Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

by Francis Fukuyama

the most politically destabilizing group tends not to be the desperate poor, but rather middle classes who feel they are losing their status with respect to other groups.

The poor tend to be politically disorganized and preoccupied with day-to-day survival. People who think of themselves as middle class, by contrast, have more time for political activity and are better educated and easier to mobilize. More important, they feel that their economic status entitles them to respect: they work hard at jobs that are useful to society, they raise families, and they carry out their responsibilities to society such as paying taxes. They know that they are not at the top of the economic heap, but they also have pride in not being indigent or dependent on government help to survive.* Middle-class people do not feel themselves to be at the margins of society; rather, they typically feel that they constitute the core of national identity.

Poor v middle class. The poor which marxist class theory relies on to rise up never has throughout history. Despite fears on the one hand & hopes on the other...middle class status is a more likely trigger to change than class consciousness

The resentful citizens fearing loss of middle-class status point an accusatory finger upward to the elites, to whom they are invisible, but also downward toward the poor, whom they feel are undeserving and being unfairly favored.

Everyone but themselves is responsible for their situation. Not existentialists.

The problem with the contemporary left is the particular forms of identity that it has increasingly chosen to celebrate. Rather than building solidarity around large collectivities such as the working class or the economically exploited, it has focused on ever smaller groups being marginalized in specific ways.

& no singular identity, smorgasbord of identities vs one identity loses in a democracies via plurality again & again

The effort to raise everyone’s self-esteem without being able to define what is estimable, and without being able to discriminate between better and worse forms of behavior, appeared to many people to be an impossible—indeed, an absurd—task.

One reason that identity politics has become so embedded in the United States and other liberal democracies is because of rising concern over self-esteem, and by what has been labeled “the triumph of the therapeutic.”

The latter refers to a 1966 book written by the sociologist Philip Rieff, who argued that the decline of a shared moral horizon defined by religion had left a huge void that was being filled by psychologists preaching a new religion of psychotherapy.

The void left by priests and ministers was now being filled by psychoanalysts using therapeutic techniques “with nothing at stake beyond a manipulatable sense of well-being.”

Some in the human potential movement saw Friedrich Nietzsche as one of their progenitors. But Nietzsche was ruthlessly honest in foreseeing the consequences of personal liberation: it could just as easily pave the way for a post-Christian morality in which the stronger ruled the weaker, rather than a happy egalitarian outcome.

Adolf Hitler would end up doing nothing more than following his inner star, as countless college graduates are constantly enjoined to do.

This was exactly the critique made in the late 1970s by Christopher Lasch, who argued that the promotion of self-esteem enabled not human potential but a crippling narcissism, indeed, a narcissism that he fe...

“Notwithstanding his occasional illusions of omnipotence, the narcissist depends on others to validate his self-esteem.

Even when therapists speak of the need for “meaning” and “love,” they define love and meaning simply as the fulfillment of the patient’s emotional requirements. It hardly occurs to them—nor is there any reason why it should, given the nature of the therapeutic enterprise—to encourage the subject to subordinate his needs and interests to those of others, to some cause or tradition outside himself.

In an American context, Lasch argued that narcissism as a social phenomenon would lead not to fascism, but to a broad depoliticization of society, in which struggles for social justice were reduced to personal psychological problems.

If therapy became a substitute for religion, religion itself took an increasingly therapeutic turn. This was true of both liberal and evangelical churches in the United States, whose leaders found that they could reverse the trend toward declining attendance if they offered what amounted to psychological counseling services built around self-esteem.

Prosperity gospel, personal truth, etc...

That year civil rights leader the Reverend Jesse Jackson led a group of Stanford students in chanting, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Culture’s got to go”—

Ironically the same Western Culture that erected a university where one is free to chant "hey ho western culture has got to go" how many other regimes from history allowed such critiques of itself.

The existing core course was built around fifteen texts, beginning with the Hebrew Bible, Homer, and Augustine, continuing through Machiavelli and Galileo, and on to Marx, Darwin, and Freud. The protesters wanted to expand the syllabus to include nonwhite and female authors, not necessarily on the grounds that they wrote important or timeless books, but that their very inclusion raised the dignity of the cultures out of which they came, and therefore the self-esteem of students coming from those cultures.

The rise of the therapeutic model midwifed the birth of modern identity politics in advanced liberal democracies. Identity politics is everywhere a struggle for the recognition

This “generation of 1968” on the left was no longer focused single-mindedly on class struggle, but rather on support for the rights of a broad range of marginalized groups.

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.

I have long blamed Rosseau & the 60s neo romanticism for paving the way to identity politics & hyperpartisanship

The current dysfunction and decay of the American political system is related to the extreme and ever-growing polarization of American politics, which has made routine governing an exercise in brinkmanship and threatens to politicize all of the country’s institutions. The blame for this polarization is not equally shared between left and right. As Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein have argued, the Republican Party has moved much more rapidly toward the extremist views represented by its Tea Party wing than has the Democratic Party to its left.14 But the left has moved further to the left as well.

the very nature of modern identity with its emphasis on lived experiences creates conflicts within the liberal coalition.

The final, and perhaps most significant, problem with identity politics as currently practiced on the left is that it has stimulated the rise of identity politics on the right.

The more extreme forms of political correctness are in the end the province of relatively small numbers of writers, artists, students, and intellectuals on the left. But they are picked up by the conservative media and amplified as representative of the left as a whole.

Social media contributes heavily to this problem, since a single comment or incident can ricochet around the internet and become emblematic of an entire category of people.

