According to the random Crooked Timber blog commenter who coined that viral aphorism in 2018, yes. But by what standard are that commenter’s musings to be considered expositive on modern conservative philosophy?
Identity politics has always been a conservative project.
You know which ones I mean.
As an example: The "conservative" judge who threw out 40 years of precedent on a technicality to prevent the American public from learning whether their former and potentially future president sold, gave away, or otherwise exposed national security secrets after he undoubtedly stole those documents.
There's a fundamental asymmetry in "the movement" on the left - which essentially rounds out to whatever annoying undergrad student showed up in your Twitter feed today - and the actual elected, governing leaders of the right, doing things like throwing out very strong criminal cases on matters of deep public importance.
In other words, identity politics to a T.
An excellent example would be Murphy's Law, and by extension many of the similar, often eponymous, laws.
See:
- List of Eponymous Laws: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_eponymous_laws>
- Murphy's Law and other reasons why things go wrong! by Arthur Bloch: <https://archive.org/details/murphyslawotherr0000arth>
- Compilation of Murphy's (and similar) laws: <https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~fgandon/miscellaneous/murphy/>
Some of those are humourous, some are in fact quite serious though have a comedic element particularly out of context. Most speak to at least a colloquial truth.
What Whilhoit did was manage to buttonhole a hypocrisy of modern conservativism, perhaps over the past few decades, perhaps a century or so (Anatole France, "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread", further evidentiarially supported by SCOTUS in Grants Pass), perhaps by millennia (see the opening paragraphs of A.H.M. Jones, Augustus, describing the political situation in the late Roman Republic, quoted here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22208105>, and at greater length: <https://web.archive.org/web/20230607042525/https://old.reddi...>). It's not so much a proved hypothesis as a phrasing which fits the understanding of many and expresses it concisely and memorably.