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Identity politics is over, here’s what will replace it | Andreas Wimmer & Richard Ford Is the age of identity politics in the West over—or just mutating into something fiercer and more dangerous? As Trumpism rages in the US and populism gains ground in Europe, we asked three leading thinkers for their views. Sociologist Andreas Wimmer argues that disillusionment with the global liberal order is fueling a rejection of identity politics and its replacement with a new form of nationalism—inter-ethnic and driven by economic anxiety and national self-interest. Critical theorist Richard Ford, meanwhile, sees identity politics giving way to a deeper ideological divide: not black vs. white or male vs female, but tradition vs. progress and cultural nostalgia vs. progressive modernism. <a href="articles/identity-politics-is-not-over-its-going-to-intensify-auid-3180" target="_blank">You can read Jean-Paul Faguet’s response here.</a> Andreas WimmerHas identity politics peaked? It may very well have<a href="http://iai.tv/video/predicting-the-future" target="_blank">Predicting the long-term future</a> is next to impossible. Attempts to do so are unsurprisingly and notoriously unsuccessful. Usually, people who seek to peek into the future simply extrapolate contemporary trends, assuming we will see more of what is already unfolding in the present. More complex forecasts (e.g. in economics) are often based on the idea that change is cyclical and that trends (such as economic growth) will peak and must eventually reverse (giving rise to a recession). If you accept this cyclical view of history, the tricky question becomes to predict when we will reach the peak and how high it will be. For the fun of the intellectual exercise, I will pursue this approach here and offer a prediction that <a href="http://iai.tv/video/after-identity-politics" target="_blank">identity politics has peaked</a>, well knowing that predicting long-term developments is, strictly speaking, impossible.___The current success of right-wing populism will lead politicians to “ride the wave” and to de-emphasize sub-national identity categories such as race and gender and to emphasize national cleavages instead___Let’s assume that identity politics comes and goes in modern societies in generational cycles. Modern history provides some support for this assumption. The liberal, economically integrated world order (combined with illiberal colonialism in the global South) that prevailed between the 1870s and the First World War gave way to the populist nationalist (both left-wing and fascist) regimes between the First World War and the end of the Second World War. Next, a hegemonic liberal order established itself in the West (contrasted by an illiberal, Communist world in Eastern Europe and the Far East) from the 1960s to the global financial crisis of 2007–08. If the assumption of cyclicality is right, then we may already have reached or will soon reach another peak, where the trend of increasing relevance of sub-national identities—such as race or gender or ethnicity—that became part of this liberal canon will reverse. <a href="video/amy-chua-on-tribes-and-tribalism" class="iai-related-in-article click_on_suggestion_link--gtm-track"> <img src="/assets/Uploads/Amy-chua-studio.webp" class="iai-related--primary-image" alt="related-video-image"> SUGGESTED VIEWING Yale's 'Tiger Mom' on tribalism today With Amy Chua </a> The reasons are straightforward. The current <a href="http://iai.tv/video/the-rise-and-rise-of-populism">success of right-wing populism</a> will lead politicians to “ride the wave” and to de-emphasize sub-national identity categories such as race and gender and to emphasize national cleavages instead, which run largely parallel to boundaries between country populations. This resurgence of nationalism may be associated with ethnic majoritarianism in some cases (such as <a href="http://iai.tv/video/the-future-of-india-shashi-tharoor" target="_blank">contemporary India</a>, or the fascist regimes of the interwar period), which leads to a heightened salience of majority-minority divides. But in other cases, perhaps including Trump’s MAGA movement, right-wing populists merely foreground national commonality without claiming primacy for any racial, ethnic, or religious group and restrict the salience, including in the legal system, of these sub-national divides.___Ideas of national solidarity, superiority, and primacy will replace globalist ideals about a universal set of equality principles tied to identity categories.