This study examines identity politics as the central thread for analyzing the decay of contemporary American political institutions, exploring its intertwined and reinforcing relationships with populism, political polarization, "vetocracy," party polarization, and other phenomena. It reveals the internal mechanisms through which identity politics ultimately erodes institutional efficacy and triggers political operational decline by manufacturing group fragmentation, polarizing identity-based demands, intensifying struggles over cultural discourse power, and weakening national identity consensus.

I. Identity Politics: A Political Phenomenon Intertwined and Superimposed with Political Institutional Decay

As a core phenomenon in contemporary American political operation, identity politics maintains a close symbiotic relationship and intertwined superimposition effect with political institutional decay. Identity politics originated in the social movements of the 1960s, later extending from the social sphere to the political sphere through party absorption, becoming the primary mechanism for parties to compete for votes and express interests. The decay of American political institutions manifests as structural problems including political polarization, party decline, and "vetocracy," rooted in multiple tensions generated when the constitutional design of separation of powers and checks and balances intersects with party competition, electoral politics, and interest group politics. When the mutual constraints among different political forces exceed the combined force of compromise, institutional functional decline is triggered. Identity politics and institutional decay are mutually causal and reinforcing: social group "identity" has been transformed into an important marker of political operation, profoundly influencing party candidate elections, cabinet formation, issue strategies, and policy directions, making identity politics a structural dilemma difficult to resolve in American politics in the short term.

II. The Origins and Evolution of American Identity Politics

This section traces the complete evolutionary trajectory of contemporary American identity politics from emergence to convergence and then to transformation, and systematically presents three representative scholarly views on the origins of Western identity politics. The first origin theory traces it back to the nation-building period of Western nation-states in the 18th–19th centuries, emphasizing the mobilizing role of nationalism in shaping national consciousness and forming national identity. The second view identifies the American civil rights movement of the 1960s–70s as the source of identity politics, where African Americans' struggle for equal rights stimulated identity-based demands from other marginalized groups, and multiculturalist thought provided the ideological foundation for identity politics to enter public life. The third perspective focuses on the early 21st century, arguing that identity politics has become a political phenomenon closely intertwined with electoral politics and party competition, driven to new heights by the 9/11 attacks, the financial crisis, and the European refugee crisis, with the 2016 election of Trump and Brexit marking its developmental peak.

In terms of evolutionary history, identity politics initially manifested as social movements in the 1960s–70s based on race, gender, sexual orientation, and other factors, with blacks, homosexuals, and other minority groups pursuing identity recognition and corresponding rights as core demands. Subsequently, this trend was absorbed by American left-wing political forces; the Democratic Party incorporated ethnic minorities, women, and sexual minorities into its vote-seeking targets through "affirmative action," and identity politics gradually became labeled as "political correctness," emerging as a core value of the left. Entering the 21st century, identity politics underwent critical transformation: economic globalization led to manufacturing relocation, declining living standards for white working-class laborers, and lower-middle-class white groups began resorting to identity politics to protest "reverse discrimination," which right-wing political elites captured as an electoral tool. Left and right wings competitively adopted populist mobilization methods, society was torn into two opposing camps of diverse identity groups versus white groups, and "identity" was thoroughly reduced to a tool for competing votes and a lever for intervening in policy, with ethnic fragmentation becoming increasingly severe, triggering deep scholarly concern about damage to American democratic institutions.

III. The Deep Connotations of Identity Politics

This section explores how identity politics constructs a pattern of pluralistic and oppositional social relations and impacts national identity through its core concept of "simultaneous identity recognition and exclusion." Its conceptual essence is subjectively and actively constructed identity-based demands, originating from social movements such as the civil rights movement and feminism, whereby marginalized minority groups seek identity legitimacy and rights through social movements to correct social inequality. Identity politics reinforces a pluralistic and oppositional relational structure of "if not me, then the other; if not the other, then the alien," creating a positional political culture that excludes broad cooperation and weakening national identity and social action solidarity. American national identity was originally centered on Anglo-Saxon culture, relying on the "American Creed" to integrate diverse ethnic groups; however, after the rise of multiculturalism, the emphasis on identity particularity gradually loosened the foundation of national identity, the connotation of citizenship was subdivided and segmented, and excessive emphasis on single identity may become a root of violent conflict. Identity demands scattered across multiple domains have shifted social relations from "compartmentalization" to "fragmentation," with new vocabulary emerging in the cultural domain such as "Black Lives Matter," "Me Too," and "LGBT," gender being subdivided into multiple subcategories, multi-ethnic integration shifting toward separatism, and the difficulty of national identity integration increasing. When identity demands become labels for left and right wings to compete for votes in electoral politics, identity politics evolves from specific group demands to a developmental trend of excluding others, intensifying social group opposition and causing democratic institutions to slide toward tribalism.

IV. The Evolutionary Mechanism of Identity Politics Aggravating Political Institutional Decay

This study examines the evolutionary mechanism through which identity politics aggravates American political institutional decay via three pathways. First, with "seeking difference" as its conceptual core, identity politics shifts social focus from "sameness and seeking common ground" to "difference and competition," creating opposition and competition among secondary social groups and dissolving the consensus foundation of national identity rooted in the "American Creed" and Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture; multiculturalist and deconstructionist movements further place immigrant ethnic rights above citizenship rights, causing fragmented identity recognition to form resistance to the integrating function of national identity and strengthening the trend of ethnic "tribalism." Second, under the electoral and party competition system, identity politics becomes deeply bound to political institutions, with group identity cleavages being "institutionalized"; confrontation in the cultural domain and political confrontation mutually reinforce each other, left-wing emancipatory politics and right-wing reactionary politics form stalemates, racial identity issues become labels for dividing political forces, "compromise" consciousness is neglected, and an environment for extremism is provided. Third, the intertwined superimposition of identity politics with electoral politics and party politics triggers institutional functional decline: evolving from "the politicization of identity" to "the identity-ization of politics," social relational structures move from "compartmentalization" toward "fragmentation" and "fission," with party reorganization toward the Republican Party as "white party" and Democratic Party as "minority group party" solidifying oppositional postures; the "fission" institutional gene and identity politics mutually reinforce each other, creating enormous friction that reduces policy efficacy, aggravating institutional maladies such as "vetocracy," diverting attention from core socioeconomic policy issues, and causing major public policies to remain long undecided.

V. Conclusion

This analysis examines the symbiotic and intertwined relationship between identity politics and the decay of American political institutions, noting that demographic structure and social relation evolution constitute the generative soil of identity politics, with social protest constituting its inherent底色; the institutional forces of electoral politics and party politics amplify community differences and opposition, while the institutional paradox of separation of powers design causes "constraint" and "mutual veto" to become operational norms; the superimposition of identity politics with political operation causes party competition, policy implementation, and other processes to attach identity group elements, with multiple negative effects mutually reinforcing and aggravating the functional erosion and decay dilemma of political institutions.