Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

by Francis Fukuyama

Criticisms that Islamists were themselves intolerant and illiberal were often downplayed under the banner of antiracism and countering Islamophobia.

So there is nothing wrong with identity politics as such; it is a natural and inevitable response to injustice. It becomes problematic only when identity is interpreted or asserted in certain specific ways. Identity politics for some progressives has become a cheap substitute for serious thinking about how to reverse the thirty-year trend in most liberal democracies toward greater socioeconomic inequality. It is easier to argue over cultural issues within the confines of elite institutions than it is to appropriate money or convince skeptical legislators to change policies. The most visible manifestations of identity politics have appeared on university campuses from the 1980s onward. University curricula can be more readily altered to include readings of women and minority authors than can the incomes or social situations of the groups in question. Many of the constituencies that have been the focus of recent identity claims, such as female executives in Silicon Valley or aspiring women actresses and filmmakers in Hollywood, are near the top of the income distribution. Helping them to achieve greater equality is a good thing, but will do nothing to address the glaring disparities between the top 1 percent and the remaining 99.

This points to a second problem that arises with a focus on newer and more narrowly defined marginalized groups: it diverts attention from older and larger groups whose serious problems have been ignored. A significant part of the white American working class has been dragged into an underclass, comparable to the experience of African-Americans during the 1970s and ’80s. Yet one has heard little concern from activists on the left, at least until recently, about the burgeoning opioid crisis, or the fate of children growing up in impoverished single-parent families in the rural United States. Progressives today have no ambitious strategies for dealing with the potentially immense job losses that will accompany advancing automation, or the income disparities that technology may bring to all Americans, white or black, male or female.

A third problem with current understandings of identity is that they can threaten free speech and, more broadly, the kind of rational discourse needed to sustain a democracy. Liberal democracies are committed to protecting the right to say anything you want in a marketplace of ideas, particularly in the political sphere. But the preoccupation with identity has clashed with the need for deliberative discourse. 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

The political strategy of building a left out of a coalition of disparate identity groups is problematic as well, as Mark Lilla has explained.13 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. In doing so, both parties are responding to the incentives that a two-party electoral system and popular primaries give to politically conscious activists. The activists most concerned with identity issues are seldom broadly representative of the electorate as a whole; indeed, their concerns have often alienated mainstream voters. Moreover, the very nature of modern identity with its emphasis on lived experiences creates conflicts within the liberal coalition. For example, controversies over “cultural appropriation” have set progressive blacks and whites against one another.15

The proponents of identity politics on the left would argue that assertions of identity on the right are illegitimate and cannot be placed on the same moral plane as those of minorities, women, and other marginalized groups. Rather, they reflect the perspectives of a dominant mainstream culture that has been historically privileged and continues to be so. These arguments have obvious truth. Perceptions on the part of conservatives of advantages being unfairly given to minorities, women, or refugees are greatly exaggerated, as is the sense that political correctness has run amok everywhere. 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. The reality for many marginalized groups continues as before: African-Americans continue to be objects of police violence, and women continue to be assaulted and harassed. 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.

Liberal democracies have good reasons not to organize themselves around a series of ever-proliferating identity groups inaccessible to outsiders. The dynamic of identity politics is to stimulate more of the same, as identity groups begin to see one another as threats. Unlike fights over economic resources, identity claims are usually nonnegotiable: rights to social recognition based on race, ethnicity, or gender are based on fixed biological characteristics and cannot be traded for other goods or abridged in any way.

The shift in agendas of both left and right toward the protection of ever narrower group identities ultimately threatens the possibility of communication and collective action. The remedy for this is not to abandon the idea of identity, which is too much a part of the way that modern people think about themselves and their surrounding societies. The remedy is to define larger and more integrative national identities that take account of the de facto diversity of existing liberal democratic societies. This will be the subject of the two following chapters.

Countries such as Kenya and Nigeria, for example, are ethnically and religiously divided; stability is maintained only because different ethnic groups take turns in power to loot the country.1 High levels of corruption, poverty, and failed economic development are the result.

National identity got a bad name in this period precisely because it came to be associated with an exclusive, ethnically based sense of belonging known as ethno-nationalism. This type of identity persecuted people who were not part of the group and committed aggressions against foreigners on behalf of co-ethnics living in other countries. The problem, however, was not with the idea of national identity itself; the problem was the narrow, ethnically based, intolerant, aggressive, and deeply illiberal form that national identity took.

But the quality of democracy depends on more than mere acceptance of the system’s basic rules. Democracies need their own culture to function. They do not produce automatic agreement; indeed, they are necessarily pluralistic collections of diverse interests, opinions, and values that have to be reconciled peacefully. Democracies require deliberation and debate, which can happen only if people accept certain norms of behavior on what can be said and done. Citizens often have to accept outcomes they do not like or prefer, in the interest of a common good; a culture of tolerance and mutual sympathy must override partisan passions.

The U.S. Constitution begins with the statement “We, the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” The Constitution says clearly that the people are sovereign and that legitimate government flows from their will. But it does not define who the people are, or on what basis individuals are to be included in the national community.

