Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

Abstract

What is someone like Viktor Orbán doing at the end of history? Francis Fukuyama once suggested that the European Union was the purest expression of his famous thesis. Why, then, is a self-declared illiberal democrat hoping to become “the saviour of Europe, and recognised as such”?1 Similarly, what is Donald Trump doing in the White House? Fukuyama’s latest book, Identity, is an attempt to explain these surprises. As readers of The End of History will recall, Fukuyama offered a theory of history, borrowed from Hegel and Kojève, which was meant to explain why liberal democracy would be more satisfying to its citizens than alternative types of government. He started by pointing out that economists have a big gap in their theory of human motivation—which, like it or not, has been the best candidate for a Theory of Everything in the social sciences. The problem is that individuals frequently fail to pursue their material self-interest. Billionaires, for example, are not going to work every day because they have unmet material needs. This cannot be resolved via some nuance of behavioral economics; it is not an issue of bounded rationality. Nor can it be addressed by defining self-interest as whatever people want, with the identification left, in economists’ jargon, to revealed preference. No satisfactory theory of history can be built on a tautology. Fukuyama did better, arguing that a powerful motor of history is a desire for recognition. There is a part of the soul, he argued, citing Plato’s term thymos, which yearns to be treated with respect. This can be a demand for equality (“isothymia”), as per criticism of the gender pay gap. It also manifests as a desire for superiority (“megalothymia”). Billionaires keep on working because they want to have the biggest company, or the largest foundation. They go into politics because there are even bigger prizes to be won there, and larger audiences to command. These sorts of demands for recognition, Fukuyama now tells us, comprise a “master concept” which can explain both the left’s identity politics and the right’s populist nationalism (at xv). It is a bold claim to say the #MeToo movement, Donald Trump, Black Lives Matter, and Orbán’s Fidesz party are all the same phenomenon. Fukuyama leads us there in three steps. The first is a philosophical history of the idea of the inner self, and particularly the view that instead of deferring to the judgment of society, people should express their inner selves and insist that society show respect. The characters here are an eclectic crowd, including Martin Luther, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the members of the California Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem and Personal Social Responsibility (1986–1990). The second step is the claim that these ideas came to preoccupy large parts of the left, at least in the West, who demanded justice for oppressed groups: women, African Americans, homosexuals, and so forth. The third claim is that this same form of politics has now taken hold on the Western right, in the form of an identity politics aimed mainly at whites. Its market is not the worst-off in society, but rather those whose relative position has slipped—the lower middle class or working class, more rural than urban, people who used to feel themselves central to their polities, but who now sense elites regard them with disdain. The first of these steps is the hardest to take. Fukuyama commits what we might call the “lineage fallacy,” which often afflicts intellectual historians. (Isaiah Berlin is another famous victim.) A modern idea is traced to its antecedents, typically through a canon of Western thinkers, often using explicitly evolutionary language. Thus, over nine pages, we find the following sequence: In the West, the idea of identity was born, in a sense, during the Protestant Reformation, and it was given its initial expression by the Augustinian friar Martin Luther [. . .]. By the late eighteenth century, the idea at the core of modern identity had evolved much further and now took on a secular form [. . .] Rousseau was the fundamental source of many ideas that would later be critical to a host of modern trends [. . .] Rousseau’s sentiment of existence would one day morph into what is now called lived experience, which lies at the root of contemporary identity politics [. . .] That the distinction between an inner and an outer self emerged in Europe between the Reformation and the French Revolution was not an accident [. . .] the concept of identity as it is now understood would not even arise in most traditional human societies. (at 26–35) For social scientists trained in theoretical rigor and empirical verification, this style of argumentation is frustrating. How do we know that there were causal connections between these ideas? Perhaps the features common to Luther, Rousseau, and the modern identitarians evolved separately, and would have existed regardless of these historical precedents? Perhaps identity concepts have flourished in traditional societies, but the evidence for this has been overlooked. In Fukuyama’s case, the argument is especially jarring, even provocatory, because it confounds a core sentiment of modern identity thinking: that human history is more than the thoughts and activities of dead white men. In his version, with a hand wave, he attributes the whole phenomenon to a handful of Western philosophers. It nonetheless seems possible women could expect equal pay for equal work, even without Rousseau. The real value in this part of the book is the model building (in economists’ terms), not the intellectual history. A model is a set of causal relationships, stripped down to the fundamental working parts, set out for inspection so the assumptions are clear, and then referred to by one name for convenience. The Fukuyama model has a Plato block (thymos), a Luther block (the inner self) augmented with some Rousseau (the priority of the individual over a corrupt society), and a Hegel block (the battle for recognition). Together, the model provides an explanation for something observed in the data (like people taking pride in their homosexuality and campaigning for gay marriage). Claiming evolutionary connections between these ideas is a distraction. It would make no more sense to say that Alfred Marshall invented markets because he worked out the dynamics of supply and demand curves. Traders of many cultures cared about supply and demand long before Marshall; he gave us the theory, but the practice had its own life. Fukuyama would have been better off using his big names as labels for his arguments rather than claiming they originated modern identity politics. In the second and third steps of his argument, fortunately, Fukuyama takes us somewhere more interesting. In particular, he takes us into his own conflicted feelings about modern identity politics, both on the left and on the right. On the left, he is clear that there are