>All politics is identity politics.
That's only true if you define the term broadly enough to be useless. What about, say, anti-war demonstrations during Vietnam?
That's only true if you define the term broadly enough to be useless. What about, say, anti-war demonstrations during Vietnam?
You can think of the whole cosmopolitan urban vs salt-of-the-earth rural aspect of American politics as one example. Or southern identity/culture. “As a veteran who served”/“As a parent”, or the cross-denomination “moral majority”— it’s all based around the idea that your lived experience as something shapes your political perspective and is intrinsically valuable to the political conversation.
And even Occupy: was occupy simply making a statement about economic politics or was it the identity of “the 1%” or “Bankers” vs the rest of Americans? These categories were somewhat arbitrary and basically represented which group you identified with.
Then the term "identity politics" shouldn't be applied. But even if we accept that extremely narrow view: there are numerous political segments that are notorious for doing what you describe across the political spectrum. Most notable the rural Scotch-Irish, often criticized for routinely voting against their self-interest and instead choosing to vote for pols who simply provide them cultural validation and do nothing to address their material concerns.
In a nation state, politics tend to be divided more on ideological and regional lines, because everyone shares an identity.
In a nation state, politics tend to be divided more on ideological and regional lines, because everyone shares an identity. There has never been a "nation" where everybody shares an identity in the sense discussed above.
A better example would be European nations like Hungary, which have reinforced their national identities in the face of the recent migrant crisis.