It's a rhetorical move to claim as your heritage some kind of truth that once went unchallenged and is now questioned by people with nefarious purposes. Nothing more.
Seems like it's all just a ploy for corporations trying to remake the world as suits them, helpful to have interchangable workers with no meaningful culture.
He seems to associate "identity politics" with bad arguments as applied to those causes. Which, sure, same. Bad arguments are bad, regardless of what they're applied to. There are an awful lot of bad arguers whose goals align with mine.
In that sense, "identity politics" sounds identical to "woke" or "politically correct" or any other right-wing buzzword used to dismiss a left-wing idea out of hand. To quote Hitchens, "as if those two words constitute an argument".
Also, ironically, this article reads like an apologia for a saint, trying to square the circle of all his inconsistent opinions. Maybe Hitchens was a very clever writer and was particularly well-equipped to speak about his age, but he far from a great thinker.