Chapter 23 — Identity and Politics: How Religion, Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Class Shape American Political Life

"All politics is identity politics. The question is which identities count, which are noticed, and which are presumed to be the unmarked default." — Lilliana Mason, Uncivil Agreement (2018), paraphrased from p. 14

"When everything is identity, nothing is." — Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal (2017), p. 11

These two sentences could not be further apart in their normative posture. They could not be closer in describing the same fact. American politics is sorted, in 2026, by overlapping group attachments — religious, racial, ethnic, gendered, generational, geographic, occupational, educational — that correlate with party, with policy preference, with vote choice, and with how people feel about their political opponents. Whether that sorting is a healthy expression of pluralist coalition-building or a corrosive substitution of group affect for civic argument is among the most contested questions in contemporary American political thought. This chapter does not resolve that question. It cannot. It presents the empirical landscape of identity in American politics, steel-mans the major positions in the normative debate, and lets you decide.

The chapter takes one position and one only: identity politics, in some form, is practiced across the political spectrum. When the term is reserved for movements on the political left — Black Lives Matter, second-wave feminism, the LGBTQ+ rights movement — and withheld from the political right, the analytical category has been used as a partisan weapon rather than a descriptive tool. White evangelical alignment with the Republican Party is an identity politics. So is the "white working class" framing of the post-2016 Republican coalition. So is the suburban-college-educated alignment of the modern Democratic Party. The question is not whether identity shapes American political life — it self-evidently does, on every side — but how, in what configurations, with what consequences for democratic deliberation.

23.1 What is "identity politics"?

The term is contested at its root. In its earliest documented usage, the Combahee River Collective Statement of 1977 — written by a group of Black feminist socialists in Boston, including Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, and Demita Frazier — used "identity politics" descriptively to refer to politics that "comes directly out of our identity":

"We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else's oppression. ... Focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics."

The Collective's claim was specific and modest. People who experience particular forms of marginalization have particular knowledge of those forms; political movements led by the marginalized, organizing around their own experience, are more likely to articulate accurate demands than movements that speak for others. The framing assumed coalition: identity politics did not preclude solidarity, it grounded it in self-knowledge.

Forty-nine years later, the term's meaning has fractured.

On the contemporary American left, "identity politics" is sometimes embraced (with the Combahee meaning), sometimes critiqued (in the Mark Lilla / Adolph Reed Jr. tradition that argues identity-focused organizing displaces class solidarity), and sometimes used carefully alongside frameworks like intersectionality (a 1989 coinage by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, which we examine below).

On the contemporary American right, "identity politics" is most often used pejoratively, to describe what the speaker believes is the political left's substitution of group identity for individual rights and universal principle. Conservative intellectuals across the spectrum — from National Review-style fusionists to the post-liberal "common good" right — share some version of this critique, though they disagree on what should replace it.

There is a further wrinkle. Many on the right who critique "identity politics" practice their own form of group-affinity politics, often (though not always) without describing it as such. The political coalition that elected Ronald Reagan, the Bushes, and Donald Trump has self-conscious religious-identity components (white evangelicals), regional components (the South, rural America), occupational components (the building trades, law enforcement, the military), and recently, ethnic-coalition components (the Hispanic-Republican alignment effort discussed below). Whether this counts as "identity politics" depends on the definition. If "identity politics" means any politics organized around shared group attachment, then virtually all American political coalitions qualify. If it means politics that elevates group claims of historical injury into a primary organizing principle, then the term picks out a narrower phenomenon, and reasonable people disagree about its scope.

This chapter uses "identity politics" in the broader, descriptive sense: politics in which shared group identity functions as a primary axis of mobilization, coalition, and vote choice. Under that definition, both major American parties are coalitions of identity politics. The interesting questions are which identities, with what intensity, in what combinations, and what does the empirical record show.

23.2 The empirical landscape: how identity correlates with vote choice

What follows is the data — drawn from the American National Election Studies (ANES, electionstudies.org), Pew Research Center religious-political surveys, the Cooperative Election Study (CES), validated exit polls (Edison Research and AP VoteCast), and academic analyses including Catalist, the Pew Validated Voter studies, and the Brookings Demographic Group reports. Where exit-poll figures are uncertain (and they often are — exit polls have known sampling issues), this chapter cites the more reliable Catalist or Pew Validated Voter numbers where available. All figures are rounded; honest uncertainty bands are noted where they matter.

23.2.1 Race and ethnicity

Black Americans have been the most reliably Democratic demographic in American politics since the realignment that began with Roosevelt's New Deal and consolidated with the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Across every presidential election from 1964 through 2024, Black voters have given the Democratic candidate between 83% (Carter, 1976) and 95% (Obama, 2008) of their votes. The 2024 election attracted attention because the Democratic margin among Black voters was the smallest in two decades — Kamala Harris received approximately 83% of Black voters per Catalist, with Donald Trump receiving roughly 13% (compared to Trump's 8% among Black voters in 2020). The shift was concentrated among Black men, particularly younger Black men, where the Republican share rose into the high teens or low twenties depending on the data source. (See Case Study 1 for a deeper treatment.) Even with this movement, Black voters remain the most Democratic large demographic group in American politics.

Hispanic and Latino voters present a more complex picture. The aggregate Democratic share has eroded across three consecutive election cycles: roughly 71% for Obama in 2012, 66% for Clinton in 2016, 59% for Biden in 2020, and 52–55% for Harris in 2024 (Catalist; Pew Validated Voter). The shift is uneven across national-origin groups. Cuban Americans, concentrated in South Florida, have leaned Republican since the 1960s. Mexican Americans, the largest Hispanic subgroup, leaned Democratic by 30+ points historically but moved toward Republicans by significant margins in Texas border counties (Zapata, Maverick, Webb, Starr) in 2020 and 2024. Puerto Ricans, particularly the post-Hurricane-Maria diaspora in Central Florida, leaned strongly Democratic, though with some erosion in 2024. Venezuelan, Colombian, and Nicaraguan voters in Florida lean Republican, often citing concerns about socialism in their countries of origin. The Cato Institute's analysis of 2020–2024 Hispanic voting patterns (Ekins 2023) and the Equis Research post-2020 reports (Odio and Trujillo 2021) both argue that the Democratic Party's coalition assumed an "inevitable" Hispanic alignment that the actually-existing Hispanic electorate did not deliver. Conservative analysts (Ramesh Ponnuru in National Review, Ruy Teixeira in The Liberal Patriot) and progressive analysts (Mike Madrid in The Latino Century, 2024) reach similar conclusions about the data, while drawing different normative conclusions.

