When Identity Politics Became the Perfect Distraction

On Provoked, Scott Horton throws out an idea that isn’t hard to recognize if you lived through 2008–2011: after the federal government, together with the banks, bailed out the big players while a lot of ordinary people got wrecked, two mirror-populisms appeared — the Tea Party on the right and Occupy Wall Street on the left. Both, in different ways, were pointing at the same thing: the state–finance marriage, the bailouts, the feeling that “there’s money for them, not for us.”

Horton’s read is that this was dangerous for the establishment. Once people at the bottom started comparing notes — “hey, you rural conservative, and me, urban student… didn’t we get burned by the same people?” — a weird but effective coalition was possible. According to him, that’s exactly the moment when the identity-politics menu got pushed hardest: race vs. race, young vs. old, straight vs. LGBT, region vs. region, veteran vs. non-veteran. The point wasn’t expanding freedom; the point was to keep people from talking about money, banking, regulatory capture, and corporate welfare. Classic “turn-them-against-the-neighbor” stuff.

He’s not the only one who’s noticed something like that. Writers like Mark Lilla have argued that U.S. liberalism tied itself to a style of identity politics that fragments the electorate and weakens the majorities you actually need to govern. Others on the left have warned that if all the political oxygen goes to recognition battles, the economic structure stays exactly where it is. So even if we can’t prove a secret meeting where “big business + Democrats invented identity politics,” it’s fair to say that in the 2010s identity became very easy to weaponize for division — which is the core of Horton’s point.

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The Flags on My Porch

Here’s where it lands for me personally.

I also see how American national identity got pushed into a corner. Patriotism, for a lot of people, got fused first with post-9/11 hawkishness — think the Iraq War era — and later with Trump-style, Christian-nationalist vibes. So even if the thing I actually love is the original promise — freedom and equality regardless of background — flying the U.S. flag can feel like I’m co-signing a bunch of meanings I don’t share.

So I do something symbolic instead. I fly the Mexican flag because Mexico’s story about mixture — la raza cósmica, the open acknowledgment of indigenous roots — captures better the kind of continental, many-origins identity I wish the U.S. would express. And I fly the Italian flag to point at an older American habit: using “where you came from” to decide who’s in and who’s out — a habit that still echoes in today’s “legal vs. illegal” immigration talk. It’s my way of saying, “the exclusion you’re normalizing is not actually part of the freedom story.”

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What I’m Arguing

So here’s my takeaway, not Horton’s script:

1. The U.S. works best when it forces broad coalitions. The system kind of assumes you’ll have to build a 51%-ish, slightly uncomfortable majority that includes people you don’t fully agree with.

2. The 2010s style of identity politics made that harder, right when those coalitions were needed to push back on the public-private power grab Horton is talking about.

3. On top of that, the same logic narrowed what “being American” is allowed to look like, so even non-hawkish, non-exclusionary patriotism now looks suspicious.

4. And, yes, there’s a danger in telling the demographic majority that the only thing important about them is bad. People were warning about that 10–15 years ago. That’s the “we’re playing with nuclear fire” part of Horton’s point, and I think they were right to warn about it — not because the old majority should rule, but because you don’t build stable coalitions by permanent moral humiliation.

That’s why I’m pushing back in miniature. Until the stars and stripes get disentangled from culture-war ownership and exclusionary projects, I’m going to keep flying the Mexican and Italian flags on my porch — as a little reminder that mixture, not purity, is actually the real story of this continent.