___This trend will be greatly reinforced by <a href="http://iai.tv/articles/post-liberalism-and-its-dangers-matt-mcmanus-auid-2692" target="_blank">the decay of the international “liberal order,”</a> which included the ideals of racial equality, minority rights, gender equality, the affirmation of “diversity,” and international co-operation to achieve all of these goals. This order offered incentives for politicians and civil society actors alike to highlight the various categories of identity politics. The new global order that emerges in front of our eyes brings us back to pre-1945 politics of <a href="http://iai.tv/video/the-return-of-empire" target="_blank">raw spheres of influence</a>, each dominated by global rivals for economic, political, and military predominance. Correspondingly, ideas of national solidarity, superiority, and primacy will replace globalist ideals about a universal set of equality principles tied to identity categories.The main driving force of these developments is that voters have drifted towards radical-right populist parties. Mainstream conservative parties (and in some cases social-democratic parties, as in Denmark) mirror their platforms and discourses to prevent a further breaking away of their electoral basis. For decades, the working classes have shifted towards neo-nationalist, populist parties across the West and beyond, more so in countries such as the United States, where the liberal global order has eroded their living standards, decreased their chances of upward social mobility, and stripped them of status and dignity by casting them as backward, racist, sexist enemies of enlightened progress. It is remarkable that this shift seems—in many countries but not all—also to encompass <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/can-maga-be-multicultural" target="_blank">working class members of ethno-racial minorities</a> and affects men as much as women. The new right-wing populist coalition emphasizes shared membership in the nation, downplays the role and significance of ethno-racial and gender discrimination within that nation, highlights the national interests common to all citizens, and excoriates immigrants and their left-wing supporters as free riders on all that the people have achieved over generations. In my view, which contrasts somewhat with Faguet’s analysis, identity politics therefore emerged on the liberal left, to which the radical right responded with a revitalized nationalism.The pendulum swing towards nationalist views will certainly not be complete. It is a matter of hegemony à la Gramsci, not of total power. In the post-war era of hegemonic liberalism, nationalist, populist, and right-wing strands of discourse and policy retreated into the institutional and social worlds where they could survive: think tanks, country clubs, rural diners and cafes. Similarly, the identitarian left will retreat into the institutional domains that it controls and will begin to hide its discourse and policies under a mantel of acquiescence to the new order. Universities, the art world, foundations, etc. will remain bastions of identity politics and they will continue their “diversity”-affirming policies in whatever disguise seems least risky.___A left-wing nationalist alternative will emerge that shares the post-identitarian, majority oriented, anti-immigrant, “anti-woke” creed of their right-wing brethren.___Effective opposition to the new, hegemonic creed of right-wing populism and nationalism will not come from these quarters, however. It is more likely that a <a href="http://iai.tv/articles/a-new-nationalism-auid-815" target="_blank">left-wing nationalist alternative</a> will emerge that shares the post-identitarian, majority oriented, anti-immigrant, “anti-woke” creed of their right-wing brethren. The difference is that the left-wing version will take social inequality— mostly income and wealth inequality, but also regional disparities—much more seriously and reverse the anti-government (and anti-science) stances of the radical right. Such a left-wing alternative already exists in some countries (Sarah Wagenknecht in Germany, Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, La France Insoumise in France, etc.).The new hegemony, like all hegemonies, redefines the terms of engagement of oppositional forces: they can only be heard and electorally successful if they operate within certain assumptions established by the radical right. This also means that these parties will depart from some basic policy prescriptions that have characterized social-democratic parties since they abandoned the majority working classes and became parties of the highly educated, captured by their identity-political preferences: they will no longer be pro-refugees, they will tone down women’s and minority rights, they will prefer job security over trade openness, they will privilege national advantage and security over international solidarity and justice.How might this prediction be wrong? First, more exclusionary, majoritarian forms of right-wing, populist nationalism may triumph over more inclusionary versions, leading to a heightened salience of ethno-racial divides (such as through scapegoating of minorities). The anti-majoritarian identity politics of the progressive left may thus be mirrored in the majoritarian identity politics of the right, more in line with Faguet’s analysis. Second, the current rise of right-wing populist nationalism might be a blip in history, not the beginning of a new, generational cycle. Perhaps the liberal, mainstream political forces can successfully push back against the current tide, curbing some of the excesses of the age of identity politics. Maybe radical right populist policies will backfire and lead to economic disasters felt by most voters, who then withdraw their support.Third, and more darkly, it may be that we have reached the end of the cyclical coming and going of liberalism and populist nationalism that has characterized Western societies since the beginning of the nineteenth century. It could be that we are heading towards uncharted territory where new technologies of information-control and manipulation, unprecedented