The First Stitch
Identity politics is a disease. The people infected are patients. The distinction between the pathogen and its carrier matters.
Identity politics is a disease. The people infected are patients.
This distinction matters. It is tempting — and common — to treat ideological opponents as the disease itself rather than its carriers. But as with any pathogen, the problem is the mind-virus, not the particular mind it has colonized. A person shaped by different circumstances might have been infected differently, or not at all. This does not make their ideas less wrong. It does affect how we should engage with them.
Political discourse is the mechanism
Political problems are real. The question that tends to get less attention than it deserves is: what mechanism do we use to address them?
The answer is political discourse — conversation, argument, persuasion, negotiation. If the mechanism is broken, the problems don’t get solved, regardless of whose diagnosis is correct. A broken calculator doesn’t produce right answers just because the person using it has good intentions and accurate data.
Political polarization is a failure of mechanism. Every exchange that turns on identity rather than argument — every accusation of bad faith, every retreat into tribal shorthand — degrades the tool through which solutions must pass. More heat means less signal. And the problems accumulate.
This is worth stating clearly because there is a particular failure mode where people convince themselves that the intensity of their concern justifies the quality of their communication. It doesn’t. The stakes of a problem are an argument for solving it effectively, not for screaming about it. In political argument, how you advocate produces effects on outcomes, independent of whether you are right.
The two conditions of moral conduct
The first condition is primum non nocere — do no harm. Conduct that makes the discourse worse, that drives opponents further into their position, that makes the shared problem harder to solve — that violates this condition, even when the intention is good.
The second condition is to actively construct welfare. Not causing harm is a relatively low bar. Most people reading this are in a position of comparative advantage relative to those who suffer most. Remaining above the fray is not sufficient.
Both conditions apply to how we participate in political conversation. Causing harm through scorched-earth rhetoric violates the first. Withdrawing from engagement entirely, on the grounds that politics is beneath you, violates the second.
The first stitch
Political divides heal, if they heal at all, the way wounds heal — stitch by stitch. The first stitch feels inadequate. The gap is wide; the thread looks thin. The act of reaching across seems unlikely to matter.
But it always comes back. Not all the way — the thread doesn’t rotate 180 degrees, and the other side doesn’t fully reciprocate immediately. But progress is made. Each subsequent crossing brings the sides fractionally closer. The wound may never close entirely. That is not a reason not to try. An open wound is more likely to become infected. The choice is not between a healed divide and a permanent one — it is between a divide that is narrowing and one that is widening.
The first act of good faith is the hardest. It must be made anyway. The alternative is waiting for the other side to go first, which both sides are doing simultaneously, which is how the wound stays open.
Identity politics resolves issues of identity at the expense of everything else. The irony is that by making every dispute personal, it makes it harder to actually help the people it claims to represent. Progress on any collective problem requires a functioning mechanism for conversation. Protecting that mechanism — even at the cost of some satisfying rhetorical battles — is not weakness. It is the prerequisite for anything else.