The purpose of this work is to analyze tropes such as the "majority" and "identity politics" in contemporary American political rhetoric in order to understand how the political is figured in these tropes and how minoritized subjects come to relate to the political in and through these tropes. In this work, I place these tropes in a historical context of ongoing sociopolitical dominance by white, hetero-normative, and cis-normative ideologies with a special attention to the turn-of-the-century eugenics movement and its ideological and rhetorical underpinnings. I engage in an extended analysis of these tropes with significant historical and contemporary context and by doing so, I open up a space to consider how these "common sense" ways of thinking about politics and the political reproduce and perpetuate harmful patterns of thought that mark minoritized political subjects as contaminants of a pure political commons.