Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

by Francis Fukuyama

The limits of this strategy were evident as the century drew to a close. The Marxist left had to confront the fact that actual Communist societies in the Soviet Union and China had turned into grotesque and oppressive dictatorships, denounced by leaders such as Nikita Khrushchev and Mikhail Gorbachev, who were themselves Communists. Meanwhile the working class in most industrialized democracies grew richer and began to merge happily with the middle class. Communist revolution and the abolition of private property fell off the agenda. The social democratic left also reached a dead end of sorts: its goals of an ever-expanding welfare state bumped into the reality of fiscal constraints during the turbulent 1970s. Governments responded by printing money, leading to inflation and financial crisis; redistributive programs were creating perverse incentives that discouraged work, savings, and entrepreneurship, which in turn limited the size of the pie available for redistribution. Inequality remained deeply entrenched, despite ambitious efforts such as Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society to eradicate it. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and China’s shift toward a market economy after 1978, the Marxist left largely collapsed, and social democrats were left to make their peace with capitalism. The left also came to share with the right an increasing disillusionment with government itself after failures such as the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal. The diminished ambitio...