Identity, by Francis Fukuyama

At first, Identity: : The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment reads as a careful dissection and rebuke of identity politics, which Fukuyama calls one of the “chief threats” to liberal democracies today. As he describes, identity politics - generally speaking - are those inspired and propelled by the perceived tension between internal expectations (usually tied to ethnic, cultural, and religious characteristics) and external realities. These often overlap with economic conditions; however, the fact they often seem to run against or without relation to these is perhaps why we talk about identity politics at all today.

Fukuyama is not vague about his motivation: he wrote this because of the Trump election (now elections) and the growing sense that liberal democratic values are being challenged from within in democratic countries worldwide - and chiefly by contingents characterized by identity politics. Getting further into the book, however, you can see that Fukuyama develops a sympathy for identity politics. The chapters on tracing the religious, philosophical, and historical roots of liberal democracy and identity politics as parallel traditions were great reads.

The true aim becomes to recognize it as a legitimate form of politics with a history and a future - hopefully - alongside liberal democracy. In this work, however, Fukuyama is more interested in the principles by which perverse identity politics gain purchase in liberal democracies (and usually at their great expense) rather than in the precise forms it has taken in history. This is the core message - and warning - of the book.

Once and always a champion of liberal democracy, Fukuyama is not at all threatened. He does spends a good deal of his work exploring why “creedal” identity, which he cites as one of the most significant innovations of liberal democracy is so appealing and powerful - but also potentially unstable. Creedal identity one that is legitimized simply by a person’s nominal participation in ideological principles rather than their immutable features, such as belonging to a specific ethnic or religious group. “I - as a human being - have a right to autonomy and life”, “I - as an American - have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”. 

Of course, there have always been debates about what constitutes a human being or an American that have excluded people from these rights; however, Fukuyama points to the rhetoric of the Abolition movement, Suffrage Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, and the many other progressive movements of the 20th century, which largely (although not exclusively) assumed and pointed to the clear existence of rights…rights that had been denied on no legitimate basis. Martin Luther King Jr., in his 1963 speech in Washington D.C., drew on these ideas, declaring, “In a sense we have come to our Nation’s Capital to cash a check…a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir”.

This book is call for us - good upstanding liberals - to embrace identity politics as an inextricable part of our most basic political instincts and useful counterpart to the creedal identity so critical for our society. That’s the main point.

Or, you can read this longer, better written and researched review from BookForum. It’s main critique of the work, briefly, is that  there is no example cited by Identity as a potent manifestation of identity politics that is not strongly linked to economics…questioning the need at all to make the distinction.

Identity is Fukuyama’s attempt to grant noneconomic politics a history and a future. Yet, in doing so, he falls prey to the same error that he charges identity politics with committing. His origin tale, based in thymos, for what he views as noneconomic politics leads him to continually misconstrue the element of economics, which is as crucial to thymotic “struggles for recognition” as thymos itself is crucial to human nature.

Consider his assertion that “a female lawyer who is passed over for partner or is made vice president but at a salary 10 percent lower than that of her male counterparts is in no sense economically deprived”: Her anger “is not so much about resources as about justice,” because in her case, “Salary is a matter of recognition.” It is true that this lawyer is not destitute, but she is, literally, being deprived economically. Her struggle for resources is her struggle for justice. Salary is indeed a matter of recognition, but the converse is equally valid: Recognition is a matter of salary.

These are valid critiques, but they are not indicting of the arguments themselves. Perhaps are more holistic study of socio-economic conditions by progressives and liberals would have avoided the problems with associate with rogue identity politics in the first place. Given this, perhaps Fukuyama’s take is unecessary - let’s just focus again on the economics and the social (deprivation of recognition, etc.) will naturally be addressed. Personally, I think Fukuyama’s approach is more politically pragmatic by being more accessible as a concept. Most people, economists excluded, struggle to appreciate the world as it is - a tableau of widgets.