What is the matter with identity politics?

Comment published on New York Times online blog in response to op-ed essay, "The White Strategy," 8/12/18:

What is fundamentally most wrong about American politics is the assumption that it is about what demographical group you belong to.  

Even the religious right-wing of the Republican Party is partly about (white) identity: they are all about enforcing proprieties and normativities because enforcing a particularist morality is a militant way of affirming a supposedly embattled identity.  

But what group is not vulnerable? If there is a war of all against all as far as social groups are concerned, then by definition, whatever your group, yours is potentially threatened (or oppressed) by some other.

Of course, there are social problems and even injustices that largely affect certain groups: like women for abortion, and blacks for mass incarceration and police militarization and violence. But no problem can be solved or issue won on on the basis of "who"; we can only achieve anything by talking about the problems.  

Much in American culture and history has contributed to this. Our politics is representational more than ideological, our society is unparalleled in its individualism, and until recently its extreme capitalist character was rarely contested.  

Say what you want and why. "Who" is not a "why." "I am for this policy because I am an X" is a lousy argument.  

The logic of a politics of identities (or "who": demography determining thought) leads naturally to a civil war by other means. It leads the destruction of democracy via that of the political as such.