The outcome of the U.S. presidential election should not be too surprising. Not only did a careful analysis of the polls predict Donald Trump’s victory in all seven swing states, but the trend over the past four weeks was also clear. State polling averages increasingly favored the Republican, while individual polls showing Kamala Harris in the lead became fewer and less convincing. The former president’s win was also driven by the fact that this election may be the first in which identity politics triumphed definitively, though certainly not in the way its left-wing architects might have hoped.
For over half a century, the United States has set the trends for democratic politics in the West, both in the political and socio-cultural realms. It is a focus of profound analysis and intense interest, not only because of the country’s power and the global influence of its leader but also as an indicator of the political future in other nations within our civilization. In this context, the 2024 elections stand out as potentially groundbreaking, as they may mark the point at which electoral outcomes were driven not by a battle of ideas, but by a battle of identities.
Ideas—and the political programs that articulate them—have lost significance in American political life as polarization has deepened. As both political camps entrenched, bipartisan compromise—a fundamental aspect of America’s complex political system—gradually disappeared. As presidents rarely held majorities in both houses of Congress, and full legislative freedom required control of 60 Senate seats, successive presidential agendas could only progress through shifting coalitions, which included members from the opposing party. The president’s party set the ideological tone, but compromises were shaped by concessions to the other side. This was the cost of moving anything forward.
As polarization intensified, bipartisan initiatives were almost completely blocked. By President Obama’s second term, this became a routine reality in Washington. Governance became restricted to executive orders, and political programs became meaningless as they were effectively doomed. Ideas lost their purpose as ‘grand narratives’ that justified these programs and instead became tools of identity-building, dissolving into banal symbols. Voters ceased to vote to change the country; they voted to affirm their own identity.
Over the past decade, two primary identities have emerged, one associated with each party, and these are no longer accurately described by ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’. These classic ideas are virtually gone in American politics. One disappeared when the right rejected free-market economics, free trade, globalization, and America’s ideological mission as a ‘freedom empire’. The other faded when the concept of equal legal rights and freedom of speech gave way to policies that tie public rights to one’s ethnic, racial, gender, and sexual identity.
Today, the contest in America is not between conservatism and liberalism but between two identities rooted in factors beyond the individual political choice of citizens. Increasingly, people do not choose their views—they are automatically assigned to them.
Politically, the problem is that these identities are asymmetrical. One is a unified majority identity tied to long-standing notions of belonging and recently mobilized by fears that it could fade away. The other is not a single identity but a mosaic of various minority identities, held together by a sense of grievance and discrimination by the majority. This loose ‘coalition’ is easily fractured by its internal contradictions, which can be exploited to drive conservative wedges, especially with culturally traditional Latino men, to demonstrate that they have little in common with nonbinary Gen Z activists or Black feminists.
As a result, we see one identity configured to secure electoral victories and another that is, at best, a handicap in elections, if not a direct burden. It’s remarkable how America’s center-left missed its moment, standing on the brink of its ultimate ideological triumph. Despite the chance 2000 Bush presidency, since the 1990s, cultural shifts have largely benefited the left. Liberalism was defeating conservatism on almost every front. Abortion opponents became caricatured as extreme, LGBT rights gained wide acceptance, and, to a significant extent, official and professional life began to eliminate racial discrimination under a ‘color-blind’ approach.
Yet, rather than consolidating these cultural and ideological gains, the liberal center-left allowed the pendulum to swing back. It ceded space to radical leftists who introduced new ideological ‘inventions’ that alienated a once-sympathetic centrist right.
Feminists of one generation attacked feminists of another for insufficient radicalism, labeling advocacy for white women’s rights as racism. Further divides saw middle-class Black women’s rights activism criticized as classism. More recent waves of feminism, representing nonbinary, queer, and non-women identifying as women, labeled traditional feminists as ‘TERFs’ and, astonishingly, won the left-wing debate. Suddenly, an activist’s right to a ‘bunny’ pronoun was deemed more important than equal pay or maternity leave for middle-class women.
Efforts toward racial equality through ‘color-blindness’ were labeled as racist, equivalent to racial discrimination itself. To eliminate racism, activists insisted on emphasizing racial identity at every turn, granting not just equal rights but privileged status to non-white people, effectively discriminating against whites. All white people were deemed inheritors of colonialism, slavery, and segregation, and expected to apologize continuously for their skin color. This framework was termed “Critical Race Theory”.
In public debate, whites, men, heterosexuals, Christians, Jews, able-bodied people, binary individuals, and those of average weight and age were barred from speaking on various issues. They were excluded from ‘safe spaces’, subjected to ‘no-platforming’, and, if they protested, encountered ‘cancel culture’.
According to ‘woke culture’ the same opinion, celebrated from a minority, could be condemned if voiced by a white person. Books were censored, rewritten, and films and TV shows imposed racial and gender quotas. Erotic scenes were acceptable if they depicted same-sex relationships, and nude photographs celebrated if they showed an obese or elderly model.
In short, the far-left alienated the majority, which concluded that centrists had tricked them, fighting not for equal rights but for privileges, and identified themselves with demands that many found absurd. Fewer people today are ashamed of racism, sexism, or even homophobia.
Donald Trump is not a conservative but effectively represented a threatened, weary, and frustrated white majority identity. He also demonstrated how this group could maintain an electoral edge for decades to come, even as whites become a minority. The self-destructive nature of ‘woke’ ideology and ‘intersectionality’ is already a vehicle for bringing more non-white groups—starting with Latino men—into the right-wing fold.
If Democrats hope to prevent a slide into prolonged political defeat, they must recreate the 1993-2013 center-left environment. They need to distance themselves from extreme left-wing niches and demonstrate that these niches’ anti-liberty ideals threaten ‘Americanism’ just as McCarthyism did, albeit in reverse. They should discredit and dissolve these groups, even if it costs a few elections, and stand as one of two parties upholding classic American values.
As defenders of liberal America, Democrats could argue that MAGA-style extremism mirrors the very ideology of ‘woke’ radicalism. By fostering this view among millions, the Democratic Party could break today’s rigid identity divides, push Republicans back on the defensive, and restore the political debate over ideas within a shared, pluralistic American identity.
The article was originally published in Polish at: https://liberte.pl/koniec-boju-na-idee/
Translated by Natalia Banaś
