Three Kinds of Identity Politics: Traditional, Socialist, and Neoliberal

1. Traditional identity politics

For most of human history, identity politics were the politics of the powerful. They promoted a hierarchy that put men above women, people of their tribe above people of other tribes, and people of the ruling class above people of the working class.

Rebels and freethinkers who believed in the equality of all humans opposed them. In ancient times, these universalists were prophets and philosophers. A line from the Christian Bible illustrates that:

Galatians 3:28 There is no Jew or Greek, no slave or free, no male or female, for you are all one…

By the 19th century, socialists had joined the universalist ranks. Karl Marx proclaimed, “The emancipation of the productive class is that of all human beings without distinction of sex or race.”

In the United States, the struggle to end slavery and legal segregation was a fight between traditional identitarians who championed the white race and universalist socialists who rejected the idea that race mattered. At the height of the Jim Crow era, Eugene Debs announced, “As a social party we receive the Negro and all other races upon absolutely equal terms. We are the party of the working class, the whole working class, and we will not suffer ourselves to be divided by any specious appeal to race prejudice.”

When legal segregation ended in the 1960s, the universalists thought identitarianism…