Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

by Francis Fukuyama

The global surge toward democracy that began in the mid-1970s has gone into what my colleague Larry Diamond calls a global recession.2 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. Authoritarian countries, led by China, have meanwhile grown more confident and self-assertive.

Thymos is the part of the soul that craves recognition of dignity; isothymia is the demand to be respected on an equal basis with other people; while megalothymia is the desire to be recognized as superior.

The rise of identity politics in modern liberal democracies is one of the chief threats that they face, and unless we can work our way back to more universal understandings of human dignity, we will doom ourselves to continuing conflict.

The left has focused less on broad economic equality and more on promoting the interests of a wide variety of 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, an identity that is often explicitly connected to race, ethnicity, or religion.

But as important as material self-interest is, human beings are motivated by other things as well, motives that better explain the disparate events of the present. This might be called the politics of resentment. In a wide variety of cases, a political leader has mobilized followers around the perception that the group’s dignity had been affronted, disparaged, or otherwise disregarded. This resentment engenders demands for public recognition of the dignity of the group in question. A humiliated group seeking restitution of its dignity carries far more emotional weight than people simply pursuing their economic advantage.

More than two millennia before its advent, Socrates and Adeimantus understood something unrecognized by modern economics. Desire and reason are component parts of the human psyche (soul), but a third part, thymos, acts completely independently of the first two. Thymos is the seat of judgments of worth:

The politics of recognition and dignity had reached a fork by the early nineteenth century. One fork led to the universal recognition of individual rights, and thence to liberal societies that sought to provide citizens with an ever-expanding scope of individual autonomy. The other fork led to assertions of collective identity, of which the two major manifestations were nationalism and politicized religion. Late-nineteenth-century Europe saw the rise both of liberal and democratic movements demanding universal individual recognition and the more ominous emergence of an exclusive nationalism that would eventually trigger the world wars of the early twentieth century. In the contemporary Muslim world, collective identity is taking the form of Islamism—that is, the demand for recognition of a special status for Islam as the basis of political community.

The “long nineteenth century” that stretched from the French Revolution to the outbreak of World War I in 1914 saw two versions of dignity and two approaches to identity in competition with each other. The first sought recognition of the universal Rights of Man (not, at that point, necessarily of women as well). The other sought recognition of the dignity of particular peoples who had been oppressed or held in bondage by others. These different versions of dignity, universal and national, contended with each other over decades; the revolutions of 1848, for example, were fought in the name both of liberal rights and of national self-assertion. By the early twentieth century, the liberal version of dignity was joined by another universalist doctrine, Marxist socialism, which would fight for the rights of proletarians. Both the liberal and the socialist movements contended with nationalism through the two world wars; after fascism’s defeat in 1945, the two universal doctrines emerged as the poles around which global politics was organized during the Cold War. But nationalism was never fully discredited, despite institutions such as the European Union that were designed to keep it in check, and has reemerged as a new force in the twenty-first century.

The idea that each group has its own identity that was not accessible to outsiders was reflected in the use of the term lived experience, which has seen explosive growth in the popular culture since the 1970s.5 The distinction between experience and lived experience has its roots in the difference between the German words Erfahrung and Erlebnis, which preoccupied a number of thinkers in the nineteenth century. Erfahrung referred to experiences that could be shared, as when people witnessed chemistry experiments in different laboratories. Erlebnis (which incorporates the word Leben, or “life”), by contrast, meant the subjective perception of experiences, which might not necessarily be shareable. The writer Walter Benjamin argued in a 1939 essay that modern life constituted a series of “shock experiences” that prevented individuals from seeing their lives as a whole and made it hard to convert Erlebnis into Erfahrung. He saw this negatively as a “new kind of barbarism” in which communal memory breaks down into a series of individual experiences.6 This line of thought ultimately traces back, we should recall, to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose emphasis on the “sentiment of existence” valorized subjective inner feeling over the shared norms and understandings of the surrounding society. The distinction between Erfahrung and Erlebnis is the same as the distinction between experience and lived experience. The latter term entered the English language via Simone de Beauvoir: the seco...

Multiculturalism was a description of societies that were de facto diverse. But it also became the label for a political program that sought to value each separate culture and each lived experience equally, and in particular those that had been invisible or undervalued in the past. While classical liberalism sought to protect the autonomy of equal individuals, the new ideology of multiculturalism promoted equal respect for cultures, even if those cultures abridged the autonomy of the individuals who participated in them.

The focus on lived experience by identity groups valorizes inner selves experienced emotionally rather than examined rationally. Notes one observer, “Our political culture is marked, at the micro level, by the fusion of a given person’s opinion and what they perceive to be their singular, permanent, and authentic self.” This privileges opinions sincerely held over reasoned deliberation that may force one to abandon those opinions.11 That an argument is offensive to someone’s sense of self-worth is often seen as sufficient to delegitimize it, a trend encouraged by the kind of short-form discourse propagated by social media.12

Trump was the perfect practitioner of the ethics of authenticity that defines our age: he may be mendacious, malicious, bigoted, and unpresidential, but at least he says what he thinks.

What is notable, however, is how the right has adopted the language and framing of identity from the left: the idea that my particular group is being victimized, that its situation and sufferings are invisible to the rest of society, and that the whole of the social and political structure responsible for this situation (read: the media and political elites) needs to be smashed. Identity politics is the lens through which most social issues are now seen across the ideological spectrum.

The contemporary European struggle over national identity begins with the founders of the European Union, Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet, who understood that exclusive ethnic definitions of national identity had been at the root of the two world wars that Europe experienced.3 As an antidote, they created the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951, composed of France, Belgium, West Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, which was designed to prevent German rearmament while facilitating trade and economic cooperation in a formerly integrated region that had been ripped apart by war. The Coal and Steel Community evolved in stages into the European Economic Community and eventually into the EU, with a membership that grew steadily to encompass the current twenty-eight members.

Citizenship can be granted at birth on the basis of jus soli or jus sanguinis, or it can be acquired after birth through naturalization. Under jus soli, anyone born on the country’s territory automatically became a citizen; under jus sanguinis, citizenship depends on descent.

English Euroskepticism is rooted in a long-standing belief in English exceptionalism. The country was conquered in 1066 by a French dynasty and for the next several hundred years had a history deeply intertwined with that of the Continent. But when Henry VIII broke with the papacy in the early sixteenth century and created a separate Protestant national church, a distinctive sense of English identity began to take root.

The nice thing about dystopian fiction is that it almost never comes true. That we can imagine how current trends will play themselves out in an ever more exaggerated fashion serves as a useful warning: 1984 became a potent symbol of a totalitarian future we wanted to avoid and helped inoculate us from it. We can imagine better places to be in, which take account of our societies’ increasing diversity, yet present a vision for how that diversity will still serve common ends and support rather than undermine liberal democracy. Identity is the theme that underlies many political phenomena today, from new populist nationalist movements, to Islamist fighters, to the controversies taking place on university campuses. We will not escape from thinking about ourselves and our society in identity terms. But we need to remember that the identities dwelling deep inside us are neither fixed nor necessarily given to us by our accidents of birth. Identity can be used to divide, but it can and has also been used to integrate. That in the end will be the remedy for the populist politics of the present.