To them politics is not about ideas, or policies, or problem solving, or good governance. It’s all about identity.

I want to push back a little. Politics, or more specifically, political affiliation or advocacy of a specific political philosophy is part of one’s identity.

Their error, which also reveals a limitation of their capacity for abstraction, is that her background and other traits are sole determinants of her identity in political discourse, at least publicly.

This is a good example of “correlation doesn’t mean causation.”