Asian American voters are the fastest-growing electorate by percentage and have leaned Democratic since the 1990s — approximately 60–65% Democratic in 2020 and 2024. Variation by national-origin is substantial. Indian Americans lean strongly Democratic (approximately 70% per AAPI Data 2024). Filipino Americans are the most evenly split major Asian group. Vietnamese Americans are the most Republican-leaning Asian group, partly tied to anti-communist political identity formed during the post-1975 refugee migration. Chinese, Korean, and Japanese American voters lean Democratic, with significant generational variation (younger more Democratic). The Asian American Voter Survey (AAPI Data; AALDEF) is the best ongoing source.

Native American voters are a smaller share of the national electorate but a meaningful one in Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, North and South Dakota, and Alaska. They lean Democratic by roughly 65–35 in recent cycles, with significant tribal variation and substantially below-average turnout owing to combinations of geography, ID requirements, and reservation polling-place access — issues litigated in Brnovich v. DNC (2021) and addressed throughout the post-Shelby County voting-rights landscape (Chapter 36).

White voters are the largest group and the most internally divided. The education divide among white voters is now the most consequential single demographic axis in American politics. White college graduates voted Democratic by approximately 8–10 points in 2020 and 12–15 points in 2024 (Catalist). White non-college voters voted Republican by approximately 25–30 points in 2020 and 30–35 points in 2024. White women college graduates are now among the most reliably Democratic large demographics in the country (~60–65% Democratic). White men without college degrees are among the most reliably Republican (~70%+ Republican). This realignment is recent — within white voters, the education axis was politically inert in the 1980s and weakly Democratic-favoring in the 1990s. Its post-2016 acceleration is documented across the political spectrum (Pew "Beyond Red v. Blue" 2014 and 2017; David Shor's Slow Boring analysis; Patrick Ruffini's Party of the People, 2023).

23.2.2 Religion

Religion is the single strongest demographic predictor of Republican vote share among white Americans and one of the strongest among Hispanic Americans. The data are unusually clear.

White evangelical Protestants voted approximately 81% for Trump in 2016, 84% in 2020, and 81% in 2024 (Pew Validated Voter). They have been the most Republican religious group in America since the rise of the Religious Right in the late 1970s, and the Trump-era alignment has, despite considerable intra-evangelical debate, been remarkably stable. (See Case Study 2.)

White Catholics have leaned Republican since the early 2000s, by margins of approximately 15–20 points in 2024. This is a striking reversal from the FDR-through-JFK era, when white Catholics were a foundational Democratic constituency.

Hispanic Catholics lean Democratic, but by a smaller margin than they did a decade ago — approximately 55–60% Democratic in 2024, down from 70%+ in 2012.

Hispanic Protestants and Hispanic evangelicals (a fast-growing population) lean Republican, often by significant margins (~55–60% Republican in 2024). The growth of Latino Pentecostalism is one of the most under-discussed demographic shifts in American politics; it is a major reason for the Hispanic-Republican movement of the past three cycles.

Mainline Protestants (Methodists, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Presbyterians, the United Church of Christ) split roughly evenly, with college-educated mainline Protestants leaning Democratic and non-college leaning Republican.

Black Protestants vote Democratic by 80+ point margins, regardless of denomination. The Black church has been the institutional backbone of Black political mobilization for sixty years (Case Study 1).

American Jews vote Democratic by approximately 70–30 in most recent elections. The 2024 cycle saw a small shift toward Republicans, particularly among Orthodox Jews (where the Republican share is now ~65%+) and among Jewish voters in some New York and New Jersey suburbs concerned about post-October-7 antisemitism on college campuses. Reform and Reconstructionist Jews remain strongly Democratic.

American Muslims voted Democratic by 60–35 or so in 2020. The 2024 cycle saw a meaningful shift, driven by frustration over the Biden administration's handling of the Israel-Gaza war. In Michigan (the state with the largest Arab and Muslim population), Harris received an estimated 36% of the Muslim vote, Trump 21%, and Jill Stein 32%. This is a single-cycle shift driven by specific policy circumstances; whether it represents durable realignment is unknown.

Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists lean Democratic, in roughly the 60–40 range, though with important variations by national-origin and immigrant generation.

Religiously unaffiliated voters ("nones," "spiritual but not religious," atheists, agnostics) are now the largest religious-affiliation category in America (approximately 28–30% of adults per Pew 2024) and lean Democratic by roughly 65–35 to 70–30 margins. The growth of the "nones" — particularly among voters under 40 — is one of the most consequential religious shifts in American history, with implications for both parties' coalition strategies.

The aggregate pattern across religion: the gap between religiously observant Americans (who lean Republican on average) and religiously unaffiliated Americans (who lean Democratic on average) has grown substantially over the past three decades and is now larger than the gap between Catholics and Protestants ever was. This is sometimes called the "religiosity gap" or, in some analyses, the "God gap" — terms that themselves carry connotations and are not used neutrally. Robert Putnam and David Campbell's American Grace (2010, updated 2024) is the most comprehensive academic treatment.

23.2.3 Gender

Women have voted Democratic by 7–12 percentage points more than men in every presidential election since 1980. The gender gap has been remarkably stable in aggregate, even as the underlying composition has shifted.

In 2024, women voted Democratic by approximately 53–46 (Catalist), and men voted Republican by approximately 55–43 — a gender gap of roughly 18 points. This is the largest gender gap in modern polling, driven by movements at both ends: women (particularly women without college degrees, where Harris over-performed expectations) shifted Democratic relative to 2020, and men (particularly young men of all races) shifted Republican.

The gender gap is not uniform across racial groups:

• Black women, the most Democratic-leaning demographic in America, voted Democratic by approximately 88–10.
• White women split, with college-educated white women voting Democratic by ~60–40 and non-college white women voting Republican by ~60–40.
• Hispanic women voted Democratic by approximately 56–43, down from ~65–35 in 2020.
• Asian women voted Democratic by approximately 65–35.

Marital status also matters. Single (never-married, divorced, widowed) women have voted Democratic by 30+ point margins for decades; married women split or lean slightly Republican; this "marriage gap" is sometimes larger than the basic gender gap.

The young-male shift of 2024 is among the most discussed phenomena of the cycle. Men aged 18–29 voted Democratic by approximately 7 points (Harris 49–Trump 42, Catalist), down from Biden's 24-point margin in 2020. The shift was concentrated among young men without college degrees and was visible across racial groups (young Black men, young Hispanic men, young Asian men, young white men all shifted right relative to 2020). Young women aged 18–29 voted Democratic by approximately 18 points, comparable to 2020, producing the largest gender gap within an age cohort in modern polling — about 25 points between young men and young women. Whether this represents a durable generational pattern or an artifact of the specific candidates and issues of 2024 is an open empirical question.

