In this essay, I wish to think through the shifts in our social imaginaries that now gravitate strongly around identity. My intention is not to raise the specter of "identity politics" merely to condemn it, nor to pretend that I am somehow free from its influence. One of the surest signs of being lost in ideology, as Jason Blakely observes in his recent book, is the belief that one has made a clean break from it. 4 (Other people are lost in ideology, whereas I am not! Let the contempt and self-deception begin.)What we need is a way to denaturalize our ideological framings, and this comes, in part, through historical understanding as well as immanent critique. Girard is invaluable in this effort. His incisive analyses of cyclical human conflict and scapegoating can help us see how our current convictions and sensibilities—often assumed to be natural or self-evident—have emerged over time, while also warning us of the temptation to wield them in rivalrous or self-righteous ways.Alongside Girard, I will engage the works of Yascha Mounk, Charles Taylor, and Jason Blakely to outline how the modern concern for victims and the political focus on identity are internally linked.