18-Identity Politics

              All politics is identity politics. The question is which identity a politician invokes. 

              Each one of us has many identities. I discussed this previously in my essay “Tribalism” from Pencils – 2019. We are individuals, a gender (or not), a generation, a school body, a sports team member or fan, a citizen of a community, city, state, and nation, a race, a culture, a member of a political party, a human, part of life on earth, etc. None of these identities is mutually exclusive. We identify ourselves depending on the context.

              If leaders of any kind appeal to one or another of our identities, we have a choice whether to support them based on that identity. If another of our identities feels more important, we will decide not to. Currently, many in the United States seem to feel more strongly connected to political, racial, or cultural identities than to more general identities like US citizen or human being.

              Some connection to each of our identities is healthy, but at some point, we will all become worse off if we forget our common ground. If leaders will invoke our identity as humans and all dependent on the earth for our lives, perhaps we can work together to preserve our lives. Perhaps also, that mutual effort will help us to listen to each other and accommodate all of our needs as other identities.

              Unfortunately, we often feel we have less power if our identity group is too large. It seems contradictory, but identifying with a smaller group just seems more manageable and more rewarding. That’s understandable and healthy to an extent, but if we forget that we all belong to the human race and to the planet earth, we can push things too far and risk losing everything.

              Humans are a family. Families are messy and do not get to choose each other, so things will never be perfect, but they need to be a whole lot better than they are now if we are going to survive. 

              Remember who you are. You are human. And so are all those other people including____(fill in the blank). We have to save everyone if we’re going to save ourselves.

              Hugh Moffatt
              Whitstable, UK
              September 5, 2025