The identity politics of the GOP

By Heraclitus

Amanda Marcotte has an extremely interesting post up on the current state of ideology in the US. She argues that there is no dominant ideology in the US at present, because although liberals have one (though I think it's definitely debatable whether the Democratic Party has one), they're not dominant, and the conservatives are in fact an incoherent mish-mash of libertarianism and social conservatism. But the "conservatives" are held together by a certain form of identity politics, which enables GOP voters to ignore their differences and come together and vote for the particular brand of identity politics the Republicans have been successfully shopping to voters for at least ten years. It's the most interesting thing I've read on American politics this election cycle, and I highly recommend it.