The overflow crowd at Busboys and Poets was black and white and shades in between, yuppies in chinos and activists in message T-shirts, bubbling with excitement to hear from the special guest at the restaurant’s open mic night.

Instead of a poet or a musician, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) stepped onto the stage, showered with applause and cheers. Not many members of Congress could draw this kind of crowd — diverse and yet united behind a single goal. After taking a moment to thank the crowd for its greeting, Waters got right to the point.

“Donald Trump is someone that found his way to the presidency of the United States of America — I still don’t know how,” she said, drawing boos at the mention of the president’s name. “But he’s someone that I’m committed to getting impeached!”

The crowd exploded.

“He’s a liar! He’s a cheat! He’s a con man!” she said, each declaration punctuated by cheers. “We’ve got to stop his ass!”

The results of three elections in different parts of the world have been cast by pundits as proof that politicians who embrace “identity politics” risk being punished for it at the polls. In each case, this narrative has pointed to an emphasis of LGBT rights as being politically risky and somehow divisive.

Analysing the unexpected electoral loss of Hillary Clinton in the US presidential elections in November, professor Mark Lilla argued in an op-ed in the New York Times that her campaign had “slipped” into the rhetoric of diversity, calling out explicitly to African-American, Latino, LGBT, and women voters while saying nothing of direct resonance to white, working-class voters that have long been part of her party’s base. In his telling, this led many white working class voters to feel abandoned.

He said that national politics is not about “difference,” but about commonality, and that Clinton’s campaign failed to speak clearly enough to issues like economic justice that cut across group lines. In a campaign that set out to embrace diversity, white, rural, religious Americans started to see themselves as a disadvantaged group whose identity and real-world needs were being ignored.

Whatever one thinks of the term, public unhappiness with “identity politics” has shown itself to be a complex and volatile political rallying cry. Many of the questions Lilla and many others have written on are of course worth exploring. But it’s dangerous and intellectually bankrupt to claim that the right lesson to draw from all of this is that politicians have gone too far in embracing diversity and standing up for the rights of women, racial minorities, LGBT people or anyone else. Political leaders may well need to look for new ways to speak to the needs and interests of groups who feel alienated by mainstream politics, but they shouldn’t embrace bigotry as a cheap and easy way to get there.

Politics that stops talking about minority rights on the theory that upholding them is “divisive,” or makes it harder to win over majority voting blocs, will only lead to a more fragmented society, not bring people together. Instead, political leaders should make clear that rights are not a zero-sum game – protecting my rights does not undermine yours. On the contrary it creates a framework we can all rely on if our rights come under threat.