let's say you define the future of your political party, and are attempting to articulate the political future of the nation, by demographics. you will appeal to 'women and minorities,' breaking off those demos as we become majority-minority. thus, total domination is our destiny! others think this is a sad approach because it involves technologies for exacerbating differences extremely, or relentlessly treating each person as being identified primarily by their position in gender and race hierarchies. ok, perhaps disastrous for our society, but strategically sensible?
but one insane aspect of this structure is that though it looks like it just sorts individuals into groups, the demographic lines you're drawing run through individuals. like can you really have missed this? so here's the approximate distribution: the population is about 60% white, so about 60% of women are white, and about 30% of americans are white women. about 40% of the population is minority, and about 50% of the minority population is male, so about 20% of the population of the country is minority male. so 50% of the population is white and female or minority and male. for each person in half the population, in other words, the 'women and minorities' distinctions run through them, not around them. your conceptuality splits each member of half the population internally, and yet you act as though are describing distinct demographic segments or distinct populations. but you aren't.
this actually amounted to a possibly election-deciding confusion: white women didn't turn out for hillary as predicted, and voted more heavily for trump than predicted. that was...predictable as a result of this grotesquely incoherent strategy.
nothing, nothing could be more obvious! how in the world can you have missed this? there is no future in it, because the situation will persist in precisely the same form in a majority-minority america. alright? for god's sake sit there and think for a few minutes.
'identity politics' basically treats individual identities by place in a demographic taxonomy or grid: race, gender, income level, region, educational level, and so on. but now the situation is just internal chaos for almost everyone as everyone occupies many boxes. and most of them occupy boxes that both sides are dedicated to annexing. their basic political strategy is literally logically incoherent: it cannot be construed in a way that makes it conceptually consistent. there is no possible world - i mean this seriously - where a real population can vote in the patterns suggested by the strategies.