accumulation of economic power, the mass replacement of human labor by AI and robots, and an erosion of trust in liberal institutions will create an unforeseeably new type of political order <a href="http://iai.tv/articles/rearmament-is-undermining-the-nation-state-auid-2852" target="_blank">beyond the liberal nation-state</a>. Politics will thus no longer swing back and forth between the liberal and the nationalist foundational principles of the nation-state, but establish a new rhythm altogether. Richard Thompson FordAs Inequality Wanes, so does Identity PoliticsAfter the dramatic spread of social movements such as #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter, many believed that politics in Western societies would be dominated by issues of identity for the foreseeable future. But attention to social injustice is not the equivalent of identity politics. In fact, the former may be an antidote to the latter.What is identity politics?“Identity politics” typically refers to groups organized around a common race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or some analogous affinity. The term can apply to many affinities, but it can’t be stretched too far: for example, it would not do to say Marxism is a form of identity politics because is refers to the “identities” of bourgeoisie and proletariat or, worse, that liberalism is identity politics because it refers the “identities” of liberals and illiberals. Identity politics is a squishy term that may be best understood in negative terms: identity politics is an alternative to politics organized around worldview or ideology. Therefore, to the extent that ideological commitments to, say, equal opportunity, human dignity, inclusion, or cosmopolitanism require attention to persistent inequalities or impediments to human flourishing that are based on race, sex, or sexual orientation, the resulting politics is not identity politics—it is liberalism or progressivism. In such a case, the focus on identity is incidental to ideology and we would expect it to fade once the underlying inequalities have been addressed. Some of what it is called identity politics takes this form.In his 1997 book <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/We_are_All_Multiculturalists_Now.html?id=VAdsYl5xgGwC&redir_esc=y" target="_blank">We Are All Multiculturalists Now</a>, the Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer wrote that “multiculturalism is the price America is paying for its inability or unwillingness to incorporate … African-Americans” into its prosperous mainstream. In the intervening decades, multiculturalism—with its focus on race and ethnicity—has morphed (or for <a href="http://iai.tv/video/after-identity-politics" target="_blank">its critics</a>, metastasized)<a href="http://iai.tv/video/rethinking-race-and-gender-tommy-curry" target="_blank"> into identity politics</a>, which includes concerns over sexual orientation and gender identity. The multiplication of identity-based concerns beyond race may seem to signal the growing importance of identity as an axis of political orientation. In fact, it signals a waning of its intensity: as identity concerns multiply, they become mundane—no longer a shock to the system, they are background noise. Moreover, today’s identity-based claims typically enjoy a diverse base of support: multi-racial coalitions support claims on behalf of one race; straight cis-gender people support LGBTQ rights. This is a direct result of increasingly diverse workplaces, neighborhoods, and schools. Pace Glazer, Western democracies have begun to incorporate once marginalized groups into the mainstream.Ideology, not identity, polarizes usTake the case of race relations in the United States. In the 1990s—to say nothing of the 1960s and 1970s!—racial divisions were stark and racial issues divisive. To take one salient example: compare reactions to racialized police violence. In 1991 the acquittal of the Los Angeles police officers involved in the televised beating of Rodney King sparked a week-long riot that ended only after the National Guard, Army, and Marine Corps were dispatched to restore order. This unrest echoed the racial divisions of the infamous “long hot summers” of the late 1960s, when racial tensions sparked violence in several major American cities. These protests were not only racially charged; they, by and large, involved Black people and took place in Black neighborhoods.In the years between the Rodney King beating and the killing of George Floyd, the US made remarkable progress in incorporating African-Americans into the mainstream—most notably in electing an African-American President. Racial income and wealth gaps, <a href="https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/disparities-in-wealth-by-race-and-ethnicity-in-the-2019-survey-of-consumer-finances-20200928.html">while still large, shrank</a>, and even the stubborn problem of <a href="https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/residential-segregation-declining-how-can-we-continue-increase-inclusion" target="_blank">residential segregation lessened.