Identity politics is something usually associated with the left. Vice President Kamala Harris is often mocked by the right-wing commentariat as an identity pick.

Donald Trump’s choice of running mate – a working-class white man from a heartland state – was meant to underline the point, until Harris herself countered by selecting another working-class white man from the heartland. Senator Vance and Governor Walz spent last week in an amusing “hillbillier-than-thou” spat. “The hillbillies I grew up with didn’t go to Yale,” said Walz of Vance.

A supporter watches as the Republican presidential candidate, former President Donald Trump, speaks in Florida.Credit: AP

The American scholar Francis Fukuyama, in his 2018 essay Identity, traces the origins of identity politics to the mid-20th century evolution of Marxism from a theory in which social relationships are dictated by economic power in a society stratified by class, to a broader theory of inequality in which considerations other than purely economic ones determine relative power. Left-wing politics was no longer just about empowering the working class. Other disempowered groups – women, ethnic minorities, gays and other minorities – came increasingly to be its focus.

What started as an attempt – originating in particular with intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Herbert Marcuse and, later, Michel Foucault – to renovate Marxism, quickly moved into the political mainstream, as the aspirations of groups such as women’s liberation, the civil rights........

© Brisbane Times