MAGA: 'Make America Great Again'. Salem Rally. Alex Milan Tracy/SIPA USA/PA Images. Press Association Images. All rights reserved. In the wake of Donald Trump’s election victory, there is a critique of the liberal left that goes something like this: the left has been too preoccupied with identity politics and too little with egalitarian economic policies. Trump’s victory is a result of this because the left had divided the electorate into identity groups, and therefore they were unable to claim to represent the nation or the people as a whole.
The critique comes in different forms. There is a liberal-centrist critique, which seems more interested in settling old scores than anything else. There is a Marxist critique whereby all that talk about identity was always a distraction, because what really matters is class struggle. And there is a certain populist critique whereby the liberal left’s focus on identity politics has taken attention away from the economic concerns of ordinary citizens. Common to the different versions of the critique of identity politics are two things: first, that identity is a distraction; and, second, that it’s the economy, stupid! What they all overlook is that everybody does identity politics, and that’s it’s ok.
When people talk about identity politics, they usually mean minority identities. In this way, identity = difference.