23.2.4 Sexual orientation and gender identity

Voters who identify as LGBTQ+ vote Democratic by very large margins. Per the 2020 ANES and the 2024 CES, LGBTQ+ voters favored the Democratic candidate by approximately 75–80% to 18–22% Republican. The pattern has held across multiple cycles. The LGBTQ+ share of the electorate has grown substantially — from ~3% in 2008 to ~7–8% in 2024 (CES) — driven mostly by Gen Z and Millennial voters and by changing willingness to disclose identity in surveys.

23.2.5 Class: income and education

Education has overtaken income as the dominant class proxy in American voting behavior. This is one of the most important shifts of the past thirty years.

In the 1970s and 1980s, lower-income voters leaned Democratic and higher-income voters leaned Republican, with education weakly correlated with income. By 2024, the picture had inverted in important ways:

• Education is now strongly polarizing: college-educated voters lean Democratic, non-college lean Republican.
• Income is weakly polarizing: high-income voters split, with high-income college-educated leaning Democratic and high-income non-college leaning Republican.

The 2024 income breakdown (Catalist): voters with household income under $50,000 voted approximately 50–48 Democratic; $50,000–$100,000 voted approximately 51–47 Republican; $100,000–$200,000 split nearly evenly; over $200,000 leaned Democratic by ~5 points. This is not the income-class pattern of the New Deal coalition.

The realignment is most pronounced among non-college whites, but it is visible (in attenuated form) among non-college non-whites as well. The Democratic Party is now the party of the credentialed; the Republican Party is the party of the non-credentialed. Whether this is a temporary state, a long-term realignment, or a return to some earlier configuration is debated. (See David Shor's "education realignment" analyses; Ruy Teixeira and John Judis's Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, 2023; and Patrick Ruffini's Party of the People, 2023.)

23.2.6 Geography and density

Urban voters lean Democratic; rural voters lean Republican; suburban voters are the swing electorate. The density gradient — how Democratic vote share rises with population density per square mile — is one of the strongest geographic predictors in American politics, stronger than region for most purposes.

In 2024 (Catalist): urban voters (precincts with density above 5,000 per square mile) voted approximately 64–34 Democratic; suburban voters voted approximately 50–48 Republican (a small Republican shift from 2020); rural voters voted approximately 64–34 Republican. The density gradient has steepened over the past four cycles.

Region matters too, but less than density within region. The South is more Republican than the Northeast even controlling for density, but a New York City precinct and a Houston precinct — both urban — vote much more like each other than either votes like a rural precinct in its same state.

23.2.7 Generation

Generational cohorts have voted differently for decades, but the recent pattern is striking. Across multiple cycles, voters under 30 have voted Democratic by significant margins (typically 20+ points). Voters over 65 have voted Republican by smaller but consistent margins. Voters 30–64 split, with the modal vote shifting between cycles.

Two recent wrinkles complicate the simple "young = Democratic" story.

First, Gen Z men (born ~1997–2012, voting age cohort 18–28 in 2024) trend less Democratic than Millennial men did at the same age. As noted above, the gender gap among under-30 voters in 2024 was approximately 25 points — Gen Z men voted Democratic by only ~7 points, while Gen Z women voted Democratic by ~18 points. This is the largest within-cohort gender gap on record.

Second, Millennials (born ~1981–1996) have not aged into Republican-leaning voters as past generations did. Through their 30s, Millennials have remained more Democratic than Gen X was at the same age, and substantially more than Boomers were. Whether this is a permanent generational realignment or an artifact of specific cohort experiences (the 2008 financial crisis, student debt, housing affordability) is debated.

23.3 Cross-cutting and intersectional identity

Most voters hold multiple identities. The interesting analytical question is what happens when a voter's identities point in different partisan directions.

23.3.1 The intersectionality framework

In a 1989 University of Chicago Legal Forum article, "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex," legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw introduced the term intersectionality to describe the analytical observation that Black women, in employment-discrimination law, often fell between the cracks of race-discrimination and sex-discrimination doctrine, because the harms they experienced were attributable jointly to race and sex in ways that single-axis doctrine could not fully capture. Crenshaw's specific case was DeGraffenreid v. General Motors (1976), in which Black women had sued GM for discrimination in seniority-based layoffs; the court rejected the claim because GM had hired Black men (defeating race discrimination) and white women (defeating sex discrimination), and the court declined to recognize "Black women" as a protected sub-class.

Crenshaw's original analytical move was modest and well-grounded in legal doctrine. The framework has since been extended, generalized, and contested. Patricia Hill Collins's Black Feminist Thought (1990) developed the broader analytical framework. bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and the Combahee River Collective had articulated intersectional analyses before Crenshaw coined the term. The framework now circulates well beyond legal scholarship, in academic disciplines, in activist organizing, in corporate diversity training, and in popular discourse.

The framework's defenders argue:

• It captures empirical realities. The political experience of a Black evangelical woman is not the simple sum of "Black voter," "evangelical voter," and "woman voter"; it is its own configuration, with distinct correlates and trajectories.
• It corrects an analytical bias in earlier civil-rights scholarship that defaulted to a single-axis frame (often, race-meaning-Black-men or sex-meaning-white-women).
• It produces better policy analysis, because programs that target a single axis often miss those at the intersections.

The framework's critics — both internal-to-academic-feminism critics like Judith Butler in some moods, and external critics like Yascha Mounk in The Identity Trap (2023), Greg Lukianoff in The Coddling of the American Mind (with Jonathan Haidt, 2018), Christopher Rufo in America's Cultural Revolution (2023), and Richard Hanania in The Origins of Woke (2023) — argue:

• The framework, in its popular extensions, can essentialize identity, treating individuals as mere instances of their group categories.
• Applied uncritically, it produces a "hierarchy of oppression" that ranks identity claims rather than analyzing them.
• It can crowd out individual-rights frameworks and class-based analyses.
• In some institutional settings (corporate DEI, university administration, K–12 curriculum), it shapes practice in ways that reasonable people across the political spectrum find troubling.

The thoughtful position acknowledges that both the analytical case for intersectionality and the critique of its popular extensions have merit. Crenshaw's original insight is robust: single-axis discrimination analysis misses real harms. But the version of "intersectionality" that circulates in contemporary corporate trainings or social-media discourse is often loosely tied to the rigorous academic framework, and the critiques of that loose version are not adequately answered by the rigorous version.

