Can identity politics be a good thing?

First and foremost the politician should be appealing to his countrymen. Not a special interest group within, nor a corporate entity or internationalists. However this has been neglected so badly in the West, to the point of stupidity, that a redress is going to appear extreme when coming from such a position. We have been brainwashed to associate anything but vanilla patriotism as nasty, to accept that modern values are all about unity rather than identity and reality; and we are the poorer for it. It is no coincidence that anything tinged with national or even local pride is hastily derided by the upper echelons.