Are you tracking actual identity politics or the term "identity politics"? Because the meaning of the term applies just as much to ending slavery, womens' suffrage and civil rights movements.
Otherwise, you might as well argue that fake news only existed from 2016 onwards, because that's when Google Trends says it did.
>the meaning of the term applies just as much to ending slavery, womens' suffrage and civil rights movements.
I'm not sure that's true. E.g. Martin Luther King Jr spoke of the "magnificent words" in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Modern activists would say: "Written by dead pale male slaveholders. We need more diversity! Where are the voices of women and POC?" For King, ideas took precedence over identities. For modern activists, it's the opposite.
The American Anti-Slavery Society was predominantly white. That's puzzling for a movement driven by identity politics. It does make sense for a movement driven by universal humanitarian ideals.
In any case, if you still think I'm wrong, and identity politics is an essential force behind trends such as the civil rights movement -- then I suppose you'll be happy that it's being adopted by the political right in the United States? Since it's got such a great historical track record, surely results will be good? ;-)
>Otherwise, you might as well argue that fake news only existed from 2016 onwards, because that's when Google Trends says it did.
This is a bad analogy, because fake news itself doesn't use the term "fake news". If "fake news" was an ideology which was characterized by particular terminology, we could graph the use of that terminology to document the rise of the ideology. That's what's being done here.
In any case, I do believe that "fake news" (in the narrow sense of websites which write completely bogus news, with no effort at reporting, to drive clicks) is a phenomenon which has, in fact, become more widespread relatively recently (due to the ease of internet publishing etc.) So that's another way in which your analogy is invalid. Fake news did increase in popularity when Trump was the GOP candidate, relative to when Romney was the GOP candidate. And Google Trends helps illuminate that!
I think our definitions of "identity politics" differ too much to have a useful discussion about it. I'm going off the most common definitions I can find (eg dictionaries, wikipedia), but perhaps I'm looking in the wrong place.
Otherwise, you might as well argue that fake news only existed from 2016 onwards, because that's when Google Trends says it did.