Identity Quotes

“The left continued to be defined by its passion for equality, but that agenda shifted from its earlier emphasis on the conditions of the working class to the often psychological demands of an ever-widening circle of marginalized groups.”
― Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

“In the second decade of the twenty-first century, that spectrum appears to be giving way in many regions to one defined by identity. 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.”
― Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

“Hans’s personal story was characterized by the nineteenth-century social theorist Ferdinand Tönnies as the shift from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, or from (village) community to (urban) society. It was experienced by millions of Europeans during the nineteenth century and is now happening in rapidly industrializing societies such as China and Vietnam. The psychological dislocation engendered by the transition from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft laid the basis for an ideology of nationalism based on an intense nostalgia for an imagined past of strong community in which the divisions and confusions of a pluralist modern society did not exist. Well before the rise of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s, German writers were lamenting the loss of Gemeinschaft and what they saw as the perversions of a cosmopolitan liberal society.”
― Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

“the left stopped thinking several decades ago about ambitious social policies that might help remedy the underlying conditions of the poor. It was easier to talk about respect and dignity than to come up with potentially costly plans that would concretely reduce inequality.”
― Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

“the Islamicization of radicalism—that is, a process that draws from the same alienation that drove earlier generations of extremists, whether nationalists such as Paul de Lagarde or Communists such as Leon Trotsky.”
― Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

“The rule of law limits power by granting citizens certain basic rights—that is, in certain domains such as speech, association, property, and religious belief the state may not restrict individual choice. Rule of law also serves the principle of equality by applying those rules equally to all citizens, including those who hold the highest political offices within the system. Democratic accountability in turn seeks to give all adult citizens an equal share of power by enfranchising them, and allowing them to replace their rulers if they object to their use of power. This is why the rule of law and democratic accountability have typically been tightly intertwined. The law protects both the negative freedom from government abuse and the positive freedom of equal participation, as it did during the civil rights era in the United States.”
― Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

“Este error en la entrega postal se produjo debido a la forma en que los incentivos económicos se entrelazan con los problemas de identidad en el comportamiento humano. Ser pobre es ser invisible a ojos de los demás seres humanos, y la indignidad de la invisibilidad resulta a menudo peor que la falta de recursos.”
― Francis Fukuyama, Identidad: La demanda de dignidad y las políticas de resentimiento (Deusto)

“diversity cannot be the basis for identity in and of itself; it is like saying that our identity is to have no identity; or rather, that we should get used to our having nothing in common and emphasize our narrow ethnic or racial identities instead.”
― Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

“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.”
― Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

“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.”
― Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

“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.”
― Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

“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.”
― Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

“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.”
― Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

“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.”
― Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

“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.”
― Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

“While the economic inequalities arising from the last fifty or so years of globalization are a major factor explaining contemporary politics, economic grievances become much more acute when they are attached to feelings of indignity and disrespect. Indeed, much of what we understand to be economic motivation actually reflects not a straightforward desire for wealth and resources, but the fact that money is perceived to be a marker of status and buys respect.”
― Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

“The obligation to respect universal human rights has been voluntarily undertaken by most countries around the world, and rightly so. But all liberal democracies are built on top of states, whose jurisdiction is limited by their territorial reach. No state can undertake an unlimited obligation to protect people outside its jurisdiction, and whether the world would be better off if they all tried to do so is not clear.”
― Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

“The problem with this understanding of autonomy is that shared values serve the important function of making social life possible.”
― Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

“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.”
― Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

“The connection between economic interest and recognition was well understood by the founder of modern political economy, Adam Smith, in his book The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Even in late-eighteenth-century Britain, he observed that the poor had basic necessities and did not suffer from gross material deprivation. They sought wealth for a different reason: To be observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice of with sympathy, complacency, and approbation, are all the advantages which we can propose to derive from it. It is the vanity, not the ease or the pleasure, which interests us. But vanity is always founded upon the belief of our being the object of attention and approbation. The rich man glories in his riches, because he feels that they naturally draw upon him the attention of the world, and that mankind are disposed to go along with him in all the agreeable emotions with which the advantages of his situation so readily inspire him … The poor man, on the contrary, is ashamed of his poverty. He feels that it either places him out of sight of mankind, or, that if they take any notice of him, they have, however, scarce any fellow-feeling with the misery and distress which he suffers.”
― Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

“Trump represented a broader trend in international politics, toward what has been labeled populist nationalism.1 Populist leaders seek to use the legitimacy conferred by democratic elections to consolidate power. They claim 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.”
― Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

“By taking on political correctness so frontally, Trump has played a critical role in moving the focus of identity politics from the left, where it was born, to the right, where it is now taking root. Identity politics on the left tended to legitimate only certain identities while ignoring or denigrating others, such as European (i.e., white) ethnicity, Christian religiosity, rural residence, belief in traditional family values, and related categories. Many of Donald Trump’s working-class supporters feel they have been disregarded by the national elites. Hollywood makes movies with strong female, black, or gay characters, but few centering around people like themselves, except occasionally to make fun of them (think of Will Ferrell’s Talladega Nights).”
― Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

“Modern liberal societies are heirs to the moral confusion left by the disappearance of a shared religious horizon. Their constitutions protect individual dignity and individual rights, and that dignity seems to be centered on individuals’ ability to make moral choices. But what is the scope of those choices? Is choice limited to acceptance or rejection of a set of moral rules established by the surrounding society, or does true autonomy include the ability to make up those rules as well?”
― Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

“Confusion over identity arises as a condition of living in the modern world. Modernization means constant change and disruption, and the opening up of choices that did not exist before. It is mobile, fluid, and complex. This fluidity is by and large a good thing: over generations, millions of people have been fleeing villages and traditional societies that do not offer them choices, in favor of ones that do.”
― Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

“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.”
― Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

“Modern liberal democracies institutionalize these principles of freedom and equality by creating capable states that are nonetheless constrained by a rule of law and democratic accountability. The rule of law limits power by granting citizens certain basic rights—that is, in certain domains such as speech, association, property, and religious belief the state may not restrict individual choice. Rule of law also serves the principle of equality by applying those rules equally to all citizens, including those who hold the highest political offices within the system. Democratic accountability in turn seeks to give all adult citizens an equal share of power by enfranchising them, and allowing them to replace their rulers if they object to their use of power. This is why the rule of law and democratic accountability have typically been tightly intertwined.”
― Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

“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.”
― Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

“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.”
― Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

“A major exception was President Obama, whose Affordable Care Act was a milestone in U.S. social policy. The ACA’s opponents tried to frame it as an identity issue, suggesting sotto voce that the policy was designed by a black president to help his black constituents. But it was in fact a national policy designed to help less well-off Americans, regardless of their race or identity. Many of the law’s beneficiaries include rural whites in the South who have nonetheless been persuaded to vote for Republican politicians vowing to repeal the ACA.”
― Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

“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.10 This bargain might actually receive majority support among the American public, but hard-core immigration opponents are dead set against any form of “amnesty”
― Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment