Obama was offering the right explanation for polarization from the wrong angle. He’s right that it’s all about which identities get activated, and he’s right that our political identities are more polarized than our other identities. But he was too optimistic in believing that our nonpolitical identities could become our political identities, that they were somehow a truer reflection of our essential selves, and thus strong enough to overwhelm our partisan divisions. In practice, our political identities are polarizing our other identities, too.