</a> As a consequence, public condemnation of the police murder of George Floyd was both much less violent and much more widespread. Although there was the sporadic, opportunistic vandalism and looting that accompany any mass demonstration, the Black Lives Matter protests were by and large peaceful. They were also global and multi-racial. African-Americans were angry, but so were people of all races; as a consequence, Black people did not feel the hopelessness that leads to aimless violence. The issue of racially targeted police violence divided a multi-racial liberal faction from a largely white conservative one, but the division was based more on ideology than race.Ironically, identity politics no longer divides society into warring tribes or factions defined by identity; instead, it polarizes society into ideological camps. To be sure, ideology itself is not a fixed foundation for politics: we are no longer in the ancien regime where warring factions decamped for the left and right wings of Versailles, nor even the twentieth century where the political spectrum might have been well-described as anchored by socialism on the left and reactionary authoritarianism on the right. However, even after the upheavals of the 1960s and the rise of the “new left” that spawned today’s identity politics, left and right retain a basic set of core commitments or at least guiding myths. For the left, there is a faith in progress, modernity, and continual moral improvement. Take, for example, Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous dictum that the moral arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice. For the right, there is a profound sense of loss of a more wholesome and honorable past way of life. Against King’s triumphant arc of history, the right sees irredeemable original sin and inherent depravity; where leftists see progress toward a better future, the right sees decline from a glorious past; where the left sees human flourishing, conservatives see decadence and sin; where the left sees the potential for improvement, the right sees the risk of reversion to the Hobbesian war.___Millions of white men voted for Kamala Harris; millions of Blacks and Latinos voted for the race-baiting Donald Trump.___To put it reductively, the basic ideological split is very old, if not ancient: a struggle between tradition and modernity. This orientation drives and supersedes identity politics: white liberals support DEI programs; conservatives of color oppose them. Millions of white men voted for Kamala Harris; millions of Blacks and Latinos voted for the race-baiting Donald Trump. Something similar is true of gender issues: liberal men support reproductive liberties and egalitarian gender roles; conservative women oppose them.The political significance of transgender issues—one of the scarecrows of the last US election but one that directly affects a small fraction of the population—is largely as a proxy for changing male/female gender roles, which affect everyone in their most intimate relationships. There is a wrinkle here, but it doesn’t contradict this observation. A significant fraction of feminists <a href="http://iai.tv/video/fiction-social-construction-and-gender-kathleen-stock" target="_blank">oppose opening female-only institutions</a>—women’s sports, bathrooms, rape crisis shelters—to transgender women (transgender advocates disparage them as TERFs or Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists.) These disputes reflect a real difficulty of reconciling conventional feminism with claims that challenge the salience of sex difference: the feminists <a href="http://iai.tv/video/material-girls-kathleen-stock" target="_blank">insist that transgender activism ignores the objective vulnerability of female bodies to male predation</a>. But for the feminists, this is more a struggle over the vulnerability of women than it is about transgender identity per se: indeed, some of the most prominent opponents of transgender claims on this basis are also supporters of transgender rights in contexts that do not challenge the salience of biological sex difference.___The important point is that these are splits based on ideology—not identity.___Transgender rights do not divide transgender people or even the LGBTQ+ community from straight and cis-gender people—they divide liberals from conservatives and they divide what we might call “difference feminists” from people committed to disrupting sex and gender binaries. While both transgender activists and radical feminists may be on the “left,” they are ideological opponents with respect to whether women’s vulnerability has exclusively social causes or includes biological causes. This explains the disorienting fact that religious conservatives and some radical feminists agree about the fundamental importance of sex difference (although of course they disagree markedly about what should follow from it.) The important point is that these are splits based on ideology—not identity.Similarly, although activists and ideologues on the left and on the right reflexively treat opposition to immigration as a dog whistle for racial grievance, the relationship is often the converse: racial grievance is increasingly the effect, not the cause, of anxieties about mass migration and the disruptions it may threaten for domestic labor markets, public services, and the quality of urban life. This explains the otherwise baffling growth in support for Trump among people of color—in particular Latinos, who in the US are the main targets of xenophobic anti-immigrant hysteria.Because of the success of past social movements, members