According to the random Crooked Timber blog commenter who coined that viral aphorism in 2018, yes. But by what standard are that commenter’s musings to be considered expositive on modern conservative philosophy?
Observing the last 10 years, which political movement is most associated with the idea that inherent identity characteristics should dictate how you are treated under the law?
In those last ten years, Republicans have been utterly obsessed with "identity characteristics". From pushing back against gay marriage, abortion, civil rights... It's basically all they talk about in political rallies today. Not the economy or anything else, just how it is important to never talk about trans people, and how they should not exist.
In my observation, every time a prominent conservative breaks the law, all I hear from the right is how “he’s a good man,” “he learned his lesson,” “he was acting in good faith,” and so on — even if the crime is as egregious as homicide or pedophilia. The same generosity is never granted to someone not in the in-group: just look how Crystal Mason was treated when compared to the scores of Republicans who were caught with their hands in the cookie jar.
My understanding is the earliest application of identity politics comes from thinkers like Fanon and Wollstonecraft, would you categorize them as being conservatives?
"In-group" doesn't necessarily mean identity characteristics. In today's (US) conservative party, it distinctly means "pledges personal allegiance to party leader."
As an example: The "conservative" judge who threw out 40 years of precedent on a technicality to prevent the American public from learning whether their former and potentially future president sold, gave away, or otherwise exposed national security secrets after he undoubtedly stole those documents.
There's a fundamental asymmetry in "the movement" on the left - which essentially rounds out to whatever annoying undergrad student showed up in your Twitter feed today - and the actual elected, governing leaders of the right, doing things like throwing out very strong criminal cases on matters of deep public importance.
It's probably a bad idea and it will likely backfire but nevertheless motivation matters and a lot of people are willing to cut some slack to that political movement because they're honestly convinced it was done in good faith to restore a balance and give some power to disenfranchised groups.
Sometimes a phenomenon exists for a long time before being encapsulated in a concise, thought-provoking, and often (though not always) amusing aphorism.
An excellent example would be Murphy's Law, and by extension many of the similar, often eponymous, laws.
Some of those are humourous, some are in fact quite serious though have a comedic element particularly out of context. Most speak to at least a colloquial truth.
What Whilhoit did was manage to buttonhole a hypocrisy of modern conservativism, perhaps over the past few decades, perhaps a century or so (Anatole France, "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread", further evidentiarially supported by SCOTUS in Grants Pass), perhaps by millennia (see the opening paragraphs of A.H.M. Jones, Augustus, describing the political situation in the late Roman Republic, quoted here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22208105>, and at greater length: <https://web.archive.org/web/20230607042525/https://old.reddi...>). It's not so much a proved hypothesis as a phrasing which fits the understanding of many and expresses it concisely and memorably.
