When thinking about identity politics, I had not heard langue used in an academic setting and honestly thought it was something that the media and politicians made up in the past decade to polarize the country more and to stop any bipartisan agreement. When reflecting on our class discussion on identity and how it is unstable I wanted to compare that to identity politics. Because your own identity outside of social identifiers is unstable but within those identifiers, it is fairly stable and it does change how you think about politics especially when your identity is at stake in those debates. In this reading Mitchell does note that when thinking of this unstable identity it is more along the lines of a radical relationship, he states in part one “More importantly; the relationship is of a specific type, with discernible religious overtones: the unpayable and permanent debt one kind owes another”. When identity takes on this radical unstable relationship the unpayable debt that Mitchell brings up changes the relationship one identity has with another. Putting this in the scope of politics I do think that when identity politics becomes unstable or radical then this sense of permanent debt feeds into a mindset that there is always a lesser group, feeding into the idea of polarization and in the context of the US government the lack of bipartisan agreement because both parties have members of the radical and unstable sector of identity politics.
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