groups which have suffered injustices, sometimes devastating ones, and which have every reason to campaign for better treatment. Neither the #MeToo movement nor Black Lives Matter is imagining their grievances. For the right, he sees that rising inequality and declining social mobility have badly weakened the world’s major democracies, and that the downwardly mobile segments of the middle classes are right to be looking for a better deal. Yet he is still suspicious of the identity politics that have flourished in these conditions. It takes some time to identify all the reasons for his hostility, but the final charge sheet reads approximately as follows: first, by embracing identity politics, the left neglected its historical commitment to egalitarianism. Instead of focusing on economic issues, it built a top-and-bottom coalition between well-educated elites and the worst-off, centered on identity instead of economics. Rich gay people and poor, dark-skinned women met each other center stage. This left the traditional Western working classes—white, more socially conservative—sidelined and sometimes deplored (as per Hillary Clinton’s revealing comment2). Political entrepreneurs on the right seized this opportunity, with results that have included the Trump presidency and Brexit. Fukuyama has long expressed surprise that rising inequality in the West has not prompted a leftist, populist rebellion. He blames identity politics for getting in the way. Second, relatedly, Fukuyama is worried about the liberal democratic end of history—not because it might be replaced by something better, but because it could succumb to something worse. His updated view on that thesis seems to be that the combination of human rights, democracy, and market economics remains superior to the alternatives, but “Getting to Denmark” is harder than it once appeared, and staying there is also difficult. Many promising countries seem to get sidetracked (Brazil, Hungary, Turkey, South Africa), and vanguard countries show signs of regressing (with both the United States and United Kingdom having become almost ungovernable recently). Getting history going in the right direction again will require better politics. In turn, he insists, this will need unifying identities that can sustain a focus on the common good—not identity chauvinism across the political spectrum. Inasmuch as identity politics are about splitting people into discrete spaces, some very small, there is too little left to support the commonwealth. Third, Fukuyama’s commitment to reasoned discourse, in the Enlightenment tradition, makes him epistemologically suspicious of identity politics. The trouble is that glorifying the inner self makes it easier to sidestep objectivity, with the vantage point rather than the claim itself becoming the source of authority—hence all those college essays and letters to editors starting “as a child of immigrants,” “as a woman of color,” “as a gay man.” Fukuyama is certainly interested in listening to different perspectives, but as his students can attest, he also expects to hear good arguments. At times, Fukuyama’s positivism has seemed almost quaint, especially on elite, relativistic college campuses. In the era of fake news and alternative facts, however, it has begun to feel urgent again. This collection of criticisms has provoked fierce rejoinders, particularly from the left.3 The force of these objections probably stems from anger at any implied moral equivalence between left and right versions of identity politics, as well as fear that Fukuyama wants to sacrifice vulnerable groups to placate conservative white voters. It is not clear Fukuyama is actually saying this, but inasmuch as one set of political priorities can crowd out others, he is certainly worried that identity issues are getting in the way of things he cares about more. A stronger response might be that political agendas can include both identity and economic issues, and they have. The left in the United States and the United Kingdom certainly did not forget about old-school, egalitarian economics, as evidenced by the successes of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn. More interestingly, the next generation on the left (the “Millennial Socialists” in The Economist’s coinage4) is demonstrating a robust interest in economic issues, without any concomitant neglect of identity. If Fukuyama’s central plea is for the left to get serious about economics, he seems to be getting what he wants. A revival of economic policy innovation could be an important development, because Western philosophies of economic government have been running on stale, conservative ideas since at least the 2000s. This is not to say these ideas lacked merit when they were fresh. In the late 1970s, tax rates were inefficiently high, trade barriers were creating large deadweight losses, labor market rigidities sustained high unemployment rates, exchange rate arrangements kept breaking, and inflation was hitting double digits. By the end of the Clinton-Blair era, however, the marginal returns to tax cuts, labor market liberalization, trade deals, and monetary reform had fallen to low levels. George W. Bush’s tax cuts and mortgage bubble failed to sustain growth, and there is little chance Donald Trump’s tax cuts and trade wars will have better consequences.5 As for emerging challenges like climate change, there is little more than denial. To preserve the vitality of the liberal democracies, new economic ideas are sorely needed. Perhaps the real concern is not that the left will ignore the issue, but that it will come up with bad ideas. The “Green New Deal” is an interesting initiative, but so-called modern monetary theory is not the way to pay for it.6 Given a shortage of serious policy thinking on the right, the left carries a heavier responsibility now. This is probably why Fukuyama seems so often to be addressing the left, even though it is the right’s new identity politics he condemns most harshly. This may also be where a close reading of Fukuyama could be most useful. Activists on the left are often disdainful of their societies, a position usually founded in real injustices, but one which nonetheless provokes gross errors of judgment (think of Jeremy Corbyn’s support for Chavismo, or, in another generation, the Webbs’ enthusiasm for Stalin). Fukuyama’s alternative, which is a consistent theme running through his books, is surprise at how well modern polities work, relative to the vast inferiority of their predecessors. Any sustained reflection on South Sudan, or North Korea, or Venezuela—or for most people, Game of Thrones—should inspire awe that accountable, representative governments serving prosperous citizenries are possible, let alone widespread. The challenge as we move toward the middle of the century is not how to tear up diseased societies by their roots but how to achieve more perfect unions. This is probably Fukuyama’s core message, and it is worth heeding.

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