What went down in England yesterday was a surprise to a whole lot of pundits and political analysts. Many of them missed the mark, believing the Leave side of the Brexit vote would fail. Obviously, it didn’t.
Why the surprise? I think they underestimated the power of identity politics.
All politics is identity politics. Identity is the beating heart of every social movement and the ticking time bomb of governance in the modern nation-state system, a system that too often attempts to marginalize ethnicity and other identity markers in support of singularizing national narratives. To understand what I mean by … Read more “Identity Politics, the Brexit Vote, and the American Election”