Chapter 23 — Key Takeaways

Identity in American politics — the empirical pattern

  • Race, religion, gender, education, geography, and generation correlate strongly and persistently with vote choice in American elections. These correlations are not artifacts of measurement; they show up in ANES, Catalist, Pew Validated Voter, and CES data across multiple cycles. Treating these as well-documented empirical facts is a starting point, not a partisan position.

  • The education divide has overtaken income as the leading class proxy in American voting. College-educated voters now lean Democratic; non-college voters lean Republican. This realignment is most pronounced among white voters but visible across racial groups, and it is recent (post-2000).

  • The "religiosity gap" has grown. Religiously observant Americans lean Republican on average; religiously unaffiliated Americans lean Democratic. The unaffiliated are now ~28–30% of American adults — the largest single religious-affiliation category.

  • The 2024 cycle produced notable demographic shifts: the smallest Democratic margin among Black voters in two decades; continued Hispanic movement toward Republicans; a record within-cohort gender gap among voters under 30; significant shifts among Muslim voters in some states. Whether these represent durable realignment or candidate-specific factors is an open empirical question that future cycles will resolve.

Identity politics across the spectrum

  • Identity politics, in some descriptive form, is practiced across the political spectrum. The white evangelical / Republican coalition is identity-coalitional politics. The Black church / Democratic coalition is identity-coalitional politics. The college-educated suburban-Democratic coalition is identity-coalitional politics. The non-college rural-Republican coalition is identity-coalitional politics. The selective application of "identity politics" as a critique only of left-coded movements is itself a partisan move; symmetrical analysis treats all of these as identity-coalitional patterns.

  • The term "identity politics" itself has multiple meanings. The Combahee River Collective (1977) used it descriptively, to mean politics rooted in one's own group experience as a basis for analysis and solidarity. The contemporary contested usage often means something narrower and more pejorative. Both senses are in circulation; honest analysis names which sense is in play.

The contested normative debate — four positions, all steel-manned

  • Progressive critique of identity politics (Mark Lilla, Adolph Reed Jr.): identity-focused organizing can crowd out cross-group civic appeals and class-solidarity politics; can produce backlash; can essentialize groups; can rank identities rather than appeal to shared citizenship.

  • Progressive defense of identity politics (Ta-Nehisi Coates, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Ibram X. Kendi in his more aggressive register, the Combahee tradition): specific groups have specific structural disadvantages requiring specific remedies; "color-blind" framing can mask discrimination; centering of marginalized voices reflects epistemic-authority claims rooted in experience.

  • Conservative critique of identity politics (Yuval Levin, Patrick Deneen, Christopher Rufo, Charles Murray): identity-focused politics elevates group claims over individual rights and universal principle; can racialize neutral issues; reflects broader institutional erosion; produces credentialed-class authority over neutral institutions.

  • Conservative defense of group-affinity politics (Yoram Hazony, Patrick Deneen in Regime Change, the religious-conservative tradition): faith communities, traditional families, regional cultures, and national identity are legitimate axes of political organization; the selective application of "identity politics" critique only to left-coded movements is itself partisan.

The chapter steel-mans all four positions. It does not endorse any of them.

Mechanisms of identity-political mobilization

  • Group cues through trusted institutions (churches, unions, civic associations) translate group identity into political action.
  • Material interest matters but is not the only or always the dominant motivation.
  • Symbolic and identity-protective voting — using party as a vehicle for valued identities — has strong predictive power for many phenomena.
  • Cross-pressured voters — those whose multiple identities point in different partisan directions — are more open to persuasion and produce electoral volatility.
  • Social sorting (Mason 2018, Klein 2020): as identities have aligned, partisan affect has intensified.

Specific controversies (2020–2026)

  • Affirmative action. SFFA v. Harvard (2023) ended explicit race-conscious admissions; race-neutral alternatives are being tested empirically.
  • Religious-liberty exemptions. The post-Hobby Lobby line has expanded protections; defenders and critics both have substantive arguments rooted in different constitutional clauses.
  • Curriculum debates. "CRT" has both academic-doctrinal and political-curricular meanings; the 1619 Project has both historiographic and political dimensions; parental-rights legislation reflects substantive disagreements with arguments on multiple sides.
  • Title IX and gender identity. Bostock (2020) extended Title VII protections; Skrmetti (2024) upheld a state restriction on certain medical interventions for minors. Doctrine continues to develop.
  • DEI initiatives. Substantial post-2023 backlash has restructured corporate and educational programs. The empirical question of which programs work, on which metrics, is under-researched relative to the political heat.
  • The new Christian-conservative current. Variously labeled "Christian nationalism," "national conservatism," or "post-liberal" — terminology itself contested among supporters and critics.

What the data settle, and what they do not

  • Settled by data: the existence and direction of demographic-political correlations; the trajectory of the education realignment; the religiosity gap; the institutional infrastructure of major identity coalitions.
  • Not settled by data: whether identity-coalitional politics is, on balance, healthy or corrosive; whether specific institutional practices (DEI, race-conscious admissions, parental-rights laws) are wise; what the proper relationship is between group-affinity and universal civic commitments.

A serious citizen distinguishes the two. Empirical disagreement with documented trends is usually motivated reasoning. Normative disagreement on contested values questions is the legitimate work of democratic deliberation.

The chapter's central discipline

Apply the analytical framework symmetrically. The "white working class" is identity-coalitional. The "Black women voter" is identity-coalitional. The "evangelical voter" is identity-coalitional. The "college-educated suburban professional" is identity-coalitional. None has a privileged claim to being the natural, unmarked, default American position. Honest political analysis names them all and analyzes them all the same way.