National identities have been created by four main paths. The first is to transfer populations across the political boundaries of a particular country, either by sending settlers into new territories, by forcibly evicting people who live in a certain territory, or by simply killing them off—or all three. The third of these was labeled ethnic cleansing during the Balkan wars of the early 1990s and was rightly condemned by the international community. But ethnic cleansing has been used by many countries in the past, including democracies such as Australia, New Zealand, Chile, and the United States, which saw settlers violently removing or killing off the indigenous populations of the territories in which they settled.

The second path to nationhood is to move borders to fit existing linguistic or cultural populations. Historically, this has been accomplished either through unification, as in the case of Italy and Germany in the 1860s and ’70s, or through separation, as when the Irish Republic left the United Kingdom in 1919, or when Ukraine declared its independence from the former Soviet Union in 1991. The third path is to assimilate minority populations into the culture of an existing ethnic or linguistic group. France was a polyglot nation two hundred years ago, but over time the different local languages such as Provençal, Breton, or Flemish were gradually displaced by Parisian French. Similarly, immigrants to Argentina or the United States—or more likely, their children—learned Spanish or English to fit into the dominant culture and move up the social ladder. The apparent ethnic homogeneity of China, where more than 90 percent of the population are said to be Han Chinese, was the product of a lengthy cultural and biological assimilation of minority populations over three millennia. The fourth path is to reshape national identity to fit the existing characteristics of the society in question. Contrary to the views of many nationalists, “nations” are not biological entities that have existed from time immemorial; they are socially constructed from the bottom up and the top down. Those doing the constructing can deliberately shape identities to suit people’s characteristics and habits....

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. A stratum of young, usually well-educated Europeans are now born in one member state, get their education in another, marry someone from yet another country, and work in multiple locations within the EU and farther afield. They retain an awareness of their birth nationality, but their lives are tied to the EU as a whole.

The 2000s saw the emergence of an intense debate across Europe over citizenship, immigration, and national identity. Citizenship is a two-way street: it endows citizens with rights that are protected by the state, but it also enjoins duties on them, above all, the duty of loyalty to the country’s principles and laws. This was a particularly neuralgic issue due to the large welfare benefits of many European states: strong opposition arose to providing such benefits to immigrants who did not seem to accept the basic terms of the social contract. And some feared that Muslims, as opposed to earlier immigrant groups, might never properly assimilate into the countries’ cultures. Right-wing anti-immigrant parties such as the National Front in France, Denmark’s Danish People’s Party, and the Freedom Party in the Netherlands gained support and put pressure on mainstream parties to accommodate their demands.

Japan has one of the most restrictive systems of citizenship and naturalization of any developed democracy, as well as sharp limits on immigration, with the result that it is one of the least diverse of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries.

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.

Huntington was not making an argument for an Anglo-Protestant understanding of American identity if that meant that only Anglo-Saxon Protestants could qualify as Americans. Rather, he was saying that the Anglo-Protestant settlers to the United States brought with them a culture that was critical for the subsequent development of the country as a successful democracy. The culture is important, not the ethnic or religious identities of those who take part in it. His view is, in my opinion, undeniably true.

One of the elements of that culture that Huntington emphasized was the “Protestant” work ethic. Empirically, Americans do work much harder than many other peoples around the world—less hard than many Asians, but certainly harder than most Europeans.23 The historical origins of this work ethic may indeed lie in the Puritanism of the country’s early settlers, but who in the United States works hard these days? It is just as likely to be a Korean grocery-store owner or an Ethiopian cabdriver or a Mexican gardener as a person of Anglo-Protestant heritage living off dividends in his or her country club. While we can acknowledge the historical roots of this culture, we must also recognize that it has become detached from its particular ethno-religious origins to become the common property of all Americans.

The question is not whether Americans should go backward into an ethnic and religious understanding of identity. The contemporary fate of the United States—and that of any other culturally diverse democracy that wants to survive—is to be a creedal nation. But it also needs an understanding of positive virtues, not bound to particular groups, that are needed to make that democracy work. While it would be wrong today to link identity to race, ethnicity, or religion, it is correct to say that national identity in a well-functioning democracy requires something more than passive acceptance of a creed. It requires citizenship and the exercise of certain virtues. A creedal identity is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for success.

Liberal democracy is built around the rights given to individuals who are equal in their freedom, that is, who have an equal degree of choice and agency in determining their collective political lives.

But many people are not satisfied with simple equal recognition as generic human beings. The rights one enjoys as a citizen of a democracy are highly valued when one lives under a dictatorship, but come to be taken for granted over time once democracy has been established. Unlike their parents, young people growing up in Eastern Europe today have no personal experience of life under communism, and can take the liberties they enjoy for granted. This allows them to focus on other things: the hidden potentialities that are not being permitted to flourish and the way that they are being held back by the social norms and institutions around them. Being a citizen of a liberal democracy does not mean, moreover, that people will actually be treated with equal respect either by their government or by other citizens. They are judged on the basis of their skin color, their gender, their national origin, their looks, their ethnicity, or their sexual orientation. Each person and each group experiences disrespect in different ways, and each seeks its own dignity. Identity politics thus engenders its own dynamic, by which societies divide themselves into smaller and smaller groups by virtue of their particular “lived experience” of victimization.

