Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

Francis Fukuyama, “Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment,” Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018, 163 pp.

Francis Fukuyama is a political scientist at Stanford University. In 2014, he wrote that American institutions were in decay as the state was progressively captured by powerful interest groups. Two years later, his predictions were borne out by the rise to power of a series of political outsiders whose economic nationalism and authoritarian tendencies threatened to destabilize the entire international order. These populist nationalists seek direct charismatic connection to “the people,” who are usually defined in narrow identity terms that offer an irresistible call to an in-group and exclude large parts of the population as a whole.

Fukuyama is additionally a New York Times bestselling author of The Origins of Political Order (see reviews I posted of that book, volume II, 11/3/2014 as well as a review of volume I on 1/1/2016).  In this, his current book, Identity…, Fukuyama states that Identity politics grew out of the social movements of the 1960s, around the demands of African Americans, women, gays and lesbians and other marginalized groups demanding recognition of their dignity and concrete remedies for social disadvantages. Over the years these demands evolved to displace the previous socio-economic class identity as the traditional way that much of the left thinks about inequality.

Recently identity politics have also infected the right. There are several factors conspiring to produce the wave of populism that has emerged in Europe and the United States. One factor has to do with globalization and its highly unequal impact on developed country populations (note well that I said DEVELOPED). Outsourcing and technological change have not just impacted working-class incomes but a broad social decline that is perceived as a loss of status.  Globalization has raised the standard of living for India and China but is hollowing out the middle class in developed countries.

Demand for recognition of one’s identity is a master concept that unifies much of what is going on in world politics today. The universal recognition on which liberal democracy is based has been increasingly challenged by narrower forms of recognition based on nation, religion, sect, race, ethnicity, or gender, which have resulted in anti-immigrant populism, the upsurge of politicized Islam, the fractious “identity liberalism” of college campuses, and the emergence of white nationalism. Populist nationalism, said to be rooted in economic motivation, actually springs from the demand for recognition and therefore cannot simply be satisfied by economic means. The demand for identity cannot be transcended; we must begin to shape identity in a way that supports rather than undermines democracy.  

High levels of immigration are providing an opening for populist politicians who have blamed elites for not managing immigrants and ensuring mechanisms are in place to ensure immigrants are assimilated into the national identity.  A national identity that is defined in open and liberal terms rather than immigrants residing in self-regarding and separate tribal communities.

And, then there are the leftist elites that are blamed for producing both the 2008 subprime crisis in the United States and the euro crisis in the EU, both of which hurt ordinary workers much more than the elites themselves. All of this has fed opportunistic politicians from Viktor Orban in Hungary to Donald Trump, who see the stoking of these resentments as vehicles for their own ambitions.  Although in the case of Trump, I believe he just wanted the showcase and attention, I suspect he never expected to actually be elected.

My Notes:

Pg. xf:  Trump represents a broad trend in international politics toward what has been labeled populist nationalism.  Populist leaders seek to use the legitimacy conferred by democratic elections to consolidate power.  They claim a direct charismatic connection to ‘the people,’ who are often defined in narrow ethnic terms that exclude big parts of the population.  They don’t like institutions and seek to undermine the checks and balances that limit a leader’s personal power in a modern liberal democracy: courts, the legislature, an independent media, and a nonpartisan bureaucracy.  Others in this category are Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Viktor Orban of Hungary, Jaroslaw Kacynski of Poland, and Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines.

Pg. xi:  The global surge toward democracy that began in the mid-1970s has gone into a global recession.  In 1970, there were only about 35 electoral democracies, a number that steadily increased over the next three decades until it reached nearly 120 by the early 2000s.  The greatest acceleration came from 1989 to 1991, when the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union led to a democratic wave throughout that region.  Since the mid-2000s, however, the trend has reversed itself, and total numbers have declined.  What was unexpected was the threats to democracy arising from within established democracies themselves.  Hungary, for instance, Britain with Brexit, and the US with Trump.  Britain and the US had many concerned with globalism and immigrants, a trend they associated with loss of work.

Pg. 4:  Between 1970 and 2008, the world’s output of goods and services quadrupled and growth extended to virtually all regions of the world, additionally the number of people living in extreme poverty in developing countries dropped from 42 percent of the total population in 1993 to 17 percent in 2011.  Children dying before their fifth birthdays declined from 22 percent in 1960 to less than 5 percent by 2016.  However, inequality in developed democracies increased dramatically, such that many of the benefits of growth flowed primarily to an elite defined primarily by education.  Huge new middle classes arose in countries such as China and India.  The work they began to do replaced the work that had been done by older middle classes in the developed world.  Manufacturing moved steadily from Europe and the US to East Asia and other low-labor-cost regions.  At the same time, women were displacing men in an increasingly service-dominated new economy, and low-skilled workers were being replaced by smart machines. 

Pg. 6:  In the twenty-first century Progressive politics, which had been centered on workers, their trade unions, and social democratic parties that sought better social protection and economic redistribution, changed. The left which had focused on broad economic equality now focused more on promoting the interests of a wide variety of smaller groups perceived as being marginalized—blacks, immigrants, women, Hispanics, the LGBT community, refugees, and the like.  The right, meanwhile, is redefining itself as patriots who seek to protect traditional national identity, and identity that is often explicitly connected to race, ethnicity, or religion.

