The New York Times recently ran an article proclaiming the "return" of identity politics. This assumes that there’s some other kind. Politics is about the accumulation of individual interests into collective decisions. Your interests, by definition, reflect your identity. Look at the United States Constitution, which begins with a statement of identity: "We the People of the United States of America...." It contains other statements of identity, such as "three-fifths of all other persons," the infamous three-fifths compromise according to which slave owners got greater political influence than their numbers warranted by being allowed to count three-fifths of their slaves for purposes of representation.
The idea that "identity politics" waxes and wanes stems from the privileged straight, white male perspective that, much before the civil rights revolutions of the 1960s, politics was all about the important stuff like property, taxation, budgeting, business, and war. Then African Americans, women, other racial and ethnic minorities, and lesbians and gay men began demanding equal treatment and equal representation, introducing the distractions of "identity politics" into the pressing affairs of state.
When federal law prohibits you and your legally wedded spouse from filing a joint tax return or expecting Social Security survivor benefits, as it currently does for all same-sex couples, you quickly see how false the "identity politics"/real politics dichotomy is.
Conservatives are particularly fond of disparaging "identity politics." In his characteristically scathing dissent in Lawrence v. Texas, Antonin Scalia heaped scorn on what he called the "famed sweet-mystery-of-life passage" from an earlier abortion rights decision that the Lawrence majority quoted in explaining its reasoning. Scalia claimed never to have heard of a law that regulated anyone’s right to define certain concepts. But Kennedy, writing for the majority, was correct – sodomy laws did interfere with the right to self-definition of lesbians and gay men. Sodomy statutes are all about identity politics, as was Scalia’s dissent, loath as he would no doubt be to admit it, except to say that he has to address identity politics because others bring it up.
What Scalia demonstrates in spades even as he refuses to recognize the fact is that his dismissive attitude to the right of self-definition reflects a life in which no one has ever seriously challenged his self-definition. He never got teased for being a fag in junior high or high school. No one ever called him a nigger, or deprived him of an opportunity that he was qualified for solely because of his race, ethnicity, or gender.
What is more, privileged, straight, white guys like Scalia want us all to believe that they make their decisions based on "reason," and that the characteristics of their personal identities play no role in their evaluation of cases. This is plainly false. To begin, we’re supposed to believe that his background as a devout Catholic has no impact on his dismissive attitude toward lesbian/gay civil rights claims, and his frequent attacks on abortion rights? Not happenin’. He’s a crusty, privileged, straight, old, white, Catholic guy who should be in a bar somewhere in Pittsburgh screaming at the television instead of deciding important national issues.
Secondly, all of the recent research on the topic clearly indicates that human decision making ultimately rests on emotion. A fascinating account of this proposition is Jonah Lehrer, How We Decide. Cut off the emotion-processing parts of the brain, and people become incapable of making decisions. Thus, if reading his intemperate decisions didn’t already tip you off, you have science to prove that emotion plays a huge role in Scalia’s decisions.
The difference between him and Sonia Sotomayor is not that he’s the dispassionate rationalist in contrast to her "racist" wise Latina woman, but that she’s honest about the identity characteristics that inform her judgments.