Not in Our Genes: Identity Politics as Liberal Ideology

Liberals increasingly want to portray the identitarian and partisan divides as natural, quasi-biological ones. The result is not simply gross misunderstanding of the present political impasse; it’s also surrender to the conditions that perpetuate it.

Recent years have seen the publication of a small library’s worth of popular scholarly accounts written by liberal academics and journalists on the contemporary identity politics craze and its attendant partisan hostilities. Taken together, these books offer a complementary, largely overlapping explanation of these phenomena. Liberals and conservatives,…