CMV: Identity politics has had a net negative impact on society, politics and culture in the US since the 1990s
My view is that identity politics has had a net negative effect on society, politics, and culture and that this is palpable when the comparison is made between 1990 and 2026, I believe this to be true in Europe where I live but I'll limit the view to the United States for simplicity and because that's the clearest case.
By identity politics, I do not simply mean noticing or asserting that the canonical protected identity categories exist, nor that they correlate with outcomes which we may consider meaningful, nor even that in some cases the relationship may be causal and not merely correlative. What I mean is the much broader cultural and institutional shift away from liberal universalism, which I assert characterized the political culture of the 1990s, and towards treating identity as central, morally privileged, politically determinative, and constantly relevant.
The older ideal, at least in mainstream liberal culture, was something like: treat people as individuals, apply common standards, reduce the social importance of inherited characteristics, and aim for equality of opportunity. That ideal was never perfectly achieved, and it often failed in practice, but it was at least an ideal that pointed beyond tribal identity.
Over the last few decades, that ideal has been displaced by a much more identity-conscious worldview. Schools, universities, corporations, media organizations, arts institutions, charities, public bodies, and political parties increasingly teach people to understand themselves and others primarily through identity categories and identity framed power dynamics. People are encouraged to notice identity, foreground identity, interpret interactions through identity, and treat identity-based representation as a major moral and political good.
My view is that this has produced several harmful effects.
- It has made society more tribal, not less. If people are constantly told that identity is central to power, morality, authenticity, and social meaning, they will start thinking and behaving more as members of identity groups. That does not only activate minority identity consciousness. It also activates majority identity consciousness. You cannot tell everyone that race, sex, ethnicity, or other inherited categories are politically central and then expect only the “approved” groups to organise around them.
- It has damaged liberal individualism. While I acknowledge that some metrics by which we could assess individualism (self-expression, name uniqueness, self-focus, familial independence) have increased or remained stable over this period, metrics which are more integral to the healthy functioning of a liberal democracy (speech tolerance, civic responsibility, shared universal national identity) have seen sometimes shocking decline.
- It has harmed democratic norms. If political conflict is framed primarily as conflict between identity groups, compromise becomes harder. Disagreement becomes identity threat. Ordinary policy questions become symbolic struggles over group status. This makes democratic politics uglier, more paranoid, and less capable of resolving material problems and, critically, destroys the original concept of representation as it applies to democracy; that the person I vote for is mandated by my vote to represent me, not that the person in a given office or role represents me or not on the basis of a shared identity characteristic. This redefining of what it means to be represented has been so complete that the word representation is now itself a synonym for identity politics.
- It has degraded culture. Casting, publishing, awards, advertising, arts funding, and criticism are now often interpreted through identity politics before anything else. This creates obvious tokenism and box-checking. It also produces backlash, because audiences can tell when artistic decisions are being made or marketed as symbolic identity gestures.
My view is not that identity never matters, or that liberal universalism was perfectly practised, or that identity politics is the sole variable responsible for the above changes, I acknowledge the roles of globalization, digital technology, mass migration and demographic shift. My view is that making identity central to institutional life has, on balance, worsened social trust, cultural quality, political stability, and intergroup relations, independent of these other factors.
To change my view, it would not be enough to show that identity-conscious politics has achieved some local, specific goods. I accept that it has. The case to change my view would need to show that those gains outweigh the broader costs which I identify; increased tribalism, erosion of liberal democratic norms, resentment, tokenism, self-censorship, institutional distrust, and cultural balkanisation, or that I have misidentified those costs.
EDIT: Thank you for your responses, nobody has really come close to changing my view and I've been actively responding to your comments for almost four hours now and the quality of my reasoning is degrading significantly. I'll have another look tomorrow.