23.3.2 Cross-pressured voters

A cross-pressured voter is one whose multiple identities point in different partisan directions. Examples:

• A Black evangelical woman in South Carolina has identities (Black, evangelical, woman) that pull in different partisan directions (Black → strongly Democratic; evangelical → strongly Republican; woman → leans Democratic).
• A white college-educated rural voter in Vermont has identities (white, college-educated, rural) that cross-pressure (college-educated → leans Democratic; non-urban → leans Republican; white → split).
• A Hispanic Catholic small-business owner in Texas has identities (Hispanic → leans Democratic but eroding; Catholic → split; small-business owner → leans Republican) that produce genuine ambivalence.

Cross-pressured voters tend to be more open to persuasion, less ideologically rigid, and more responsive to candidate-specific factors. They are the voters that campaigns invest heavily in. They are also the voters that produce the volatility in election outcomes, since stable-bloc voters' preferences are largely locked in.

Lilliana Mason's Uncivil Agreement (2018) develops the social sorting thesis: as identities have come to align (most Republicans are now also most evangelical are also most rural are also most non-college; most Democrats are now also most urban are also most college-educated are also most secular), partisan affect has intensified. Cross-pressured voters once provided a structural brake on polarization — when your own family included partisans of both parties, your hostility toward the other party was constrained by personal relationships. As demographics have sorted, that brake has weakened. Ezra Klein's Why We're Polarized (2020) extends Mason's argument with attention to media and institutional reinforcement.

23.4 How identity shapes voting: mechanisms

The empirical correlations are clear. The causal mechanisms — why identity correlates with vote choice — are more contested. Several non-mutually-exclusive accounts.

23.4.1 Group cues

Group identity → group cues → vote choice. Voters who identify with a group take cues from group leaders, group institutions (churches, unions, civic organizations), and group media. A Black voter whose church endorses a Democratic candidate is more likely to vote for that candidate; a white evangelical voter whose pastor explicitly or implicitly endorses a Republican candidate is more likely to vote for that candidate. The mechanism is informational (the institution provides political information the voter values) and affective (group endorsement creates pressure toward conformity).

This mechanism predicts that which groups carry political weight depends on the density of group institutions. Black political mobilization through the church is particularly potent because the Black church is institutionally robust. Hispanic political mobilization is institutionally thinner — there is no analogous unified church infrastructure — and Hispanic vote behavior is correspondingly more volatile.

23.4.2 Material interest

Material interest — what economic, social, or policy outcomes a group benefits from or is harmed by — predicts political alignment in obvious ways but with important caveats. Public-sector union members lean Democratic in part because the Democratic Party tends to support public-sector union prerogatives. Small-business owners lean Republican in part because the Republican Party tends to support tax and regulatory positions favorable to small businesses. These are first-order interest accounts.

The caveats are substantial. The "What's the Matter with Kansas?" thesis (Thomas Frank, 2004) argued that working-class voters who voted Republican were voting against their material interest. Subsequent analysis — including from progressive economist Larry Bartels (Unequal Democracy, 2008, updated 2016) — questioned this framing, noting that voters' assessments of their own material interest do not always match outside analysts' assessments, and that non-material concerns (religious values, cultural identity, perceptions of national direction) are also "real" interests in a voter's own framework. The Frank thesis and its critics remain a useful starting point for any analysis of class-and-identity politics.

23.4.3 Symbolic politics and identity protection

A third account: voters use partisan affiliation to signal and protect a valued identity. This is the focus of much of the recent political-psychology literature.

Donald Kinder and Lynn Sanders (Divided by Color, 1996), Karen Stenner (The Authoritarian Dynamic, 2005), Diana Mutz (Hearing the Other Side, 2006), and more recently John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck (Identity Crisis, 2018) and Ashley Jardina (White Identity Politics, 2019) develop versions of this account. The argument: voters use party as a vehicle for expressing and defending an identity they value, and policy positions adjust to the party's coalition rather than the other way around.

This account has strong predictive power for some phenomena — the way voter positions on ostensibly non-identity policy questions (trade, immigration, COVID-19 protocols) shifted with the parties' coalitions over the past decade — and weaker predictive power for others. Like all general accounts of voter behavior, it is part of the picture, not the whole.

23.5 Identity entrepreneurs: movements that mobilize identity

Movements that explicitly mobilize identity for political ends exist across the political spectrum. Naming them:

On the left or progressive side:

• Civil rights / Black political movements — from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) of the 1960s through the contemporary Movement for Black Lives (M4BL, founded 2014) and Black Lives Matter Global Network. These movements are diverse and internally contested; they share a focus on Black political power, criminal-justice reform, and (in the M4BL case) economic restructuring.
• Second-wave and contemporary feminism — from NOW (founded 1966) through #MeToo (2017–) through contemporary reproductive-rights organizing post-Dobbs (2022).
• The LGBTQ+ rights movement — from the Mattachine Society and Daughters of Bilitis through Stonewall (1969), through the AIDS-era ACT UP, through marriage-equality organizing culminating in Obergefell (2015), through contemporary trans-rights advocacy.
• The Hispanic civil-rights and immigration-advocacy tradition — LULAC (founded 1929), the United Farm Workers (1962), MALDEF (1968), and contemporary organizations like UnidosUS.
• The Asian American civic-organizing tradition — including the Asian Americans Advancing Justice network and AAPI Data.
• The post-2020 racial-justice mobilization — the largest cross-racial protest movement in American history per crowd-counting analyses (Putnam et al. 2020), with significant aftermath in policy debates over policing, education, and corporate practice.

On the right or conservative side:

• The Religious Right — from the Moral Majority (founded 1979 by Jerry Falwell Sr.) through the Christian Coalition (Pat Robertson, Ralph Reed) through Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council and the post-2010 mobilization around religious-liberty cases (Hobby Lobby, Masterpiece Cakeshop, Fulton). (See Case Study 2.)
• The Tea Party (2009–2014ish) — initially organized around fiscal concerns about the 2009 stimulus and the ACA; institutionalized through Americans for Prosperity, FreedomWorks, and a network of local chapters; influential in the 2010 midterm and the rise of the House Freedom Caucus.
• MAGA / the Trump-aligned political movement (2015–) — organized around opposition to immigration, skepticism of post-Cold-War international institutions, and an anti-elite populism. Its identity-political dimensions include white-working-class self-identification, evangelical-conservative coalition, regional (Sun Belt and Midwest non-coastal) identity, and an "America First" national identity.
• The "anti-woke" Republican mobilization (2020–) — organized in part by Christopher Rufo, Manhattan Institute scholars, the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR), and state-level political organizers. Focused on opposition to corporate DEI, K–12 curriculum content (CRT, 1619 Project), and certain trans-rights policies.
• The Hispanic-Republican entrepreneurial effort — the LIBRE Initiative (a Koch-network organization founded 2011), Bienvenido, and similar groups working to build Republican identification among Hispanic voters. Notable for explicitly engaging in identity-coalition organizing while critiquing identity politics.
• The new Christian-conservative current — organizations like First Things magazine, the Heritage Foundation's post-2020 turn, the National Conservatism (NatCon) conferences (2019–), and intellectual work by figures like Patrick Deneen, Yoram Hazony, Adrian Vermeule, and R. R. Reno. Some adherents describe this as "Christian nationalism," a term others in the same milieu reject as pejorative; we discuss the term carefully below.

