Study: To US Papers, ‘Identity Politics’ Is Mostly a Way to Sneer at the Left

Funny. As a European political scientist, when I think of identity politics the first thing that comes to mind is nativism, right wing populists, and all those people crying out in public about outgroups who are not like themselves.

We always had trans people. They didn't politicize themselves - there's not many enough of them that they could have even if they wanted to. They became politicized by a group of people who chose to identify themselves in opposition to them. The same goes for immigrants, gays, whatever. We vote less according to economy, and more according to identity.

The only way the Republican party is allowed to exist in it's current form is through identity politics. Women not wanting to go thorough with unwanted pregnancies is *not* identity politics. It's more a matter of fucking survival. A bunch of conservative couch fucking male shitheads who want to limit women's ability to decide over their own bodies on the basis of their own hypocritical set of beliefs, however, very much is about identity politics.

And then trans people wanting to simply be allowed to live their lives in peace has also become a matter of identity politics, as their very existence has become politicized. But that's a development driven by right wing nut jobs, not by the left who (at its best, at least) wants to focus on economic issues while guaranteeing human rights as a mattet of common sense and decency.

Pretending that the political left are the ones pushing squishy identity politics while the right are focusing on hard economics and traditional politics is just plain wrong, and portraying it this way is yet another failure of the American media.

/rant