If Kamala Harris wins the 2024 election, she will be the first female president ever, and the first Black and Indian female president too. But despite the historic nature of her candidacy, she doesn’t want to focus on her identity—and, in a pretty notable turn, neither does her party.

For feminists like me, this is uncomfortable: For one thing, I’m psyched about the prospect of the first female president. I wish the whole country were shouting it from the rooftops! No, I don’t think a few individual women in positions of power are the solution to sexism, but it also seems obviously true that it’s good when power is more equally shared between women and men. Progress is not linear and it is often hard to measure; these “firsts” are not evidence of problems solved, but they are symbols of changing times. Plus, identity matters—at least, it has certainly mattered to the chain of men, all but one of them white, who have held the presidency, as well as for the American public that has put them in office.

And yet I also believe there is something shallow, and sometimes incredibly counterproductive, about a focus on identity. It flattens more than it layers on, and it is certainly damaging to progressive movements when identity is wielded as a cudgel or a gotcha. Donald Trump’s four years in office were such a shock to the system, and such a victory for racism and sexism that the politics of identity on the left went into overdrive. A lot of good came out of this: movements against racial injustice and sexual abuse; a broader shared vocabulary with which to talk about power and fairness. But, as inevitably happens with well-meaning but extremely zealous social movements, there were excesses, especially in the ever-evolving linguistic demands that often obscured more than they clarified, the quickness to abandon other principles in the name of the cause, and the ritual shaming of the........

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