Liberal. Politically correct. Social Justice. Woke. DEI. These are all among the many formerly respectable expressions that now are considered to be verbal fungi on the underbelly of society. And now we can add another term to that dubiously distinct lexicon: Identity Politics. While all these words and phrases were actually coined by progressives to serve useful and constructive functions, they subsequently were (like fake news) hijacked by right-wingers and distorted to mean something very different, and often the exact opposite, of their original intent; and weaponized to ridicule, attack and diminish the (supposed) actions and values of progressives. (And weaponize itself has been herded into that corral as well.)

Curiously, the diction dragons were very late to the game when it came to Identity Politics, which first entered the vernacular in the 1970s — yet it took nearly half a century for them to decide that it might be worth perverting. Likewise with the related term intersectionality, which has been around for some 30 years. (Note that conservatives acknowledge that they don’t even deny the validity of the concept of intersectionality; they just don’t want people talking about it. After all, if too many people become aware of it, that might upset the social hierarchy from which conservatives benefit.)

Identity politics, which is perhaps even more linguistically imprecise (and therefore gets thrown around a lot, natch), essentially means making political choices based upon one’s social segment(s). Which could be a good thing or a not so good thing, depending on (a) the extent to which you allow your social identity to take precedence over other considerations, and (b) the specific group(s) you identify with.

But when you hear about identity politics in the media, you always, always hear it cast in an unfavorable light. And you always, always hear it applied exclusively to The Left. Just like any of the other grave and trendy sins like “censorship”, “cancel culture”, “virtue signaling”, “culture wars” and being “triggered” like “snowflakes”. There’s good reason you only hear such things mentioned in connection with The Left — and it isn’t because The Left does them more often, or even very often at all. It’s because The Right has engineered a powerful projection machine, and it has been bolted very securely into place at the center of the public forum.

Never forget that with right-wingers, every accusation is a confession. Every. Single. Time. With zero evidence, they accuse drag queens of “grooming” kids for pedophilia; but the actual pedophiles invariably turn out to be church leaders, cops and assorted sleazy “family values” activists. They routinely accuse Democrats of cheating in elections, but Republicans are the only ones who actually commit election fraud. They declare that The Left is waging a “culture war”, then go on unhinged rants about the changes in costumes of animated characters, and (literally) burn Barbie dolls because they’re so freaked out by a movie they probably haven’t even seen, and launch into a frenzy over the imaginary War On Christmas every September. They hammer away on a daily basis at the groundless narrative that President Biden is suffering from dementia — hoping you won’t notice that every time Orange Man opens his mouth, he offers solid evidence that he himself is. They whine that Democrats are “weaponizing” government whenever they are held accountable for their misdeeds; and as soon as they have an opportunity they go full-bore on marshaling government agencies to target their political opponents, giving us endless months of hearings about Hunter Biden’s laptop.

And so it is with their tsk-tsking over “identity politics”. For years, conservatives have been arrogantly garbing themselves with such labels as the “Moral Majority” (which was neither) and “Values Voters” — as if they have values and nobody else does. And those “values” are directly derived from their identities as Christian fundamentalists — not to mention homophobes, Islamophobes and racists. Do you suppose maybe those identities have some impact on how they vote?

But of course when people bemoan “identity politics” among liberals, they’re usually referring to matters of race, gender and the struggle for social justice. The official spin is that everyone should just ignore race and be “colorblind” — as if simply looking away from racism will cause it to vanish in a puff of smoke.

It should be obvious, however, that in order for such a tactic to work at all, it must be applied universally rather than unilaterally. If liberals should take some magic pill that induced them to forget that race and racism exist, they’d learn about it all over again very quickly if conservatives didn’t take it too. And be assured, conservatives absolutely are not going to swallow. They’re always going to wail that electing a (half) black president was divisive and race-obsessed, just because he was indeed (half) black. They’re always going to rail about the supposed dire threat from brown-skinned refuges “invading” the southern border. They’re always going to characterize Muslims as hateful and violent. They’re always going to make baseless claims about election fraud in Detroit, Philadelphia and Atlanta. They’re always going to declare that George Soros controls the world. They’re always going to say that the most oppressed and discriminated-against demographic in the nation is the white male. To an increasing degree, many of them are even willing to openly fashion themselves as antisemitic and/ or white supremacists.