Identity politics is the lens through which most social issues are now seen across the ideological spectrum.

Highly divided countries are weak, which is why Putin’s Russia has provided quiet support to independence movements across Europe and has intervened in American politics to increase the level of political division there.

The founders of the European Union deliberately sought to weaken national identities at the member-state level in favor of a “postnational” European consciousness, as an antidote to the aggressive ethno-nationalisms of the first half of the twentieth century.4 The hope of these founders was that economic interdependence would make war less likely, and that political cooperation would follow on its heels. In many ways, they were wildly successful: the idea that Germany and France, the two main antagonists of the world wars, would ever go to war with each other is vanishingly remote today.

Post WWII peace predicated on lacking membership to identity

They retain an awareness of their birth nationality, but their lives are tied to the EU as a whole.

Same for this 1st gen American. I feel neither American or Dutch. People with strong senses of identity seem foreign to me.

But the leaders of the EU were not in a position to invest much effort in building an alternative new identity.5 They did not create a single European citizenship; rules for citizenship remained the province of individual member states.

So while the elites talked of “ever-closer union” within the EU, the reality was that the ghosts of the older national identities hung around like unwanted guests at a dinner party. This was particularly true among older, less educated voters who could not or would not take advantage of the mobility offered by the new Europe.

Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manner and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side through a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence.

Note how specific and narrow Jay’s definition of American identity is. It is based on shared religion (Protestantism), ethnicity (descent from the English), common language (English), and belief in the same republican principles of government.

This creedal understanding of American identity emerged as the result of a long struggle stretching over nearly two centuries and represented a decisive break with earlier versions of identity based on race, ethnicity, or religion. Americans can be proud of this very substantive identity; it is based on belief in the common political principles of constitutionalism, the rule of law, democratic accountability, and the principle that “all men are created equal” (now interpreted to include all women). These political ideas come directly out of the Enlightenment and are the only possible basis for unifying a modern liberal democracy that has become de facto multicultural.

The type of identity politics increasingly practiced on both the left and the right is deeply problematic because it returns to understandings of identity based on fixed characteristics such as race, ethnicity, and religion, which had earlier been defeated at great cost.

Alexis de Tocqueville in particular warned of the temptation of people in democratic societies to turn inward and preoccupy themselves with their own welfare and that of their families exclusively. Successful democracy, according to him, requires citizens who are patriotic, informed, active, public-spirited, and willing to participate in political matters. In this age of polarization, one might add that they should be open-minded, tolerant of other viewpoints, and ready to compromise their own views for the sake of democratic consensus.

Very tempting to take care of my girls and fuck everyone else, for the record, not even Tocqueville has me convinced that's not the right move...

We need to promote creedal national identities built around the foundational ideas of modern liberal democracy, and use public policies to deliberately assimilate newcomers to those identities. Liberal democracy has its own culture, which must be held in higher esteem than cultures rejecting democracy’s values.

Over recent decades, the European left had come to support a form of multiculturalism that downplayed the importance of integrating immigrants into the national culture. Under the banner of antiracism it looked the other way from evidence that assimilation wasn’t working. The new populist right, for its part, looks back nostalgically at a fading national culture that was based on ethnicity or religion, a culture that was largely free of immigrants or significant diversities.

In the United States, identity politics has fractured the left into a series of identity groups that are home to its most energetic political activists. It has in many respects lost touch with the one identity group that used to be its largest constituency, the white working class. This has spawned the rise of a populist right that feels its own identity to be under threat, abette...

The creedal national identity that emerged in the wake of the American Civil War today needs to be strongly reemphasized and defended from attacks by both the left and the right.

On the right, plenty of new white nationalist voices would like to drag the country backward to an identity once again based on race, ethnicity, or religion. It is urgent that these views be firmly rejected as un-American,

On the left, identity politics has sought to undermine the legitimacy of the American national story by emphasizing victimization, insinuating in some cases that racism, gender discrimination, and other forms of systematic exclusion are somehow intrinsic to the country’s DNA. All these things have been and continue to be features of American society, and they need to be confronted in the present. But a progressive narrative can also be told about the overcoming of barr...

In France, the problem is somewhat different. The French concept of republican citizenship, like its American counterpart, is creedal, built around the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity coming out of the French Revolution.

with public education. The teaching of basic civics has been in long-term decline in the United States, not just for immigrants but for native-born Americans, and this needs to be reversed.

Noncitizens also share duties with citizens: they are expected to obey the law and must pay taxes, though only citizens are liable for jury duty in the United States.

The distinction between noncitizens who are documented and those who are not is sharper, since the latter are liable to deportation, but even the undocumented possess due process rights.

The only major right that is conveyed solely by citizenship is the right to vote; in addition, citizens can enter and exit the country freely and can expect support...

Rather, the rules could be better enforced through a system of employer sanctions, which requires a national identification system that will tell employers who is legitimately in the country. This has not happened because too many employers benefit from the cheap labor that immigrants provide and do not want to act as enforcement agents.

Easiest problem in the world but no one is honest why we don't.... Cheap labor. Everyone uses it. My lawn is flawless

So the possibility of a basic bargain on immigration reform has existed for some time. In a trade, the government would undertake serious enforcement measures to control its borders, in return for an agreement to give undocumented aliens without criminal records a path toward citizenship.

This bargain might actually receive majority support among the American public, but hard-core immigration opponents are dead set against any form of “amnesty,” and pro-immigrant groups are opposed to stricter enforcement of existing rules.

Identity ruins everything