Why Identity Politics Fails
Identity politics is like technology. It can save and kill humanity, with indifference. When it's borne out of the tendency to blame the innocent ordinary people of China, it leads to a global wave of racism. When it smelts out of the glaring need to rise up against the continued historical brutalization of the African American people, it leads to a social movement against racism. Identity politics, while underlying both these phenomena don't care about racism. And that indifference is its failure. There are features of identity politics that make its failure inherent, inescapable, and infectious.
Identities are garments
Identities change in the blink of an eye. You can be a feminist for your entire unexciting life, and then one moment can turn that around, just like that, without much effort. The identity called "Republicans" shifted slowly from emancipating slaves to justifying white supremacy in less than 100 or so years. More notoriously, people shed off an identity to replace it with another for personal profit, in the name of diplomacy, for the greater good, and all other reasons that are always retrospectively crafted and heavily rationalized before those whose identity you abandoned. The journalist crying out about the government's religious bias in India gets fired, starts a new channel, and now supports the same government to a comical extent. People can and do switch their identities on and off, as per convenience.
Identities occur in amalgam
In a given social construct, it's highly unlikely to have just one identity label. I am a male, an Indian, and an immigrant in the US. I was raised as Hindu Brahmin in the higher middle class, and I am brown (in the US). I am a poor student of wealthy parents and an underpaid researcher at a wealthier university. This list could be as long as you would want it to be. These multiple identities can be in conflict without a possible consensus. Depending on the situation, it's likely that in politics, one of these identities can trump others. This means that my political beliefs are supposed to be unpredictable under environmental uncertainties. The multivariate nature of the identity complex gives me my unique individuality. Not understanding your individuality can lead you to immaturely take up an identity, which in turn is bound to generate an identity crisis (not to be conflated with an existential crisis. A lot of people merely have identity crises but assume to have an existential crises. If the former is getting a fever in your twenties, the latter is getting COVID in your eighties).
Identities are perceptual
There is no real feminist or nazi or nationalist or socialist in the world. Beyond positional relativity, identities in themselves are unreal. It's just a perception of who others think you are or who you think you are at a given political moment. For expressing the same opinion, you can be attached to diametrically opposite identity labels. You can be a feminist from one perspective and a patriarch from another, just take the example of Mahavir Singh Phogat, the wrestler who nurtured his kids to become top women wrestlers but also ruined the essence of being a child in their childhood. During the CAA protests and debates, in the same week, for expressing the exact same political opinion, I was labeled "hidden leftist" in one group and "Modi sympathizer" in another group. For me, both those labels seem equally misfit to the identity that I was trying to put on. There is no way to defend what identity I was trying to put on. There is no way of knowing, even for me, what that identity was.
A socio-political system that relies heavily on identity politics for practically everything, from deciding welfare schemes to luring voters, deserves to fail transitively due to the inherent failures of identity politics.