Art by マルティン藤吉
Allow me to set the scene. Politics in America is the most volatile it's been in over a century. The American people re-elected Donald Trump in 2024 and almost immediately came to regret that decision. The only opposition, the Democratic Party, has consistently failed to deliver the sort of cohesive resistance you would hope for in times like these. People feel aimless. The new mayor of New York City is a socialist (or at least, called himself one, at some point). Christian nationalism is on the rise. Being a centrist seems less like nuance and more like apathy at this point.
Meanwhile, in the UK, things aren't much better. The two main parties, Conservatives and Labor have both fallen completely out of public favor, and it's almost exclusively due to their handling of immigration. They have been replaced by Reform and the Green Party, who both take baffling approaches to politics: Reform is running on the platform of a single issue, immigration, on which they have thus far failed to deliver anything more than promises. And the Greens, with their strong progressive stance, have vexingly allied with Islam fundamentalists in order to secure a strong coalition in opposition. The Green party is talking seriously about cracking down on dog ownership, because muslims don't like them. Hamas did something similar in 2017, I suppose. Things aren't just bad. They're crazy.
Or are they?
Let's rewind time for a moment and talk about the early 2000s. At this point, many changes were set in motion that I won't waste time talking about here. However, importantly, the way politics basically worked had not changed much in a while. Broadly, politics was about policy. Should we invade the middle east? Should we cut taxes or increase spending? Should gay people be allowed to get married?
Being about policy, things like identity and facts were very important, but they weren't really considered a platform. You couldn't run a campaign off of "I am a woman". You couldn't hope to win a competitive race by arguing about whether we should really be listening to those scientist guys. There was an understanding that Americans were too stupid to really understand policy, so the policy discussions were dumbed down a LOT for TV, but the conversation was still basically about policy.
In the 2010s, however, this changed. Obama proved that the identity of the president can be an asset, even when that identity isn't "White Christian Male from either Virginia or Illinois". And so, starting around 2012, we began the era of Identity Politics.
Identity Politics, like Policy Politics, is concerned with policy. However, the importance of policy is different. Instead of being about the effects and costs of a policy, the focus shifts to the authors of that policy and whether or not they are moral and competent. This was occasionally talked about before, but usually only briefly.
When I use the term "Identity politics", you are probably thinking of blue-haired liberals on college campuses discussing the merits of the patriarchy. However, the American Conservative movement also embraced identity politics during this time. Mitt Romney essentially based his entire campaign against Obama around the fact that he was a Christian and would therefore not tolerate un-Christian policy choices. Separation of church and state? Bah.
Identity politics raises a lot of fair points about the old system. Policy is complex and the full effects of a given policy are rarely explicitly stated by the people advocating for or against it. And even then, policy authors have a certain worldview with certain biases, and will forget about certain groups. Historically, many groups, like black people, have not had a seat at the table in these discussions. Identity politics correctly criticizes and attempts to remedy this.
In 2012, the conversation began to shift to Identity Politics, but was still largely centered on policy. By 2016, however, the transition had largely completed. We had a presidential candidate whose primary slogan explained nothing except that she was a woman ("I'm With Her"). Hilary Clinton's repeated assertions of "It's my turn" attempted to capitalize on the new Identity Politics movement. Unfortunately, she picked an identity that did not inspire the average voter, who I will remind you, had only experienced 4 months of gay marriage being federally legal at that point.
Hilary's opponent, Donald Trump, picked a much stronger identity: He's a businessman. You know this guy from TV, where he plays... a businessman. Our country's finances suck, we need a business guy to fix it. He is rich and so if we put him in charge, he'll make the country rich. Or so the narrative went. But the reason I'm explaining this is so you can understand: The MAGA movement began as Identity Politics too.
Trump winning proved the viability of Identity Politics once and for all. But it also proved something else. Something much more important to our world 10 years later. He proved that you can lie a LOT and still win. What Trump did, that no other president had previously done, was spin a yarn so insane and so wide-reaching that the liberal establishment didn't even know how to engage with it. It was spectacular, it was powerful, and it was engaging as hell. The media couldn't just not talk about it. And so they rewarded this otherwise total outsider candidate with continuous coverage.
And if there's anything a businessman understands, it's that when you find something profitable, you scale it as fast as you possibly can.
I will spare most of the details of the MAGA movement in the past 10 years, they are not essential to my point and most people know them anyway. But I will call out a few things that are illustrative. First, the existence of the "QAnon" conspiracy. This was essentially presidential fanfiction that turned into a legitimate movement (of divorced dads), which was so successful that the Trump campaign even started leaning into it. The storm is coming. Second, the scale of the lies of the Trump administration continued to balloon, until they came to a head in the COVID pandemic where millions of people were dying and the administration's response was "Nuh-uh, those millions of excess deaths were a coincidence and all the medical records were faked". This was, by a narrow margin, too much for the American people to bear and so Biden took office in 2021. However, many people still believe this. Even people who have had family members die from COVID will sometimes say it was something else, or possibly the COVID vaccine itself, that caused it.
The point I am basically trying to make here is that the MAGA movement, since 2015, has essentially established its own version of reality. Which takes us to the present day, and the title of this article. Identity Politics is dead. It's time for Reality Politics.
At its core, the theory of Reality Politics is simple: You know that whole "shared reality" thing centrists keep blabbering on about? Yeah, we don't need that actually. That's essentially it. It is the acknowledgment that reality itself, and things previously said to be facts are actually not agreed-upon and can be freely challenged.
The implications of this are huge, though. Let's dig in.
The most obvious place to start when you talk about removing something is looking at what you lose as a result. When you lose the common shared reality, it comes at a cost. The main, and most obvious cost is that we spend a lot of time arguing about facts now, rather than policy. Consequently, we spend less time and attention on policy.