The Real Use for "Identity Politics"

I never had any concept of what "identity politics" was all about, or how evil it was, until a bunch of hate-filled women accused me of being a misogynist during the 2016 campaign because I dared to criticize Hillary Clinton's campaigning style. If I criticized her, so their reasoning went, then I must be a misogynist.

Since then I have noticed many examples of this concept which has so polluted our politics. The right-wing MAGA folks are bellowing about how the recent school shooter in Minnesota was trans, as if that means trans people are evil. Another example of this identity politics nonsense.

Two books I've read recently prompt me to consider whether there might be a legitimate use for identity poitics. The distinction I wish to make is urban vs. rural. This might be an example of a useful distinction, as rural and urban folks do tend to see the world differently.

The first book which clued me in to this is "The History of the SS", by G. S. Graber. While most of the book is a straightforward, factual account of the SS, near the end the author reflects on the meaning of this ugly piece of 20th century history. He says that the history of the SS is "an inseparable part of that yearning seen on all sides today to return to a preindustrial age".

The author elaborates: "The vast changes that the Industrial Revolution caused, including the establishment of a gigantic urban proletatriat, made it impossible for the conserative, land-oriented men who formed the ideological nucleus of the SS to come to terms with the twentieth century. The city became for them the emblem of all that was unsound and morally abhorrent. And in the city, they believed, it was the Jews who contolled life. Here is the meeting place between the conservative reaction against modern life which typified the SS, and their anti-Semitism."

The second book is "Miracle at Philadelphia", an account of the Constitional Convention of 1787. Here again I will skip to the end, where the author describes the approval process. Each of the 13 colonies had conventions to consider whether to ratify the proposed constitution. The debate was largely between the urban representatives and the rural representatives. The rural folks (called anti-Federalists) couldn't support the idea of a federal government with power superior to that of the states. In the end, the constitution was duly ratified, but look at the closeness of the vote in the three key states: Massachusetts, 187-168; Virginia, 89-79, and New York, 30-27. We don't realize that the constitution which has worked so well until recently came close to never getting off the ground, because of the rural-urban schism.

I checked the voting patterns of the twenty most rural states in the last three presidential elections. They all (except for three New England states, and Georgia in 2020) went for Trump in all three elections.

I suggest that instead of harping on gender, race, ethnic group, sexual persuasion, or what generation we were born in, we should pay attention to the differences between rural and urban folks.