, to gin up support for the upcoming race for public advocate — de Blasio’s old job — which he ended up winning. And those guys are B-list. McElwee boasted to me that Senator Kirsten Gillibrand had been by recently, drinking the “piss bar wine.”
McElwee, a lapsed Evangelical Christian who used to intern at the libertarian Reason Foundation, has through sheer chutzpah transformed himself into one of the go-to voices of New York City socialism. (He tracks the performance of Abolish ICE tweets via Excel spreadsheet.) I saw him again at a happy hour a month later. “What’s your name again?” he asked me. “I always forget white guys’ names.” (McElwee is white.) I bought McElwee a vodka-and-soda — “I’m trying to lose weight. All the white supremacists are making fun of me” — and we chatted with a guy in wire-rimmed glasses and muttonchops who worked at Google and said he was at the Seattle WTO protests in 1999. The beauty of “Abolish ICE,” he told us, was its simplicity. “Build the wall,” “Lock her up”: They’re all perfect for shouting.
McElwee’s Abolish ICE activism has made his brand of immigration politics synonymous with young socialism. But it taps into a deep and awkward divide on the left. Bernie Sanders, for example, has long toed a more conservative line on immigration. To him, unchecked immigration is favorable to the bosses since it leads to an influx of cheap labor. “Open borders,” he has said, “is a Koch-brothers proposal.” A cause like Abolish ICE, in the view of the socialist old school, will galvanize a progressive constituency at the expense of uniting a populist movement, which Sanders has long dreamed of building around class. By that logic, to divide your coalition into competing identity groups is to fracture and doom your movement.
This is also the Jacobin view of socialism. Bhaskar Sunkara, the magazine’s founder, lays out the anti-identity argument in his forthcoming book, The Socialist Manifesto: “Without the bedrock of a class politics, identity politics has become an agenda of inclusionary neoliberalism,” he writes. “A world where half the Fortune 500 CEOs are women and fewer of them are white would be better than our world today, but still doesn’t mean much if there are just as many poor kids experiencing the same oppression they are now.” Or, as he put it more provocatively in person, “I’d rather be a black middle-class person than a white poor person.”
McElwee couldn’t disagree more. “I don’t ascribe in any way to these ideas that identity politics is bad for us. I think I can take someone who is deeply concerned about patriarchy and I can make them understand how patriarchy intersects with capitalism much more than I can take someone who’s mad because GM took their job away and make them understand socialism,” he said. (DSA’s Cunningham, who is black, sees class versus race as a false choice. “Racism,” she says, “is a tool of capitalism” to divide workers.)
One reason McElwee isn’t bothered about alienating blue-collar whites is that he’s not interested in their votes. Like the Ocasio-Cortez-aligned PAC Justice Democrats, his activism revolves around running candidates in safe blue districts and pushing leftward from within. Which is exactly how ultraprogressive congresswomen and close AOC allies Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, and DSA member Rashida Tlaib were elected to the House in the November midterm elections.
“It’s weird to me that DSA is a coalition of college-educated white people who, like, hate the idea that the Democratic Party should appeal to college-educated white people,” McElwee said. Sanders, meanwhile, is hoping for a somewhat broader appeal.
That's how bad it is. 
