Identity Politics Are Stronger on the Right Than the Left
The Republican Party is increasingly unified around whiteness
In the popular imagination, identity politics is the stuff of queer-studies seminars and Hillary Clinton rallies. The excesses of intolerant university students raging against misogyny, racism and homophobia have been rigorously catalogued. Rather less attention has been paid to the appetite for a different kind of identity politics — one centred around whiteness and championed by President Donald Trump. This kind of right-leaning identity politics is more potent than the left-leaning version. There is no cause which unifies the Democratic Party as much as the lost respectability and forgotten prestige of whiteness that typifies the Trumpian Republican Party today.
For evidence of this, look no further than the president’s closing arguments a week before the mid-term elections on November 6th. Worried about the damage that a Democratic wave in the mid-terms could wreak, Mr Trump has fed his base an artery-clogging diet of red meat. Recently leaked news that his administration is planning to rip up Obama-era rules on the treatment of transgender people was a poke in the eye for political correctness. The president has also seized on the useful image of a caravan of Central American migrants heading to the southern border.
