In the trove of right-wing commentary chestnuts, one of the best goes something like, “All this identity politics is what’s wrong with America!”

What brought that to mind? Well, it was knowing that with next to no effort, you could elicit the same sentiment from any attendee at the recent get-together to canonize the guy who was cool with liberty and justice for all … except for the Muslims, the blacks, the Jews, the women, and any remaining liberals.

I remain amazed at how far you could apparently get in the 21st century by wrapping up Archie Bunker politics in Jesus-digs-your-prejudices rhetoric and a Eddie Haskell package. But I digress.

The irony reveals itself when you do the math. Take away all the immediately suspicious, inherently limited, or supposedly outright hell-bound groups according to that lot, and what you’re left with is … well, white Christian dudes.

I’ve touched on this before, but never in recent history has so much attention fallen on a single man whose career reminds us all of one thing: White Dude Politics was the original identity politics. I would’ve said Well-Off White Dude Politics, but originally that was redundant since nobody was truly well off who wasn’t a White Dude.

The very phrase “identity politics” only came into existence when other demographics acquired enough clout to get noticed making noise about historically getting screwed over to preserve the comfort and advantage of said White Dudes.

Just how much are White Dude Politics the O.G. of identity politics? For over 300 years in what would eventually become this country, the mainstream term for White Dude Politics was “politics.”

Well-known Dubya speechwriter David Frum had it figured out years ago: “If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. The will reject democracy.”

Turns out “democracy” was shorthand for not only the last remnants of actual conservatism but a whole lot of other Constitutional norms in general, if certain people stopped accepting secondhand citizenry with gratitude.

Which begat MAGA. For MAGA, being forced to settle for equality instead of the policy charade marketed as equality is the greatest affront of all. They see identity politics everywhere but in the mirror.