America has been wrecked on the shoals of identity.
Identity politics has been characterized casually as a form of tribalism: Americans grouping themselves according to biological or sexual characteristics, in opposition to other groups associated by biological or sexual characteristics. There is certainly truth to the idea that such tribalism has damaged America in extraordinary ways — that tribalism acts as the sort of factionalism the Founding Fathers feared, tearing Americans from one another and forcing them into polarized units to compete against others in a battle over control.
