No girls. No foreigners. No straws. No egg and cheese.

At a neighbor’s cookout last weekend, the kids played so hard that at the end one dad had to carry home his four-year-old boy, after putting his small rainbow shoes onto his feet. They were getting tight. A few minutes later, we were about to leave with our four-year-old boy and his rainbow shoes, but discovered that the ones by the door were curiously loose. It took us just a minute to deduce that the two friends, who we now realized had come to the cookout in identical shoes one size apart, had accidentally switched footwear.

I mention this because I’ve been thinking this week about men—not all men! a very specific subset of men—and why they are getting so weirdly intense about straight white guy identity politics. (SWGIP? Okay, sure.) In my own life, to my great good fortune, I am surrounded by a lot of lovely guys, who wear their masculinity as comfortably as a dad carrying home a little boy whose friend has identical rainbow shoes, because rainbows are cool. The men in my life mostly have jobs that are of use in the world, work gracefully with women and men of varying races and international backgrounds, and try to take good care of their families and be of service to the larger community. Are they perfect? No. Neither am I, and neither are other women. But even my lady friends’ crappiest ex-husbands are, mercifully, not into the kind of SWGIP that’s becoming a scourge of this country.

“Identity politics” in general has a bad name—it’s mostly used as a pejorative by people in more advantaged groups who wish people from less advantaged groups would stop going on about it. The Heritage Foundation website hosts a 2019 “report” on the topic by David Azerrad, with a summary that reads in part: “Identity politics combines a focus on race, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, and other identitarian categories with a politics of victimization…Identity politics poses a threat to republican self-government by corroding patriotic ties and demanding special treatment rather than equality under the law.”

This last bit seems plain wrong—the identity politics of minority or disadvantaged groups is precisely about asking for treatment commensurate with the implicit norm of straight white guys, both under the law and beyond it. Typical demands tend to be things like “we, too, should be able to vote, and then not have our choice strategically diluted to nothing” or “hospitals should prioritize our safety and survival” or “we should be able to use public bathrooms” or “immigration enforcers should not detain us based solely on race.” Beyond those legal demands, people in these groups also generally like not to be called names or assumed to be stupid, and they do like to use these identity categories as a marker around which to celebrate, mourn, and learn.

With the straight white guy identity politics that’s on the rise, however, attaining equal civil rights is not the goal. SWGIP is what’s happening when Pete Hegseth systematically blocks the promotion of Black and female Army officers to be one-star generals. It’s what’s afoot in the genuinely appalling new White House project called “Aliens,” a “ha ha they’re extraterrestrials” propaganda site to dehumanize and smear undocumented US residents, like if Hitler was better at gamifying. It’s why Republican politicians are trying to establish Texas Democrat James Talarico as insufficiently manly to serve in the Senate because his favorite potato, egg, and cheese breakfast taco does not contain meat.

If all this sounds narrow in its appeal, well, yes. As the Heritage Foundation said—like a stopped clock, it is right a couple times a day—this kind of identity politics is about demanding special treatment. Even more so, it’s about blocking people in the out-groups from accessing an equal measure of rights, opportunity, and respect. It is no accident that this is a favored ideology for people like Hegseth, Ken Paxton, or Andrew Tate; these are not people who would fare well in a meritocracy. Their only hope is to eliminate the social standing of the competition, including other guys who are able to use straws or eat tacos or even, gasp, advise the gay-straight alliance without having a nervous breakdown.

It has become popular among certain center-left politicians and pundits to argue that identity politics really is just as bad as the Heritage Foundation said, and that it’s the reason Democrats lost the last election. But these people need to refocus their ire. Getting hung up on the annoyingness of civil-rights seekers is a dead end. It plays right into the hands of the people who, very concretely, are blocking nonwhite asylum seekers, putting women and people of color out of work, destroying scholarship on race and gender, and dissolving every majority-minority voting district in the South, while (coincidentally) wreaking havoc on the economics of ordinary Americans. If anything is going to “corrode patriotic ties,” it’s this insistence that we reorder society around white supremacy and 1950s patriarchy, coming from a bunch of low-quality guys who know it’s their only chance.

The brittle and anxious vision of masculinity coming from Donald Trump’s team is one thing that makes me suspect this regime will not last. Who needs some chud trying to knock your breakfast taco out of your hand? In my world, at least, dudes rock enough to have very little patience with this nonsense. Confident men do not need an identity politics that tries to convince them everyone else is coming to take their stuff. They can find strength in a different kind of identity—one that makes room for the rest of us, and that sends the kind of creeps who can only win by kneecapping others scuttling back to the dark corners where they belong.

If you’ve read this far: thank you. And if you haven’t done so already, consider upgrading to become a paid member, which will allow you to comment on all the other things Talarico needs to avoid to maintain his manliness till November. See you next time.