https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/12/how-identity-politics-imperils-the-liberal-tradition/
As a vehicle to satisfy the human thirst for recognition and belonging, identity politics has proven an empty vessel. While promising to elevate the status of various minorities it has eroded human dignity, and while claiming to offer solidarity it has sown division and discord.
In the midst of the 1949 election campaign, Robert Menzies told a Melbourne audience, “We denounce all attempts to create hostilities against any migrant or group of migrants, whether Jew or Gentile, on the grounds of race or religion.” The aspiring prime minister went on to declare, “Once received into our community, a new citizen is entitled to be treated in every way as a fellow Australian”, and that “the strength and history of our race have been founded upon this vital principle”.
To be sure, Menzies in 1949 accepted “White Australia” as a pillar of the “Australian Settlement” and desired “as many immigrants as we can get of British stock”. Nonetheless, the Liberal Party founder attempted to strike a new tone that marked a clean break from the bitter religious and racial sectionalism of Australia’s past. Committed above all to reviving the tradition of Australian liberalism, Menzies envisioned an Australia where citizens would be judged less by their background than by their moral character and contribution to society. As the historian and Liberal Party elder David Kemp observed, Menzies created a party and subsequently led a government that would go beyond the collectives of class, race and gender to promote greater opportunities for all Australians.
The liberal philosophy Menzies embodied stands out as not only a repudiation of the old class warfare and sectionalism but also as a rebuke to the contemporary fad of “identity politics”, the phenomenon of “group identities” defining and driving political discourse in Australia and much of the Western world.
Subject to a variety of constructions and meanings, “identity politics” embodies two main related ideas. First, that individuals are defined primarily by their “identity”, the three main classifications being race, class and gender; and second, that politics, history and sociology can be primarily understood through the role played by those identities and the conflict those identities generate. As a 2017 report by the Institute of Public Affairs noted, “the underlying philosophical premise of identity politics is that individuals are distinguished by their differences, rather than by their similarities”.