The point of this list: identity-mobilizing movements exist on both sides of the political spectrum. They differ in their substantive content, the identities they activate, the institutional networks they rely on, and their relationships to the major parties. They share the basic technology: organize people around a salient group attachment, translate that attachment into political action, channel it into electoral and legislative outcomes. The political scientist who studies one and not the other is doing partial political science.

23.6 The contested normative debate

The empirical questions are largely matters of measurement. The normative questions — should identity be a primary axis of political organization? — are genuinely contested, and the chapter steel-mans the major positions.

23.6.1 The progressive critique of identity politics

A serious progressive critique of identity politics has existed throughout the post-1960s era. Its current best-known articulators include:

Mark Lilla, in The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics (2017), argues that the post-1960s liberal abandonment of a unifying civic vision in favor of group-specific appeals has weakened the Democratic Party electorally, made cross-group coalition-building harder, and contributed to a political culture that ranks identities rather than appealing to shared citizenship. Lilla writes from a center-left position; his argument is that identity politics, even when deployed in the service of marginalized groups, makes it harder to win the political power those groups need.

Adolph Reed Jr., the political scientist and democratic-socialist, has argued for decades (most recently in No Politics but Class Politics, 2022, with Walter Benn Michaels) that identity-focused politics displaces the class solidarity that, in his view, alone can produce durable economic redistribution. Reed's critique is from the left of the Democratic Party and has more in common with traditional labor-left politics than with center-left criticism.

Bernie Sanders and the Sanders-aligned political tradition have advanced a version of this critique pragmatically: that the Democratic Party's coalition-building strategy has over-weighted identity-specific appeals and under-weighted cross-identity economic appeals. This critique is contested within the Democratic coalition itself; some progressive analysts argue Sanders' framing is too sharply opposed to identity organizing.

The strongest version of the progressive critique: identity politics, as practiced, can crowd out the cross-group solidarity needed for economic redistribution and political-coalition durability. It can produce backlash. It can essentialize groups. It can become an end in itself rather than a means to substantive policy gains.

23.6.2 The progressive defense of identity politics

The strongest versions of the defense:

Ta-Nehisi Coates, in Between the World and Me (2015) and We Were Eight Years in Power (2017), articulates a defense grounded in the specificity of Black American historical experience. The argument is not that identity should always trump other axes; it is that race-specific experiences (slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, mass incarceration) have produced race-specific harms that race-neutral remedies cannot fully address. To pretend otherwise — to retreat to a "color-blind" framework — is to abandon the analytical tools needed to understand and remedy those harms.

Ibram X. Kendi, in How to Be an Antiracist (2019), offers a more aggressive version: any policy that produces racially disparate outcomes is, in his framing, racist; the only moral response is "antiracist" policy that explicitly aims at equal racial outcomes. This is a more contested position even within progressive circles — Coleman Hughes, Glenn Loury, John McWhorter, and Sheena Mason have all critiqued Kendi from within the broader Black intellectual tradition — but it is a coherent and seriously argued position.

Kimberlé Crenshaw's intersectionality framework, properly applied, can be understood as a defense of a sophisticated form of identity politics: not crude single-axis identity claims, but careful attention to how multiple identities configure to produce distinctive experiences and policy needs.

The "centering of marginalized voices" tradition — with roots in the Combahee River Collective, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and Patricia Hill Collins — argues that members of marginalized groups have epistemic authority about their own experiences that members of dominant groups lack. Coalition-building must therefore start with the perspectives of the marginalized rather than abstracting from them.

The strongest version of the progressive defense: specific groups have specific structural disadvantages that require specific remedies. "Color-blind" or "identity-neutral" framings can mask discrimination by treating unequal starting points as if they were equal. Coalition politics is the actually-existing mechanism by which historically marginalized groups have secured political voice; a coalitional language is not the same as a divisive language.

23.6.3 The conservative critique of identity politics

The strongest versions:

Yuval Levin, in The Fractured Republic (2016) and A Time to Build (2020), argues that contemporary identity-focused politics is one symptom of a broader institutional erosion: the institutions (churches, civic associations, professions, families) that once formed individuals into citizens have weakened, and politicized identity has rushed in to fill the void. Levin's critique is institutionalist and Burkean; he is critical of identity politics on both left and right.

Patrick Deneen, in Why Liberalism Failed (2018) and Regime Change (2023), offers a post-liberal critique. In Deneen's reading, liberal individualism — the framework that treats individuals as bearers of universal rights, abstract from group membership — has paradoxically produced identity politics as a reaction, because abstract individualism could not satisfy the human need for thick communal belonging. His prescription is contested even on the right but the diagnosis is influential.

Christopher Rufo, in America's Cultural Revolution (2023), makes a more polemical argument that contemporary "diversity, equity, and inclusion" practices in corporate, educational, and governmental institutions trace their intellectual lineage to critical theory traditions that, in his analysis, are at odds with classical liberal commitments. Rufo's framing is contested — many of the academic figures he traces would describe their work very differently — but his account has had substantial influence on Republican policy practice.

Charles Murray, in Coming Apart (2012) and Facing Reality (2021), offers a different conservative analysis: that the central American social cleavage is class (specifically, the gap between a credentialed upper class and a non-credentialed working class), and that race-focused political analysis often misidentifies class-based dysfunction as racial dysfunction. Murray is among the most controversial figures in this debate; his earlier work (The Bell Curve, 1994, with Richard Herrnstein) makes claims about race and intelligence that are widely (and, in this textbook author's empirical view, correctly) regarded by the mainstream of the relevant academic disciplines as poorly supported. We note this because students will encounter Murray either way; honest engagement requires honesty about which of his arguments are within the mainstream of contestation and which are not.

