By Chris Kremidas-Courtney.
A previous essay here on Our Kindred Future titled “When America’s Far Right Speaks Through Europe’s Center” traced how language originating on the American far right has quietly migrated into Europe’s political center, reshaping debates while wearing the costume of moderation. One of the most consequential examples of this drift is the contemporary use of the term “identity politics.” What appears to be a neutral descriptor has in practice become a powerful tool for misdiagnosing democratic stress and assigning responsibility to the victims of inequality, not systems that perpetrate it.
The term itself did not originate as a pejorative. It was coined by the Combahee River Collective to describe political organizing rooted in lived experience and aimed at dismantling intersecting systems of exclusion. Its intent was rooted in the belief that systems which fail those most marginalized ultimately fail democracy as a whole. Over time, however, the term has been inverted. In contemporary Western debate, it is routinely used to reframe claims to equal citizenship as narrow sectional demands, while the identities embedded in existing power structures are treated as neutral, universal, or simply invisible.
This inversion matters because it subtly shifts where democratic systems look for the source of instability. Standing against structural inequality is recast as cultural grievance. Institutional failure is reframed as social fragmentation. Disagreement is treated as evidence of excess rather than societal feedback. In this framing, equality itself becomes suspect since it is rhetorically positioned as disruptive.
When those citizens organize to name and stand against exclusion, the language available to them has already been hollowed out. Their claims are delegitimized before a single march is held.
This dynamic is especially visible in how equal-rights movements are received. Campaigns such as Black Lives Matter, feminist mobilization, and efforts advancing LGBTQIA rights are increasingly framed not as responses to demonstrable disparities, but as expressions of identity-based grievance. Structural claims about unequal protection, bodily autonomy, or access to rights are reduced to cultural assertions. Demands for equal treatment are reinterpreted as requests for special recognition beyond equality. Instead of prompting institutional self-assessment, the act of naming exclusion is treated as a source of instability in its own right.
This framing weakens democratic resilience in two directions at once. Movements lose the language needed to articulate structural harm in terms institutions and politicians are willing to hear. Institutions lose the capacity to respond proportionately to inequalities that are persistent, measurable, and corrosive to societal trust. What remains is a politics of surface calm masking a deeper fragility.
Seen this way, the migration of far-right framing into the political center is not merely a cultural concern. It is a governance problem. Democracies do not fail only when they are overwhelmed by extremism. They fail when they lose the conceptual tools needed to recognize legitimate claims under the law as system feedback rather than disruption. When equality is persistently reframed as division, democratic resilience is not protected but rather slowly eroded from within.
