Identity politics are fundamentally about a sense of exclusion based on an identity that one considers significant. For many years, this has meant a politics centered around race, gender and sexuality for Democrats. The right, however, has something different in mind. In calling on the language of the ‘radical left crackdown’ on what conservatives see as traditional American culture—Christian values, patriarchal gender norms and the like—the right has claimed a new sense of exclusion, that of the alienated conservative, the true believer punished for trying to live the way he knows is correct. This right-wing persecution narrative has a
powerful foothold in contemporary conservative discourse; in other words, victimhood is no longer solely the realm of liberals.
Conservative media outlets such as Fox News have been telling a story that has grown more and more mainstream in recent years: some shadowy, liberal establishment seeks to stamp out any vestiges of traditional American values, as well as the conservative voices that advocate for them. A
2025 poll from the Pew Research Center showed that 55% of people categorized as Republican or Republican-leaning believe that white people face some discrimination, with 22% stating that whites faced “a lot” of discrimination. Similarly, 57% believed that our society discriminated against Evangelical Christians. In comparison, 15% of the same group said that Black people faced “a lot” of discrimination.
Many Republicans,
including our President, argue that
conservative speech is under attack, with repression in the name of political correctness being the primary culprit; Trump’s invocation of the “fake news media” has been a constant since his first term in office. Furthermore, the American economic success that many Republicans—both legitimately and illegitimately—identify with is subject to endless encroachment by an ever-growing welfare state that rewards laziness. Another contributing factor to right-wing fear is the notion that
equal rights are a zero-sum game, meaning that a gain for minoritized groups is predicated on a loss for the majority. Under this view, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) and other attempts at equity pose a blatant risk to conservatives who enjoy privileged identities.
What conservative victimhood necessitates is the formation and consolidation of politics as identity.
Unlike liberals, who focus on racial, gender or class identity, for conservatives, political viewpoint is the identity. In a world where technology is siloing people into increasingly niche echo chambers of political thought, our politics have become who we are. The two are no longer separate or distinct, and an attack on one is irrefutably an attack on the other.
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