Richard Hanania, in The Origins of Woke (2023), argues that contemporary corporate and institutional DEI practice traces in significant part to civil-rights regulatory and legal incentives that emerged from the 1960s and 1970s, particularly under federal contractor requirements and disparate-impact doctrine. Hanania's account is contested in important particulars and broadly disputed by civil-rights scholars; we include him because his argument has been influential among conservative legal thinkers.

The strongest version of the conservative critique: identity-focused politics elevates group claims over individual rights, and group identity over universal principle, in ways that undermine both classical-liberal commitments and the project of cross-group cooperation. It can racialize neutral issues; it can divide; it can produce credentialed-class authority over institutions that ought to be neutral.

23.6.4 The conservative defense of group-affinity politics

This is sometimes the rhetorically asymmetric position: many conservatives critique "identity politics" while practicing what is, descriptively, a form of group-affinity politics. The intellectually honest defenses:

Yoram Hazony, in The Virtue of Nationalism (2018) and Conservatism: A Rediscovery (2022), offers a defense of national-identity politics specifically. The argument: nations, as bounded communities with shared histories, languages, and (sometimes) religions, are legitimate objects of political loyalty; politics that takes national identity seriously is not racism but legitimate communal self-government.

Patrick Deneen's Regime Change (2023) and the broader post-liberal or integralist current advance a stronger version of communal-identity politics, sometimes drawing on Catholic social teaching, sometimes on a broader civic-republican tradition.

The religious-conservative defense of faith-community politics — articulated across a range of figures from Russell Moore (when in his pre-2020 Southern Baptist Convention role; we discuss his post-2020 dissent in Case Study 2) through Robert P. George, Sherif Girgis, and others — argues that religious communities have legitimate interests in collective political action: defending their institutional autonomy, advocating for their moral views in democratic deliberation, and participating in coalition politics like any other group.

The traditional-values and family-structure defense — articulated by figures like Mary Eberstadt, Jenet Erickson, the team at the Institute for Family Studies, and earlier work by James Q. Wilson and Robert Putnam — argues that the political claims of religious-conservative coalitions reflect substantive concerns about family, community, and moral formation that secular individualism does not adequately address.

The strongest version of the conservative defense: faith communities, traditional families, regional cultures, and other forms of pre-political belonging are legitimate axes of political organization, and have been throughout American history. The selective application of "identity politics" as a critique only of left-coded movements is itself a partisan move; the analytical category, applied honestly, would acknowledge that communal-affinity politics is not unique to one side.

23.6.5 What the chapter does not endorse

The chapter steel-mans all four positions. It does not endorse any of them. The honest reader will notice that all four contain real insights and all four have genuine weaknesses. The political scientist's job is to lay out the empirical landscape and the contested normative debate clearly enough that students can engage them seriously. Picking a side is the student's job, not the textbook's.

23.7 Specific identity-political controversies (2020–2026)

A non-exhaustive list of the controversies that have organized identity-political conflict in the recent period.

23.7.1 Affirmative action

Cross-reference Chapter 6 (Civil Rights) for full doctrinal treatment. Briefly: the Supreme Court's 2023 decisions in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and SFFA v. UNC (600 U.S. 181) effectively ended the use of race as an explicit factor in higher-education admissions. The decisions have been celebrated by critics of race-conscious admissions (who argue, in the Bakke-Powell-Harlan-dissent tradition, that the Constitution is colorblind) and criticized by defenders (who argue that race-neutral admissions cannot achieve sufficient racial diversity given continuing structural inequality). Both arguments are serious. The post-SFFA empirical question — what happens to under-represented minority enrollment at selective institutions, and whether class-based or geography-based alternatives can substitute — is being studied in real time.

23.7.2 Religious-liberty exemptions

Cross-reference Chapters 5 and 6. The post-Hobby Lobby (2014) and Masterpiece Cakeshop (2018) line of cases — through Fulton v. Philadelphia (2021), Carson v. Makin (2022), and 303 Creative v. Elenis (2023) — has expanded religious-liberty protections in ways that intersect with antidiscrimination law. Defenders argue these decisions properly protect religious conscience against secular state pressure; critics argue they license discrimination against LGBTQ+ Americans and others. Both sides have substantive arguments rooted in the Free Exercise Clause and the Equal Protection Clause respectively. The doctrine remains in motion.

23.7.3 Curriculum debates

Critical Race Theory (CRT) is, in its original academic sense, a tradition in legal scholarship dating to the 1980s — work by Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw (yes, the same), Richard Delgado, Mari Matsuda, and others, examining how race and law interact in ways that formal equality alone cannot capture. The legal-academic CRT is a graduate-level intellectual tradition that virtually no K–12 school has taught.

The political term "CRT" — as deployed in K–12 curriculum debates from 2021 onward — refers more loosely to any pedagogy that emphasizes systemic racism, racial-disparity analysis, or race-based identity formation. The conflation between the academic and political senses of the term is itself contested. Christopher Rufo has acknowledged in published interviews that he chose to "freeze the brand" of CRT as a political target because of its rhetorical utility; defenders of the targeted curricula argue the political use of "CRT" is a deliberate misdirection.

Both points of view contain truth. There is a real academic tradition called CRT. There are also K–12 curricular practices that the academic CRT scholars themselves often did not author and would not necessarily endorse, and that are nonetheless what most parents and policymakers are arguing about. Honest political education names both senses of the term and refuses to pretend they are identical.

The 1619 Project, a New York Times Magazine feature published in 2019 (and expanded into a book and curriculum by Nikole Hannah-Jones), reframes American history with the arrival of enslaved Africans in 1619 as a foundational event. Critics — including a group of historians led by Sean Wilentz and including Gordon Wood, James McPherson, and Victoria Bynum — wrote a 2019 letter to the Times objecting to specific historical claims (particularly the original framing of the American Revolution as motivated by a desire to preserve slavery). Defenders argue the project's broader interpretive frame — that slavery and its legacy shape American history more centrally than mainstream historiography acknowledges — is well-grounded. The doctrinal historical questions are matters of professional debate; the political-curricular question is a matter of legislation, with multiple states having passed laws restricting how the project can be taught.

Parental rights legislation — with Florida's 2022 "Parental Rights in Education" act (HB 1557) the most prominent — has been similarly contested. Defenders argue parents have legitimate authority over content involving sexuality and gender taught to young children; critics argue specific provisions are vague or directed at LGBTQ+-related discussion. Both positions are arguable. (Cross-reference Chapter 29 on education policy.)