But the freedom and degree of choice that exist in a modern liberal society can also leave people unhappy and disconnected from their fellow human beings. They find themselves nostalgic for the community and structured life they think they have lost, or that their ancestors supposedly once possessed. The authentic identities they are seeking are ones that bind them to other people. They can be seduced by leaders who tell them that they have been betrayed and disrespected by the existing power structures, and that they are members of important communities whose greatness will again be recognized.

Many modern liberal democracies find themselves at the cusp of an important choice. They have had to accommodate rapid economic and social change and have become far more diverse as a result of globalization. This has created demands for recognition on the part of groups who were previously invisible to the mainstream society. But this has entailed a perceived lowering of the status of the groups they have displaced, leading to a politics of resentment and backlash. The retreat on both sides into ever narrower identities threatens the possibility of deliberation and collective action by the society as a whole. Down this road lies, ultimately, state breakdown and failure.

while we will never get away from identity politics in the modern world, we can steer it back to broader forms of mutual respect for dignity that will make democracy more functional.

How do we translate these abstract ideas into concrete policies at the current moment? We can start by trying to counter the specific abuses that have driven assertions of identity, such as unwarranted police violence against minorities or sexual assault and sexual harrassment in workplaces, schools, and other institutions. No critique of identity politics should imply that these are not real and urgent problems that need concrete solutions. Beyond that, there is a larger agenda of integrating smaller groups into larger wholes on which trust and citizenship can be based. 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.

the naturalization oath of allegiance to the United States of America: I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law; and that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God.1

Americanism constituted a set of beliefs and a way of life, not an ethnicity; one can deviate from the former but not the latter.

While the United States has benefited from diversity, it cannot build its national identity around diversity as such. Identity has to be related to substantive ideas such as constitutionalism, rule of law, and human equality. Americans respect these ideas; the country is justified in excluding from citizenship those who reject them.

United States and other developed democracies have gradually eroded the distinction between citizen and noncitizen.8 Noncitizens rightfully enjoy many legal rights, including rights to due process, speech, association, free exercise of religion, and a range of state services such as education. 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 from their government when traveling abroad. Small as they are, it is important to hold on to these distinctions. Basic human rights are universal, but full enjoyment of rights actively enforced by state power is a reward for membership in a national community and acceptance of that community’s rules. The right to vote is particularly important, since it gives individuals a share of state power. As a human being, I may have an abstract right to citizenship and political representation, but as an American citizen I would not expect to be able to vote in Italy or in Ghana, even if I lived in one of those countries.

Liberal democracies benefit greatly from immigration, both economically and culturally. But they also unquestionably have the right to control their own borders. A democratic political system is based on a contract between government and citizen in which both have obligations. Such a contract makes no sense without delimitation of citizenship and exercise of the franchise. All people have a basic human right to citizenship, something that, according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, cannot be arbitrarily taken away from them. But that does not mean they have the right to citizenship in any particular country. International law does not, moreover, challenge the right of states to control their borders, or to set criteria for citizenship.9 What refugees are owed is sympathy, compassion, and support. Like all moral obligations, however, these obligations need to be tempered by practical considerations of scarce resources, competing priorities, and the political sustainability of a program of support.

The new groups vociferously opposing immigration are actually coalitions of people with different concerns. A hard-core group are driven by racism and bigotry; little can be done to change their minds. They should not be catered to, but simply opposed on moral grounds. But others are concerned whether newcomers will ultimately assimilate. They worry less about there being immigration than about numbers, speed of change, and the carrying capacity of existing institutions to accommodate these changes. A policy focus on assimilation might ease their concerns and peel them away from the simple bigots. Whether or not this happens, a policy focusing on assimilation would be good for national cohesion.

Identity politics has made the crafting of such ambitious policies more difficult. For much of the twentieth century, politics in liberal democracies revolved around broad economic policy issues. The progressive left wanted to protect ordinary people from the vagaries of the market, and to use the power of the state to more fairly distribute resources. The right for its part wanted to protect the free enterprise system and the ability of everyone to participate in market exchange. Communist, socialist, social democratic, liberal, and conservative parties all arrayed themselves on a spectrum from left to right that could be measured by the desired degree of state intervention, and commitment alternatively to equality or to individual freedom. There were important identity groups as well, including parties whose agendas were nationalist, religious, or regional in scope. But the stability of democratic politics in the period from the end of World War II up to the present revolved around dominant center-left and center-right parties that largely agreed on the legitimacy of a democratic welfare state.

Identity issues, by contrast, are harder to reconcile: either you recognize me or you don’t. Resentment over lost dignity or invisibility often has economic roots, but fights over identity often distract us from focusing on policies that could concretely remedy those issues. In countries such as the United States, South Africa, or India, with racial, ethnic, and religious stratifications, it has been harder to create broad working-class coalitions to fight for redistribution because the higher-status identity groups did not want to make common cause with those below them, and vice versa.

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

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.