Pg. 12:  Modern economics is based on a theory that human beings are ‘rational utility maximizers:’ they are individuals who use their formidable cognitive abilities to benefit their self-interest Embedded in this theory are several further assumptions.  One is that the unit of account is an individual, as opposed to a family, a tribe, a nation, or some other type of social group. 

Pg. 14:  Behavioral economists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky have attacked the modern economic model’s underlying assumptions by showing that people are not rational in practice, that they, for example, choose default behaviors over more optimal strategies or economize on the hard work of thinking by copying the behavior of others around them.

Pg. 26:  In the West, the idea of identity was born, in a sense, during the Protestant Reformation, and it was given its initial expression by Martin Luther.  Luther was one of the first Western thinkers to articulate and valorize the inner self over the external social being.  He argued that man has a twofold nature, an inner spiritual one, and an outer bodily being; since ‘no external thing has any influence in producing Christian righteousness or freedom,’ only the inner man could be renewed. 

Pg. 32:  Rousseau asserts what became foundational in world politics in the subsequent centuries, is that society exists outside the individual, a mass of rules, relationships, injunctions, and customs that is itself the chief obstacle to the realization of human potential, and hence of human happiness.  This way of thinking has become so instinctive to us now that we are unconscious of it.  It comes up in the defense we hear that ‘society made me do it.’ 

Pg. 55; Individual choice in areas outside of morals began to expand with the market economy and the general social mobility that it required:  people could pick their occupations, marriage partners, domiciles, and brand of toothpaste. The problem with this understanding of autonomy is that shared values serve the important function of making social life possible.  If we do not agree on a minimal common culture, we cannot cooperate on shared tasks and will not regard the same institutions as legitimate; indeed, we will not even be able to communicate with one another absent a common language with mutually understood meanings.

 Pg. 73:  Both nationalism and Islamism can be seen as a species of identity politics.  They have a number of important similarities.  They both appeared on the world stage at moments of social transition from traditional isolated agrarian societies to modern ones connected to a broader and more diverse world.  They both provide an ideology that explains why people feel lonely and confused, and both peddle in victimhood that lays the blame for an individual’s unhappy situation on groups of outsiders.  And they both demand recognition of dignity in restrictive ways: not for all human beings, but for members of a particular national or religious group.

Pg. 132:  In the US, immigration has largely displaced class and race as the chief reason why Americans vote for Republican candidates (Others are abortion, political correctness, and distaste for elites, and a Supreme Court that legislates, are others).  The incorporation of African-Americans into the Democratic Party following the civil rights movement of the 1960s is widely credited for driving the South into the arms of the Republican Party; today immigration is playing a similar role.  

Opposition to Mexican and Muslim immigration figured centrally in Trump’s election campaign and subsequent rise to the presidency.  At the core of conservative complaints about immigration are the approximately 11-12 million undocumented immigrants now estimated to be living in the US.  Levels of migrants and corresponding cultural change are as high now as they were in the 1920s following the large wave of immigrants who entered the US before and after the turn of the twentieth century.

Pg. 182:  Social media and the internet have facilitated the emergence of self-contained communities, walled off not by physical barriers but by belief in a shared identity.

Addenda:

Fukuyama: People’s happiness is driven more by relative rather than absolute levels of income and by social recognition. As Adam Smith noted in his “Theory of Moral Sentiments,” the rich man “glories” in his riches while the poor man is invisible to his fellow human beings. Many who voted for populist politicians feel that they have been invisible to elites who are indifferent to their struggles and ready to favor immigrants, minorities, and others “less deserving.” This perception is untrue but nonetheless lies behind much of the anger from members of former majority populations. This is why Brexit voters were willing to risk economic costs as long as they could “get back their country” and why Trump voters are often happy with his confrontational anti-elite rhetoric in the absence of concrete socio-economic gains for themselves.

More broadly, nationalism and politicized religious movements like Islamism are also based on offended dignity. Russia was humiliated by NATO moving east during a period of weakness. China is recovering from its “hundred years of humiliation.” And fighters for the Islamic State believe that they are winning back the dignity of repressed and abused Muslims around the world. All of these movements are obviously willing to sacrifice material interests for the sake of the recovery of group dignity.

It seems that, on the one hand, we are seeing the demise of socializing institutions (such as universal military service and public education in which all races, ethnicities, and classes mingle) combined with the rise of polarizing norms and practices — with mainstream media playing to cultural niches in a highly competitive market, a business model of the big social media companies that maximizes virality by linking up the likeminded and the demagogic politics that amplifies tribal differences.

It is clear the growth in information bandwidth has ended the dominance of the large American networks and European public broadcasters, leading to a factionalization of media spaces where people talk only to people like themselves — the so-called filter bubble. In recent years, this has been vastly abetted by the business models of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, whose self-interest lies in virality, which is often fed by conspiracy theories and personal abuse. It is very hard to disentangle cause and effect here: Clearly, Americans would be polarized without social media, and yet the decline of trusted integrating institutions has also contributed to polarization.