23.7.4 Title IX and gender identity

Cross-reference Chapter 6. The doctrinal moves are these: Bostock v. Clayton County (2020) held that Title VII's prohibition on sex discrimination encompasses discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in employment. Whether Bostock's reasoning extends to Title IX (educational settings, particularly athletics and facilities) is a contested question that the Court has not yet fully resolved. The Biden administration's 2024 Title IX rule extended Title IX protections to gender identity; portions of the rule were enjoined in multiple federal courts; the rule's status was further unsettled by the change of administration.

In United States v. Skrmetti (decided June 2024), the Supreme Court upheld Tennessee's law restricting certain gender-transition medical interventions for minors against an Equal Protection challenge. The 6-3 decision held that the law did not constitute sex discrimination subject to heightened scrutiny. Concurring and dissenting opinions reflect substantive disagreement about the constitutional treatment of transgender medical care, parental rights, and the role of medical evidence in constitutional analysis. The doctrine continues to develop.

The underlying policy questions — how to balance protections for transgender Americans, parental authority over minors' medical care, religious-conscience claims, women's privacy and athletic-competition concerns, and medical-evidence questions about specific interventions — are genuinely contested, including within medical and academic communities. Honest political analysis acknowledges this contest rather than treating any single position as settled.

23.7.5 DEI initiatives

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives became standard in corporate and educational institutions over the 2010s and accelerated dramatically after the 2020 racial-justice mobilization. By 2022, virtually every Fortune 500 company had a DEI office or designated officer; most universities had analogous structures; many federal agencies had institutionalized DEI processes.

The post-2023 backlash has been substantial. Several large corporations (Walmart, McDonald's, Ford, Harley-Davidson, John Deere, Boeing in some forms) reduced or restructured their DEI programs in 2024–2025. Multiple state legislatures (Florida, Texas, Tennessee, others) passed laws restricting DEI offices in public universities. The 2023 SFFA decision, while formally about admissions, has been interpreted by some federal judges as cabining race-conscious institutional practices more broadly.

Defenders of DEI argue the programs address real and measurable inequities, that critique is often based on misrepresentation of program content, and that the rollback represents partisan retrenchment rather than substantive correction. Critics argue specific practices (mandatory training with contested content, hiring and promotion processes that consider racial composition explicitly, pedagogy that emphasizes group attribution over individual judgment) are problematic on classical-liberal grounds, and that the rollback reflects substantive correction. Both sides are arguing about specific institutional practices; the empirical question of which DEI programs work, on which metrics, is under-researched relative to the political heat the topic generates. Recent academic work (including meta-analyses by Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev showing mixed-to-modest effects of mandatory diversity training; work by Edward Chang and others on the effectiveness of specific interventions) is the better starting point than the polemical literature on either side.

23.7.6 The new Christian-conservative current

A current of explicitly Christian-conservative political thought has gained influence in recent years. The figures and groups vary in their specific commitments: some endorse what scholars like Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry (in Taking America Back for God, 2020) call Christian nationalism — the view that the United States is a Christian nation by founding and identity, and that public policy should reflect that. Others, like the NatCon (National Conservatism) circle, articulate forms of religious-civic conservatism without endorsing the "Christian nationalism" label. Still others, like the integralist current associated with Adrian Vermeule and Sohrab Ahmari, draw on Catholic political theology to argue for more substantive religious shaping of the political order.

Critics — including across the political spectrum: the Christian conservative writer David French has been a sustained critic, as have progressive scholars like Anthea Butler and Kristin Kobes Du Mez (Jesus and John Wayne, 2020) — argue that Christian-nationalist framings conflict with the religious-liberty commitments of the Founding, marginalize non-Christian Americans, and risk producing the very Christian-state coercion that the First Amendment was designed to prevent.

Defenders within the movement argue that "Christian nationalism" is often a pejorative imposed from outside, that the underlying commitment is to a religiously grounded politics that respects religious liberty for all, and that mainstream secular liberalism has its own implicit metaphysics that it imposes on dissenters. Both readings have substantive content; this textbook does not adjudicate.

The chapter does flag that the term "Christian nationalism" is contested: Whitehead and Perry's empirical operationalization is one definition; figures within the movement often reject the label or use it in different senses; honest analysis names the contestation.

23.7.7 Whiteness as a political category

Recent academic and political work — beginning with W. E. B. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction (1935) and continuing through Theodore Allen's The Invention of the White Race (1994), Nell Irvin Painter's The History of White People (2010), Ashley Jardina's White Identity Politics (2019), and contemporary writing by Robin DiAngelo, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and others — examines "whiteness" as an analytical category, as a political identity, and (in some versions) as a normative target.

The academic-progressive use distinguishes among several things: (1) "whiteness" as a historically constructed racial category, (2) "white identity" as a self-conscious political affiliation, (3) "white privilege" as an analytical claim about systemic advantage, and (4) "whiteness" as a normative target for critique. Different writers in this tradition emphasize different combinations.

The conservative critique varies similarly. Some (like Heather Mac Donald, John McWhorter, Coleman Hughes) accept some of the analytical claims but contest the normative move. Others (like Andrew Sullivan, Wesley Yang) argue the academic move from analysis to normative critique can produce its own kind of essentialism. Others (Christopher Rufo, the American Mind circle) argue the entire framework is illegitimate.

Several things are simultaneously true:

• "White identity" exists as a measurable political phenomenon. ANES and CES data document its presence and its correlation with vote choice (Jardina 2019).
• The question of how to think about whiteness politically is contested across the spectrum.
• Some uses of the analytical category in popular discourse are looser and more polemical than the rigorous academic versions.

This textbook does not endorse a specific normative reading. It notes the existence of the analytical tradition, the substantive disagreements about its application, and the empirical fact that white identity (like other group identities) shapes political behavior.

23.8 What the data does and does not settle

To close this chapter, a discipline. The data settle some questions and leave others open.

The data settle: - Race, religion, gender, education, geography, and generation correlate strongly and persistently with vote choice in American elections. - The patterns of correlation have shifted over recent decades, with the education realignment, the gender gap, and the religiosity gap among the most consequential shifts. - Both major American parties have identity-coalitional dimensions, even when the term "identity politics" is used selectively. - Cross-pressured voters are a meaningful share of the electorate and behave distinctively from stable partisans.

The data do not settle: - Whether identity-coalitional politics is, on balance, healthy or corrosive for American democracy. - Whether specific institutional practices (DEI training, religious-school vouchers, race-conscious admissions, parental-rights curriculum laws) are wise. - What the proper relationship is between group-affinity claims and universal civic commitments. - Whether the recent shifts represent durable realignment or cyclical fluctuation.

