One of the broad characteristics defining American politics today is, unfortunately, the weaponization of identity in politics.

This used to apply to social issues, like race, religion or sexual identity and orientation, but now it’s come to infect economic policies as well. We see this with populist candidates on both sides, who identify with the working class (no matter what their actual background is) and rail against the insiders and the oligarchs.

Sound familiar?

There are a couple of problems with this. One is that the terms used to describe it, especially in economics, are fluid and ill-defined. Take the term “working class.” One traditional definition is a person who contributes nothing but their labor, regardless of whether it’s office work or physical labor, excluding those who derive income from the labor of others.

If that sounds fair, consider that by that definition, a lawyer who works at a large firm in New York City is a member of the working class, while a man in his 70s in Maine who owns a home contracting business that employs others is not. Furthermore, if you own rental units as part of your income — even if they’re owner-occupied — you’re disqualified.

The terms “white-collar” and ‘blue-collar” can be misleading as well, as can the term “millionaire.” Many people are millionaires on paper. The home they own or the business they’ve spent decades building is worth a million dollars, and so they technically qualify. That doesn’t mean they have a million dollars in cash lying around, nor does it mean that they make a million dollars in income every year. Those are three different categories — income, net worth and cash assets — by which one can measure an individual’s wealth, and they’re entirely different.

That’s why none of those terms are especially useful in discussing actual, serious economic policy. Conversely, they’re exactly the reason many politicians, whether they’re running for office for the first time or longtime incumbents, rush to embrace them: they love the fluidity of those terms. They’ll often embrace even more vague words and terms, like “hard-working,” that virtually any American can apply to themselves in their head. Most politicians want to avoid serious policy discussions when they embrace these terms.

When a candidate says they’ll stand up for the working class against the oligarchs, for instance, they’re not offering a precise, realistic solution to a problem (they may have those as well, but that’s not part of the rhetoric). Instead, they’re using identity politics to further divide Americans, just like candidates who rail against immigration or those who appeal to you based on your race, religion or gender identity. All of those labels are used to appeal to people’s fears, rather than to identify specific problems and offer realistic, productive solutions.

Now, that’s not to say that those terms are completely unacceptable to use in rhetoric, nor is it to say that any and all politicians who embrace them are devoid of real ideas. It’s certainly possible to use those terms and still have real, concrete proposals to back them up.

When politicians do use those terms, they are often doing so with a couple of goals in mind, whether consciously or not. The first, as noted above, is that they want to keep Americans divided and scared, encouraging Americans to see each other as enemies rather than as partners. They want you to believe that they’re on your side, and that other Americans who aren’t in your group are an enemy to be countered.

Another is that many politicians who use such divisive rhetoric — regardless of whether they have specific proposals — are doing so simply to get elected and gain power for themselves. Enacting their proposals, and actually helping the people they claim to care about, is often a secondary goal at best. Even if they have real policy ideas, they know it will be difficult — if not impossible — to enact them without broad-based public support.

The truth is that the best way for the country to solve the problems it faces is for us to come together with realistic solutions. That’s what will help everyone in this country, regardless of their race, religion, gender identity or socioeconomic class.

We need to reject divisive rhetoric regardless of ideology and instead support candidates who have real, specific solutions that will actually help everyone; there are good people like that on both sides. If we return to that, we might finally start electing politicians who want to help all of us, not just the people who voted for them.