I have a long piece on this called White Thread in a Browning America if you would like to read more of my

and listen to this of battles over ethnic identity until America's consumed by war

that's a

that'll bring us all together that'll end the polarization

I'm looking forward to the book

Hello welcome to another episode of the Weets on the Box Media Podcast Network. I'm Matthew Glacias. I'm Sarah Cliff and as we're

Klein we are getting ready to end the year. Last Weets of the Year. It's been a year. So we're gonna do some

many years. I don't know. So I can do some reflections, some year-end type stuff, you know, sit back, ponder,

expansively. The first thing we wanted to talk about is what have we learned this year?

That's right. What have you learned? So I learned a lot about political identity this year. Part of that was because of what was going on

about the part of it is because of this book I'm working on. But this to me felt really useful for understanding some of the fights

this year. And there's a lot of good work here. I'd recommend the Leon Amason's work on Uncivil Agreement. I'm going to recommend a white paper later in the

episode that relates this to. But I think that we are having a conversation about identity politics. It is pointing at something very real, but getting at it very

backwards. And that what's happening is people are starting with things in politics that they don't like and then tracing them back to the identities that

they'd inflict or lead to them. And they're saying that's bad, right? And they're recognizing that politics is a collision of a lot of different groups. And that what's coming out of that feels like a

problem to people. And I've been really trying to come at this from the other perspective, working upwards from an understanding of identity and how it affects politics. And then going up into what our politics looks like now. And I think if you do that and you work

upward from that research on identity formation, not downward from something politics, you don't like you actually get a lot of useful information. And the big thing that I've come to think about is

Democrats and Republicans as being political identities. All the evidence is that over the last 56 years that those kind of core political coalition identities left right red, blue,

Democrat or Republican is a good way to talk about it, but not actually think the best way to talk about it because a lot of people who are say in the blue coalition do not think of themselves as Democrats, but they vote very regularly for Democrats. There's a lot in there that is now merging with race and geography and religion and ideology in ways that 50 years ago were a lot less true. And so we now have what what Mason calls these mega identities. And if you understand politics is being inflected by that. And as conflicts is getting absorbed into that. A lot of things make a lot of sense.

But something you recognize is that the way in which identity affects politics is really, really profound and almost all encompassing. It's not that literally everything is identity politics that goes too far. But there's no politics doesn't have any kind of identity in it whatsoever because there are no people who don't have that. I have found it to be a really useful model and framework for understanding a lot of the collisions and fights that that we're going through.

So can I ask you a question about that?

Yeah.

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