A serious citizen — and a serious student of political science — must hold these two columns separately. The first is empirical, and partisan reactions to clearly-documented data are not analytical responses; they are emotional ones. The second is normative, and the absence of a settled answer means thoughtful people will disagree, often vehemently. The point of this chapter is not to make you agree with anyone. It is to prepare you to disagree well — to know the strongest version of each position before you commit to one.

23.9 The "default" identity problem

A subtle but important point that runs throughout this chapter: the political-analytical category of "identity politics" has historically been applied selectively, in ways that treat some identities as marked (and therefore as subjects of "identity politics") and others as unmarked (and therefore as the default human position). The political scientist trying to analyze this landscape honestly must notice the asymmetry.

When a political analyst describes "Black women voters" as a constituency, the description is recognized as referring to an identity group. When the same analyst describes "voters" without modifier, the implicit referent is often the historically dominant demographic — typically white, often male, often middle-class — but this is rarely named as such. The unmarked default is itself an identity; the failure to mark it produces the analytical illusion that some Americans have an identity and others are simply Americans. This illusion is a problem for any honest accounting of identity in politics.

The same point cuts the other direction. When a critic complains about "identity politics," the critic is typically picking out a set of identities (often racial, gender, or LGBTQ+) and exempting a different set (often religious, occupational, regional, or national). The critic is not against identity politics; the critic is against some identity politics. A symmetrical analytical framework treats these moves the same way: the "white evangelical voter," the "Black church voter," the "suburban college-educated woman voter," and the "rural non-college man voter" are all identity-coalitional categories. None has a privileged claim to being the natural, unmarked, "real American" position.

This is not a normative argument; it is an analytical discipline. Whether one approves or disapproves of any particular identity-coalitional politics, the analyst must apply the category symmetrically. One of the steady contributions of recent academic work on whiteness — even where one disagrees with the work's normative conclusions — is the insistence that whiteness too is a marked political category that can be analyzed, not simply the default neutral background. Similarly, one of the contributions of conservative critics of "identity politics" who have begun analyzing the new "credentialed-class" political identity (Charles Murray, Patrick Ruffini, Joel Kotkin) is the insistence that elite-progressive identity is itself an identity, with measurable patterns and political consequences, not the natural default position from which deviations occur.

The mature position takes both critiques seriously. The mature analyst is suspicious whenever any large American demographic group is treated as the default unmarked position from which other groups deviate. Every American holds identities. Every political coalition mobilizes some identities and not others. Honest analysis names them all.

23.10 The history this chapter rests on

Identity has shaped American political life from the beginning. The republic was constituted with property requirements that effectively limited the franchise to white male property holders. The Three-Fifths Clause, the Fugitive Slave Clause, and the Naturalization Act of 1790 (which limited citizenship to "free white persons") embedded racial and gender identity in the founding political order. Each subsequent expansion of the political community — the Reconstruction Amendments, women's suffrage in 1920, the civil-rights legislation of 1964–1965, the Voting Rights Act enforcement of subsequent decades — reorganized which identities counted, in what ways, with what political consequences. The contemporary patterns described in this chapter are the latest configuration in a long sequence, not a recent novelty.

This historical framing matters because it complicates two common contemporary positions. The position that identity politics is a recent invention, or that earlier American politics was identity-neutral, is false; the franchise restrictions and the categorical exclusions of the founding era were identity politics with the harshest possible stakes. The position that identity-political mobilization is unique to historically marginalized groups is also false; the political coalitions of dominant groups have organized around identity continuously, often without describing themselves in identity-political terms because their identities were treated as the default unmarked position. Honest history dissolves both positions.

The Nineteenth Amendment, ratified in 1920, extended the franchise to women — but in practical terms, primarily to white women, since Black women in the South remained subject to the same disenfranchisement infrastructure as Black men until the 1965 Voting Rights Act's enforcement. Native Americans were not uniformly recognized as American citizens until the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, and even after 1924, several states excluded them from voting until the 1950s and 1960s. Asian Americans of various national origins were subject to naturalization-eligibility restrictions that were not fully eliminated until 1952. The full extension of formal political equality across all major identity categories is roughly a single human lifetime old.

The implication is not that all current political-coalition patterns are continuous with these older exclusions; that would over-claim. But neither are they discontinuous. The institutional formation of the Black church / Democratic alignment (Case Study 1) traces directly through the civil-rights movement to the post-Reconstruction Black political tradition. The white evangelical / Republican alignment (Case Study 2) emerges from a longer history of southern Protestant political organizing that pre-dates the 1979 Moral Majority. The Hispanic political experience involves layers of immigration history, religious institutional formation, regional concentration, and labor organizing that long pre-date any of the recent electoral patterns. Identity-political analysis is, properly understood, a historical and institutional analysis, not just a cross-sectional snapshot.

23.11 Power flows to those who show up — and who they show up as

A theme that recurs throughout this textbook: power flows to those who show up. This chapter adds a wrinkle. Power flows to those who show up under a recognized political identity. The voter who does not vote does not count; the voter who votes as an unsorted individual without group attachment is, in a sorted electoral landscape, statistically rare and increasingly invisible to campaigns; the voter who is mobilized through group institutions is the modal participant.

This is true on every side. The white evangelical mobilized through her church is showing up as a white evangelical. The Black voter mobilized through his church is showing up as a Black voter. The college-educated suburban professional mobilized through her professional association or her social network is showing up as a college-educated suburban professional. The rural non-college voter mobilized through his union local or his hunting club or his church is showing up as a member of those groups. Pure unmediated individual citizenship is, in the actual political landscape, a minority experience.

Whether to celebrate or lament that fact — whether to organize around your group identity or to resist that organization — is a choice each citizen makes. The empirical fact is that whichever choice you make is itself a political move, and one that shapes outcomes. The "neutral, ungrouped citizen" is, in 2026 America, often a fiction. Honest civic education says so.

In Chapter 24, we turn to interest groups and lobbying — the institutional structures that organize many of the identity-political coalitions described here, and add other (occupational, sectoral, cause-based) forms of organized political pressure to the mix. Chapter 25 then takes up political polarization in its broadest sense, building on the social-sorting framework introduced here. Chapter 26 examines social movements specifically — the extra-electoral forms of political mobilization that have shaped American history from abolition through the Tea Party through Black Lives Matter through the post-2020 Christian-conservative current.

The thread connecting all of these chapters: politics is what people do together. What kinds of "together" are available, who can access them, and how they translate group attachment into governmental outcomes — these are the questions we are working through.