Francis Fukuyama's Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment presents a portrait of the Enlightenment that is meant to help illuminate our political moment. The problem is that its portrait of the Enlightenment is tendentious and unrecognizable, while its description of our political moment is equally problematic.
Immigration: The Proxy Battle
As Fukuyama understands it, the Left started today's identity politics, in which each marginalized group asserts “a separate identity for its members” and demands respect “as different from the mainstream society.” The broad scale failure of economic socialism “converged with the Left's embrace of identity politics and multiculturalism” in the late 1990s. The identity-politics Left criticizes Western civilization as patriarchal, racist, imperialist, and exploitative of the environment. For Fukuyama, the Left's way of thinking is “understandable and necessary.” It is “natural and inevitable”—and it has “both advantages and drawbacks.” He points to Black Lives Matters and #MeToo as bringing welcome changes in public policy.
The drawbacks he sees in this way of thinking include distracting the Left from a genuine concern for economic inequality; diverting attention from “older and larger” groups left behind in the modern economy; threatening free speech; and “most significant,” a “rise in identity politics on the right” seen in many quarters—Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, Brexit, and other movements and personages (David Duke) in whom Fukuyama seems to discern the fetus of fascism. Assertions of white identities are unalloyed bads; they are “illegitimate” and “cannot be placed on the same moral plane as those of minorities” and other groups.
The Left may have started it, but the whites on the Right may end it. Fukuyama seems to think that such fascism is happening here!
The divide between the Left's quasi-legitimate identity politics and the Right's opposition to it plays out on immigration issues, and, Fukuyama realizes, they're a proxy policy battle over the goodness or badness of the nation-state as a political form. He wants to defend that political form as essential to physical security, effective government, economic development, liberal democracy, a trusting social arena, and the welfare state; but he does not seem to think that the nation-state can be based on anything. Fukuyama rejects nations based on biology, ethnicity, inherited culture and religion. The best he thinks nations can do is “define an inclusive national identity that fits society's diverse reality and assimilate newcomers to that identity.” A nation-state must have a creedal basis (he praises the citizenship oath especially) with common virtues and values (none are identified). Nations need creeds and something more (my words), but that something morecannot be traceable to ethnicity, inherited culture, or religion.
Fukuyama applies this vision to the West. I wonder if he would apply it equally to the East? Are Korea, for instance, or Japan—both of which have a strong sense of nationhood based on ethnicity (at least) and restrictive immigration and citizenship policies to boot—legitimate or not? If he were consistent, he would have to be a skeptic of their brand of nation.
However that may be, the creeds and the something more are under attack in the West: from the Right, from people who would ground identity in race, ethnicity, or religion; and also from the Left, among those who see victims and oppression and think all manner of hatreds and phobias (Islamophobia, homophobia, xenophobia) are sown into any country's DNA. Fukuyama seems to consider the Right just as obsessed with race and ethnicity as the Left, even in America. America's proto-fascist mouse (which controls no public institutions) can, if held close enough to the eye, be seen to be larger than the Left's identity-politics elephant, with its fellow-traveling liberals (who control many public and private institutions).
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