And does such a magic pill exist, even metaphorically? Is it truly feasible to ignore race? Surely you must know the answer to that. It’s utterly impossible to be “colorblind” (even if you’re literally blind), nor is there any reason why you should be. Ethnicity is a useful trait for describing individuals, just like height, weight, age, gender and number of teeth. The problem with racists is not that they see race; the problem is that when they see race, they see rank.

As for the notion that ignoring racism will make it go away, we already know that’s not true because… well, it’s been tried, after a fashion. Take the criminal justice system. Black inmates receive tougher sentences than whites for the same offenses. They also receive tougher sentences when their victims are white. Or take loans for homes or vehicles: interest rates are higher for black consumers. A University of Chicago psychology professor has found that people are more likely to shoot an unarmed black man than unarmed white man, and less likely to shoot an armed white man than armed black man. Whether one chalks up such incidences to overt racism or inadvertent inequity, the net result is the same. And they have been largely “ignored” since few people are even aware they exist. Yet they certainly haven’t gone away. And while it’s less quantifiable, there is a no less consistent and uniform racial bias in the media.

Race is an involuntary identity, but others are freely chosen — e.g., religion, civic organization, and party affiliation. Everybody has a number of social/ cultural/ ideological identities. But all too often, people make choices, including electoral choices, based on their fervent convictions rather than on the evidence about what works. That means, for example, supporting the death penalty because they just believe it’s the thing to do, rather than on whether it’s actually beneficial and efficacious. (Narrator: it isn’t.)

The quintessential case study is the large sector of the population that profess to be vehemently anti-abortion (or as they sanctimoniously frame it, “pro-life”). This identity absolutely overrides every other concern they might have, and often induces them to tie themselves into knots in an effort to justify the politicians they support. But rather than promote measures that actually would reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies, and thereby the number of abortions, they almost always reject and even demonize such steps, and instead vote for candidates and laws that will simply give an impassioned voice to their dogmatic beliefs. They sacrifice the chance to produce genuine fact-based results that would make them — and everyone else — happy, for the opportunity to indulge instead in the type of behavior that would be soundly denounced as “virtue signaling” if liberals did it. This is identity politics in its most blatant, and most counterproductive, incarnation.

Even political independents have a political identity; indeed, they often are more entrenched in collectivism and even groupthink than people who vote a straight party ticket (particularly since so many of them are given to bothsidesism and hairy-assed conspiracy theories). In fact, many of them are considerably less independent than they fancy themselves; they unwittingly just espouse boilerplate right-wing stances. The poster child for such delusion of disinterest is Tulsi Gabbard, who was once nominally (very nominally) a Democrat; but she mostly just echoed the talking points of extremist Republicans. The more “independent” she became, the more indistinguishable her rhetoric became from that of the reactionary fever swamps, until ultimately she was such a cultish parrot that she was lovingly embraced by the likes of PragerU and Fox “News” — which even gave her a job. In any case, independents always (and this includes yours truly) identify themselves as iconoclasts of a sort — as Davids slaying Goliaths. But even if you live alone in a cabin in the Montana woods, you still are a part of certain demographic factions.

Just as it’s unreasonable to expect someone to have no social identity, it’s unreasonable to expect anyone to abandon their identities at the voting booth, while carrying them around constantly at all other times.

What you have total control over, however, is which identities you prioritize. You can definitely choose whether to favor empathy or egocentricity. If you are a billionaire, chances are you will vote (and otherwise exert influence over the political sphere) so as to protect and extend your financial interests. If you are a single mom on a reservation, you are more likely to vote so as to ease your hardships and improve your quality of life. The thing is, the single mom is voting and/or mobilizing not only to benefit herself, but to benefit others; whereas the billionaire is acting only in his own myopic selfish interests. The golden rule here is that acting to benefit the disenfranchised and marginalized ultimately benefits everyone; while acting to benefit the domineering ultimately harms everyone. That’s why “black pride” is inspiring, while “white pride” is sickening. (Which isn’t to say that “social justice warriors” never go off the rails. Of course they do sometimes.)

It’s possible that sometime in the distant future, race will totally disappear — because the gene pool will be blended to such an extent that there will be only one race on the entire planet. And if that ever happens, racism probably will vanish as well. But that doesn’t mean that political identity will be gone too.

Anyway, we’re not there yet, or anywhere close. Where we are is a time when identity politics is both necessary and unavoidable. A time when all politics is identity politics. Pretending otherwise is a convenient conceit of those who enjoy white privilege — or those who are willing to play along with its narratives.