Link back to commentThank you for your considered reply, Peter, and I'd like to reiterate that I raise my points of disagreement before a backdrop of substantial (80/20?) agreement with your stance. I, too, find identity politics manipulative, obnoxious, unhelpful, and some of it even, as you put it, "morally repugnant".
Still, they are an emerging reality of public exchange, and having decided - perhaps unwisely - to myself make contributions to this public exchange, I now need to contend with the inconvenient reality of identity politics. I choose to do so under observance of the philosophical Principle of charity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity): "We make maximum sense of the words and thoughts of others when we interpret in a way that optimises agreement." I deliberately try to imbue and interpret individual manifestations of identity politics (or anything else I fundamentally disagree with) so as to accord my opponent maximum rationality - before deconstructing their stance...
And the identitarians' outlook does contain aspects that the rest of us would do well to acknowledge - or as Mill put it: "Secondly, though the [criticised] opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied." Also, and on a more practical note, roundly dismissing opponents is rarely helpful. Of course, whether kindly and charitably engaging with them is any more effective, remains to be seen.
In point 1 of your reply, your raise what I believe a supremely important motivator for identity politics, namely individual sovereignty - famously referenced by none other than John Howard in the first sentence of his proposed draft preamble to the constitution, and, as I recall it, rightly dismissed in an SMH op-ed at the time by some professor for jurisprudence: "The draft is daft, because nation states and the rule of law are precisely constituted on individuals abrogating and conferring their individual sovereignty to the institutions of the state."
I'm interested to find out how you will in your future articles look at this conundrum of modern liberal democracy, and the resulting dynamics, such as Soft Despotism and Tyranny Of The Majority, implications that have been identified going on two hundred years ago (https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300144925/soft-despotism-democracys-drift), and which I believe fuel such disparate (and misguided?) identitarian attempts at securing some rank-and-file influence over a nation state's political fate as Brexit and the pursuit of Aboriginal sovereignty in Australia.
Though I will say that, as white, Saxon (but not Anglo) protestant middle-aged male myself, and aware of the implications of five centuries worth of Euro-centric global colonialism, I so far found heartfelt appeals to 're-discover our shared humanity' made by other middle class white people mostly embarrassing, and invariably redolent of the passage in the Communist Manifesto that takes to task "Conservative or Bourgeois Socialism": "The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the best [...]. [The socialist bourgeois] requires in reality, that the proletariat should remain within the bounds of existing society, but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning the bourgeoisie." A perception that characterises almost verbatim the relations of minorities with mainstream society.
I'd be looking for more substance than all that.