THE 2016 campaign was a crisis for conservatism; its aftermath is a crisis for liberalism. The right, delivered unexpectedly to power, is taking a breather from introspection as it waits to see what Trumpism means in practice. The left, delivered unexpectedly to impotence, has no choice but to start arguing about how it lost its way.
A lot of that argument already revolves around the concept of “identity politics,” used as shorthand for a vision of political liberalism as a coalition of diverse groups — gay and black and Asian and Hispanic and female and Jewish and Muslim and so on — bound together by a common struggle against the creaking hegemony of white Christian America.
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