Illustration: John Shakespeare People who think the party is dominated by one subgroup will be suspicious and reluctant to join, he said. The Wall Street Journal's conservative editorial board used the same word - "poison" - to describe identity politics in a piece published a couple of days earlier. The Murdoch-owned paper deplored a politics that "seeks to divide Americans by race, ethnicity, gender and even religion. "Diversity" is now the all-purpose justification for these divisions, and the irony is that America is more diverse and tolerant than ever. Illustration: Jim Pavlidis.

"In practice this means allocating political power, contracts, jobs and now even salaries in the private economy based on the politics of skin colour or gender rather than merit or performance." Some of the conservative columnists in Murdoch's Australian papers have taken up the cry too. "They seem to use 'identity politics' and 'political correctness' simultaneously as terms of abuse," says Dennis Altman, a professor emeritus at La Trobe University. "The people doing the attacking usually feel they are somehow beyond identity, they define themselves as the majority or the norm. As if their identity is beyond question. "Murdoch press attacks always assume the norm is white, Anglo-Saxon, Christian, heterosexual."

But the critics of identity politics aren't only on the Right. A prominent liberal American intellectual and Democrat, Mark Lilla, has just published a tough takedown of identity politics, a movement he calls "a pseudo-politics of self-regard". His primary exhibit? The failure of Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party to defeat Donald Trump at last year's US election. Lilla damns the Democrats for pursuing minority voters while failing to provide a unifying philosophy. He cites the party's website which has specific offerings for 17 subgroups listed alphabetically, starting with African-Americans and ending with "young people and students". He says it's more like a tour of Lebanon's politics than a "party with a vision of America's future." The Democrats, alleges Lilla, have rewritten John F. Kennedy's urging that Americans should ask "not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country?" They've replaced it with: "What does my country owe me by virtue of my identity?"

Lilla's book, The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics - argues that the Democrats' response to Trump should look beyond waging an anti-Trump resistance. The collapse of principled conservatism in the Republican party means that, for the first time, the Democrats have no ideological opponent: "The only adversary left is ourselves. And we have mastered the art of self-sabotage. At a time when we liberals need to speak in a way that convinces people from very different walks of life, in every part of the country, that they share a common destiny and need to stand together, our rhetoric encourages self-righteous narcissism." The party encourages supporters to "descend into the rabbit hole of the self" rather than lifting the collective gaze to a political vision for the nation. The real killer for the Left's pursuit of identity politics, however, is that it's not the only player on the field. The Right plays the game too. And it can play it better. In Mark Lilla's description of America's situation, he puts it this way: "As soon as you cast an issue exclusively in terms of identity you invite your adversary to do the same. Those who play one race card should be prepared to be trumped by another, as we saw subtly and not so subtly in the 2016 presidential election."

And Trumped the Democrats were. Because while Hillary Clinton enjoyed strong black support, Trump mobilised white. When the Left engages a minority, the Right energises a majority. A book on the failures of the Clinton campaign, Shattered by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, reveals that the candidate ignored the astute advice of her most politically successful adviser, her husband. While Bill urged the campaign to compete for white working-class voters, the campaign instead poured its energies into minorities. The book quotes a Clinton campaign official: "Our failure to reach out to white voters, like literally from the New Hampshire primary on, it never changed." In Australia, Labor is playing a shrewder game. "Hillary Clinton focussed too much on identity instead of class," says Dennis Altman, "whereas they overlap considerably. The idea that you are working class means you have no other identity is not necessarily correct at all. The assumption that you are gay and therefore you have no other identity seems to be just as silly. The two - class and identity - are constantly intertwined and clever politicians are able to manipulate them."

Bill Shorten's Labor Party, for instance. "Labor is pretty smart at combining appeals to identity and traditional class-based economic issues." On the one hand, for instance, Labor has identified closely with the push for same-sex marriage while opposing the government's planned tightening of citizenship laws and English tests. "Clearly this is aimed at, first, the queer community, and second, the immigrant and multicultural communities," says Altman. And on the other, Labor is campaigning against cuts to weekend penalty rates and in favour of curbing the excesses of negative gearing tax benefits for investors. "I think most of us would agree the government is being outflanked by Labor on both fronts," suggests Altman. Shorten is offering voters "the politics of redistribution" and the "politics of recognition" in the formulations of the US political scientist Nancy Fraser.

Of course, the Turnbull government is not merely a passive target. Finance Minister Mathias Cormann in a speech to the Sydney Institute this week made a bracing attack on Bill Shorten's politics of redistribution as a Soviet-style crushing of enterprise and aspiration. And Labor opposes Peter Dutton's citizenship and English language proposals partly because the Coalition has such an unassailable advantage on stopping the boats and asylum seeker policy; Labor seeks ground on which it might stand a chance against the government. Turnbull is on a hiding to nothing on same-sex marriage, however, damned from the Left for failing to act on his long-standing personal conviction yet not winning any votes from the conservative Right on the issue either. He hopes fervently that the issue will be settled well before the next election. The objective reality of Australian economic inequality is milder than America's. Likewise, the virulence and scale of the racial hostility is incomparably more aggravated in the US. Yet the US nonetheless offers Australia a cautionary tale in the harmfulness of untrammelled pursuit of identity politics.

Trump, not content to accept the presidency and govern the country, has decided to persist with playing identity politics in a very ugly way. As a candidate he was nakedly racist in denouncing Mexicans and Muslims. As president, rather than uniting the country, he showed in response to the Charlottesville riots that he is prepared to continue to pander to the racist Right. And the Left, while claiming to champion equal rights, actually seems hellbent on asserting superior rights for its favoured minorities. Mark Lilla again: "There is a reason why the leaders of the civil rights movement did not talk about identity the way black activists do today, and it was not cowardice or a failure to be 'woke'. "The movement shamed America into action by consciously appealing to what we share, so that it became harder for white Americans to keep two sets of books, psychologically speaking: one for 'Americans' and one for 'Negroes'. "That those leaders did not achieve complete success does not mean that they failed, nor does it prove that a different approach is now necessary. No other approach is likely to succeed.

"Certainly not one that demands that white Americans agree in every case on what constitutes discrimination or racism today. In democratic politics it is suicidal to set the bar for agreement higher than necessary for winning adherents and elections." Campaigning for equal rights for all is fundamental to a successful, fair, modern society. But the Left overplays identity politics at its peril, including the peril of being trumped. Because the Right can play just as hard, and even harder. Just ask Hillary Clinton. And it can happen here. The US may have just seen a revival of Ku Klux Klan-style white supremacism on the streets, but it was in Australia that a senator engaged in the crassest race-baiting by wearing a burqa into the national parliament.