Identity politics is a very convenient power framework. Dealing with a nation of billion intelligent individuals is an arduous task. Instead, they could be boxe

Identity politics is a very convenient power framework. Dealing with a nation of billion intelligent individuals is an arduous task. Instead, they could be boxed into 5-6 groups, every group gets assigned viewpoints that its members must adhere to, and suddenly you only need to deal with 5-6 individuals. We call it abstraction and encapsulation in software. The only problem is enforcing the in-group behavior, but it turns out groups can do it themselves: the "crab mentality" makes people pull down anyone who tries to climb out of the box. This arrangement of 5-6 boxes with crabs is very stable, but whether one can downgrade a well established and intelligent society into this state is a big open question.