of once marginal groups are finding a place in mainstream society, reducing the salience of identity-based grievances and smoothing the way for relationships and coalitions that cross such boundaries. To use race as an example again, there has been a <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2012/02/16/the-rise-of-intermarriage/" target="_blank">striking increase in the number of interracial marriages</a> over the past generation. Once taboo, interracial couples are now mundane and the resulting intimacies undermine older racial division, just as racist opponents of miscegenation have always feared. Similarly, as LGBTQ+ sexualities become more accepted, <a href="https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/lgbt-youth-pop-us/" target="_blank">a growing number of families include openly gay, lesbian, bisexual and gender non-conforming members</a>. This promotes understanding and political support that crosses identities, undermining identity politics.Of course, racial grievance is a significant feature of today’s politics. Indeed, the most salient type of identity-based grievance in the US today is that of conservative ethno-nationalists who are stoking white grievance as a wedge issue. <a href="https://www-cambridge-org.stanford.idm.oclc.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/white-male-and-angry-a-reputationbased-rationale-for-backlash/BEB3DADCC3F7CCC1A7DB49ECDA6787CF" target="_blank">White male grievance</a> is a deep and sincere commitment for some but it doesn’t explain, for instance, why 55% of Latinos and a significant number of African-Americans voted for Trump in the 2024 election. Without this multi-racial support, Trump would have lost the election and the narrative of white male grievance would be a footnote to a story about a triumphant multi-racial liberal coalition. ___This is not a “war of the sexes”: the divide here is not men versus women but traditional morality versus the values of what theorists in the 1970s would have called the new left.___For a much larger group, animosity linked to race, gender, and sexuality is a small part of a larger <a href="http://iai.tv/video/the-good-the-great-and-the-ghosts-of-the-past" target="_blank">inchoate nostalgia</a> and anxiety that cuts across divisions of both race and sex. Most women who support openly sexist political candidates such as Donald Trump don’t really want to return to traditional gender roles—indeed, a growing number of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/opinion/dissident-right-trump.html" target="_blank">former “trad wives” are now born-again feminists,</a> shocked and dismayed that traditional female gender roles are very different from their Instagram image. Many do, though, want the stability, optimism, and prosperity they associate (incorrectly) with past eras. Similarly, few Black and Latino Trump supporters agree with his racial politics, but they (especially the men) find something appealing in his unapologetic assertion of traditional masculine privilege. For them, race is sufficiently irrelevant that they ignore racist appeals and focus on other issues, such as traditional religious values, and perceived economic interests (in the last American election, price inflation was the most important factor for voters who had voted for Biden in 2020 and voted for Trump in 2024.) Gender issues remain highly salient, but it’s too glib to describe this preoccupation with gender roles as identity politics. This is not a “war of the sexes”: the divide here is not men versus women but traditional morality and family structure versus the values of what theorists in the 1970s would have called the new left—the counterculture, the sexual revolution, the feminist attack on the shackles of conventional sex roles—in other words, the values of cosmopolitan modernity.Changing racial and gender norms have left many people of all races and genders disoriented and uncomfortable. Authoritarian candidates like Trump, with his heedless and belligerent swagger, promise a confident return to an imagined lost innocence, when race and gender roles were settled. But of course the details are left conveniently vague; as a result many imagine that recent gains in social equality are settled and irrevocable. For instance, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreesen reconciled his support for Trump with his commitment to LGBTQ+ rights with the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/17/opinion/marc-andreessen-trump-silicon-valley.html" target="_blank">naïve assertion that gay rights are now “settled”</a> and no longer politically relevant. But the momentary success of vulgar ethno-nationalist candidates doesn’t reflect a growing ethno-nationalist identity politics among the general population; on the contrary, it may reflect an aversion to identity politics, a desire for a common civic culture and identity in the face of fractious pluralism.If the ethnonationalists have their way, we can expect a return to the aggressive identity politics of the past, as marginalized groups become dismayed with the political process and press for social change outside established institutions and political channels. But if Western societies can resist and beat back these regressive elements and continue to pursue equality, identity politics will continue to wane. https://f.mtr.cool/yxrcztsums